Wii vs PS3
The PS3 is losing more and more ground to the Wii with every day.
The last 2 times through the electronics department at the real canadian superstore, I have seen the same 2 60G PS3 boxes staring back at me. But, I have never seen a Wii on a shelf yet. (And the boxes are not empty, they are out in the open, and they are heavy)
Buying a PS3 is now cheaper used, as I have seen articles about people taking a loss and selling the PS3's below cost, because they can't get rid of them.
The Wii on the other hand is almost viral, most people that I show it to want one, even the people I would consider the least likely to want a game console. Of those least likely people, my parents are one of them. They love it, always want me to bring it over to entertain company for dinner, and have talked numerous times about buying one when they have money for it.
My Aunt Dodie also wants one and is another person I would consider the least likely to own a gaming console. (oh the giggles that came out when she created a short fat, big nosed Uncle Jerry Mii were priceless)
Now I look at my parents, and my aunt Dodie and think, this is a huge market.
The Wii could even replace the PC for them, with the Wii Browser. (I wonder if you could play online Pogo Euchre games on it.) They would only need an IM client with 2 way audio communication to make their PC's obsolete.
Kerazy
I heart Penny Arcade
Keeping with the iPhone(Pod) theme
According to the BBC, the cheapest place to buy an iPod is Canada!
Slashdot linkBBC linkCanada Rocks.
**Update, actual source for the iPod data is
Comsec**
iPhone .... cooooool I want one
Coolest phone / iPod / browser ever.
http://www.gizmodo.com/gadgets/iPhoneHOLY CRAP!!
I want to sing the features.....
e-mail
voicemail
tabbed browsing
music
touch screen
cool UI
camera
auto orentation sensor (still singing)
IM
Google Maps
"Pinch" zooming
Sexy
Speaker phone
No Buttons
Widescreen
This phone is frickin' sweet!!!!
(And expensive, whoa$499 4GB, $599 8GB USD)
What's the first thing you did Jan 7th?
I opened up my windows, let some fresh air run through the house.
What a crazy January.
Media Center vs MythTV??? I find it laughable
In
rebuttal to James recent post
"Media Center vs MythTV"The title alone is misleading"Media Center vs
MythTV"
glorifies Media Center by comparing it to MythTV.
I will start by saying that
MythTV has changed my TV viewing habits so drastically that I do not watch live TV or surf channels anymore, to that respect I have (I am unsure if media center has this functionality) setup my
MythTV box accordingly.
LiveTV is setup to take a back seat, I am still able to watch live TV but require more than the 120 seconds (waiting for the projector bulb to turn on did take most of my time) I had on new years day to stop a current recording, stop it from picking up another favourite recording, then change to a channel. In hindsight if I had scheduled the recording any time before the ball drop it would have taken less than 30 seconds.
Let me list a few of the features
MythTV has.
- Standard
PVR functionality
- Watch TV
- Pause, rewind, fast forward, skip ahead, skip back, stop watching in the middle of show X, go watch show Y, come back to show X and continue watching etc..
- Non standard but still basic
PVR functionality
- Pictures
- Music
- Movies
- DVD playback
- DVD burning
- Interface with any television provider (Bell, Rogers,
DirectTV,
Starchoice, antenna, etc..)
Now the Nonstandard (special) functionality is off the chart.
I will miss functionality here, but here are some of the things that
MythTV does that are special.
- automatic and manual commercial flagging
- ability to manually or automatically skip commercials
- Games (Mame, and
rom organization... cool)
- DVD ripping
- CD ripping
-
IMDB lookup for
DVD's and
CD's - Playback of any media with
codec (including rm, mov, divx, avi, xvid, wmv, anything really)
-
Backend server and
frontend client
