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PVR, Digsby, NIN, and More
By Woopop | March 3, 2008 9:49 pm
Another full weekend! Tiff and I hit up some MacGregor’s Friday night for dinner, and then came back home and watched the Sabres lose. Bums. I also started fiddling with a piece of software called GB-PVR, which is an app that turns your computer into a DVR, and it also has channel guides, along with a bunch of other stuff. It also makes use of the Windows Media Center Edition (MCE) remote and IR receiver/emitter that I picked up a couple of months ago. Essentially, GB-PVR turns the computer into a Tivo, and does a couple of other nifty things. This pretty much consumed my entire weekend, seeing as Saturday, Tiff and Michaela went to see a movie in the afternoon, leaving me to my own devices. What took forever was not getting it to work, but getting the remote to interface with GB-PVR, and then using the IR emitter (or blaster, as its called) to correctly change the channels on the digital cable box. This was accomplished with an intermediate program called HIP. It took a good bit of playing with, but with perseverance, I did get it to work correctly. So the office room was a disaster area all weekend, which led to this:
Step 2: Put your Wizard in that box.
Wizard decided to take up residence in the lid of the box I keep all my coax and speaker wire in on Saturday, while I had a rats nest of cables going on in the office. Saturday evening Tiff and Michaela returned from their movie, we made quesadillas for dinner, and spent the rest of the evening playing games, watching TV, drinking, etc. Good times!
Sunday brought running errands, and a late dinner with Lisa and Jim. And another Sabres loss. Bums. They’re taking the Weekend at Bernier’s thing literally. NOT UNTIL JUNE, GUYS! At least Kaleta scored a goal. My man crush on PK is still strong :)
I’ve started using a new combined IM app called Digsby. I actually heard about it through the RIT alumni mailing list, as it was developed at a company that’s part of the RIT high-tech company incubator. They gave out beta test invite codes to everyone on the alumni mailing list, and I have to say, it’s pretty damn good. I had been using Pidgin (formerly Gaim) to combine AIM, Yahoo, and Gtalk logins into one list, but not only does Digsby just work and look better, it also checks email from POP, IMAP, and even the usual webmail providers (Gmail, Hotmail, etc.). Better yet, it also keeps tabs on Facebook and Myspace profiles, so you don’t have to visit the actual sites to get updates on your friends. I’m really impressed with what they did, and since it’s in beta, the developers are very receptive to suggestions and bug fixes. Good stuff.
Finally, the new Nine Inch Nails album, Ghosts I-IV was up for purchase and legitimate download last night, and I grabbed it this morning. It’s a double-disc of 36 instrumental tracks, broken up into Ghosts I through Ghosts IV. As an incentive to sample the album, Trent made Ghosts I (the first 9 tracks) available for free. As in, he seeded those 9 tracks on The Pirate Bay himself. It could be bought physically in one of a couple different configurations (I went with the cheapo 2CD digipak for $10 plus shipping), or simply downloaded in either FLAC or 320k MP3′s for $5. If you bought one of the physical copies (which don’t get shipped to people or to stores until April), you get a download code for all 36 tracks, for free, immediately. If you can get the server to talk to you. Which I couldn’t. (The traffic to the site was unbelievable.) Or, you can do what I (and many others did), which was go to The Pirate Bay, and download the psuedo-legal 36 track torrent. Either way, they’re mp3′s I actually paid for, and the results, if you like NIN, are quite good. Imagine the instrumental tracks on Downward, The Fragile, Still, and Year Zero, and that’s the vein these are in. Cool stuff, innovative distribution, and since he’s not signed to a major label anymore, he can do pretty much whatever the hell he wants with his music going forward. Should be interesting to see how far this goes.
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