Anklo blog

It’s been about six months with our current home entertainment setup and things are going pretty well. I’ve made a few minor enhancements, but nothing major. The most significant is the addition of an external hard drive to each of the ViP 211k receivers in the bedroom and living room. Plug in the hard drive, quick call to Dish, a one-time $40 charge, and bada-bang, bada-bing, instant DVR. Found a great deal on refurbished WD 1TB drives for $40 each, so for $120 I have a DVR for every TV.

The other addition is in the bedroom. I added an Apple Component AV Cable which allows us to plug in one of the iPhones or the iPod Touch and stream Netflix. That gives us Netflix on every TV.

Unfortunately, it’s not all bunnies and rainbows. From the beginning of this whole exercise I knew that the big sacrifice was going to be live sports, specifically racing. I’m not talking about NASCAR. I’m interested in ALMS, Indycar, and F1. Those viewing options have actually gotten even worse than when I started.

F1 is broadcast in the US on Speed and I’m not willing to pay for the next Dish programming tier to get it. There’s no legal F1 streaming source. No real change since last year for F1.

Indycar used to stream all practices, qualifying, and races live, but the network overlords pulled the plug on that this year. I’d have to bump up two Dish programming tiers to get Versus. Not gonna happen.

The only improvement, and it is a mixed blessing, is that ALMS is streamed live on espn3.com with no live TV broadcast. I currently have access to espn3.com, but the video quality varies from okay to poor. Thanks for nothing.

If I am desperate for Indycar or F1, I can connect to a friend’s Slingbox and leech off of his cable subscription. That is assuming he isn’t watching his own TV and that I can tolerate the really poor picture quality. Really poor.

So, if you take live sports out of the equation then we’re really happy with the current setup. It’s significantly cheaper than our old full cable setup and we have more programming options. Except for my racing.

Today is the last day of tryouts for Kinnamon’s middle school softball team. She has a good chance to make the cut, but she wasn’t on team last year (didn’t even tryout) so it’s certainly not a lock.

It occurred to me that this could turn out to be a very significant day in her life. Not necessarily earth shattering in a way her wedding day or childbirth will change her, this is more subtle. The result is indirect and the ramifications are varied and neither clearly good nor clearly bad.

Her performance today will determine whether or not she makes the team. If she does, then she’s “in the system”. She won’t be just a rec league player anymore, now she’ll play for her school. That’s a big difference and I’m not really talking about the level of players’ skill.

Being on the middle school team will introduce her to new teammates and coaches. By having either practice or a game five days a week, her playing skills and game knowledge will improve. All this goes toward increasing her self-confidence. The result is that both the likelihood she will tryout for the team in high school and her chance of making the team are improved.

After playing four years in high school, then there’s college. We could optimistically hope for a scholarship, but even if we take a more conservative view, simply playing the game at any college level will expose her to people, places, and experiences that she would otherwise miss. That can lead anywhere.

Then there’s the other fork of the road. If she doesn’t make the middle school team, will she be interested in even trying out in high school? This is a very real possibility. If she doesn’t, then no high school softball. When it’s time for college, playing ball won’t even be a variable to be considered.

I don’t mean to suggest that either result is guaranteed to have any long term effect that is clearly positive or negative. The short term joy or disappointment we’ll have when the roster is posted tomorrow isn’t setting the tone for her adult future. But the result of this tryout may influence the scenery on her life’s road.

Note to Kinnamon: If you ever read this, take it as an example of one of the myriad things that parents think about. We always want the best for our children and it’s very frustrating not to know which route will lead there.

A lot has happened since my last post on our TV situation. The condensed version:

• Got an Acer Revo 3610 as the main video source in the living room.
• Added an ATI Theatre HD 750 USB TV tuner.
• Added an HP USB TV tuner in an unsuccessful attempt to solve a problem.
• Lost the Basic cable channels that we had been getting for free.
• Signed up for Dish Network service.

The Revo has 64-bit Windows 7 Home Premium installed and comes with a wireless keyboard and mouse. The Windows MCE app works well and includes tv listings for free. Netflix and Hulu streaming are nearly perfect. This wasn’t a painless exercise, but I didn’t expect it to be. There was lots of driver updating and an OS reload or two and the usual Windows crap to deal with. The end result was really good, but there were still three issues.

First, the internal WiFi antenna on the Revo is crap. Trying to stream any internet video was hit-or-miss. I had an old Linksys WRT54GS laying around, so I configured it as a wireless bridge using the DD-WRT firmware and cabled it to the Revo. Network bandwidth problem solved.

The other two issues were not show stoppers, just annoying. When turning on the TV and waking the computer, an attempt to watch digital channels (QAM) would result in a MCE video error message which I found out could mean nearly anything. That’s why I bought the HP tuner; a fruitless attempt to solve this problem. After hours of googling I found that the key variable (would never have guessed it) was the HDMI connection to the TV. Simply unplug and replug the cable after every power cycle and all was well. A solution yes, but hardly a good one.

The third issue also involved broadcast cable. Every 15 to 60 seconds there would be a slight hiccup in both picture and sound. Annoying to say the least. This may have coincided with the loss of Basic cable channels, but I can’t say with any certainty. We rarely watched cable channels, so it wasn’t killing us.

In the meantime, while the wife and I were more than satisfied with the overall scheme of the living room system; the kids were becoming more and more upset. They had nearly exhausted anything of interest to their age group from the Netflix streaming pool and their setup didn’t have a good way to view anything from internet sources. They were missing Disney, HGTV, Food Network, and TLC.

Enter Dish Network. For less than $50 per month they get all the channels they care about plus a DVR. The other two TVs also get all the channels, just no DVR features for now. I can cancel Broadcast cable and reduce the Netflix DVD package to one at a time. That should recoup $15-20. The Revo and the DVD recorder are still in use so only the antenna and the two USB tuners are being wasted.

We went from one extreme to the other and I think we may have found a happy medium. I hope.

This year’s destination was Holden Beach and while that’s much closer than last year’s drive to the Florida Keys, we were still a bit late getting on the road. You’d think I’d be used to it, but I always misjudge the time required to get everything done and ready to go. When the whole family leaves home for a week there is a mountain of work to do. It makes you question whether the trip is worth the effort.

After a pre-trip lunch at Bojangle’s we hit the road. We took two cars since we had a mountain of stuff (we had to take linens, groceries, and beach toys) and would have five people on the way back. For the cost of one tank of gas, it wasn’t worth the pain of trying to cram everything into one car. As luck would have it, we hit a traffic jam before we even got to Clayton. There was a line of thunderstorms and that slowed everyone to a halt. This slow pace lasted about an hour, then things opened up and we were cruising.

I have to say that the drive to Holden Beach from Raleigh is a piece of cake. A day trip is within the realm of possibility. The real estate office was right where the bridge hits the island and our condo was just down the street. It took maybe ten minutes from the time we crossed the bridge until we were parked at the condo. We unloaded, looked over the place, then Maria and the kids went for a quick walk on the beach. I stayed behind since I was hot, sweaty, a little mad at Kinnamon for having a pre-teen attitude, and obsessed with finding the condo’s wifi password (which I sleuthed out with the help of Google and the use of Maria’s laptop to login to the router. Password is tater2lola3 by the way).

When they got back from their walk it was time for dinner. I have to put in a plug for Urbanspoon. The user reviews helped us avoid an obvious choice and pick the Provision Company. It doesn’t look like much, but it was great. The definition of casual and the shrimp was excellent. We’ll go again before the week is out. After dinner it was back to chores, this time at the Food Lion to stock up. Back to the condo, unload, make beds, shower, sleep

For Sunday, we decided to make our first day be a full beach day with all three meals at the condo. Kinnamon’s friend Alana arrived about noon. Pretty windy, but not too hot and the ocean was just right. Active enough to be fun, but you didn’t get beat to death.

After downgrading the cable service and turning in all the DVRs, there is one feature that is sorely missed. The ability to pause live TV. If you are watching a DVD or streaming video from Hulu, then there is a pause button readily available. But when viewing something that’s “on right now” and you get interrupted (kids, phone, whatever) then those missed scenes are gone. No good, not happy.

While I knew that not having the ability to pause would be annoying, I underestimated the magnitude of the impact. Eventually we’ll have the ability to play DVDs, stream internet content, and record live broadcasts on all three TVs. Key word is eventually. Can’t afford to fill all the holes at once. It became apparent that replacing this feature was now the top priority on the entertainment list.

One candidate that I had found for replacing the functionality of a DVR was a DVD recorder. Not just any DVD recorder, but one also equipped with an internal hard drive. As of this writing there is exactly one manufacturer, Funai, of such devices and they offer two models marketed under the Magnavox brand.

Note: I have to express my gratitude for all of the work done by “wajo” to compile and post product information at the AVS forum. Everything you could want to know about these DVD recorders is there.

I bought a refurbished model 2160A for $160. I’ve been using it for a few days and I’m quite pleased. It pauses live TV, plays DVDs and basically works as expected. The only real drawback is the lack of any sort of program guide. You have to setup a recording the old fashioned manual way by picking a channel and time. Other than that it seems to be a fine replacement for the cable company’s DVR.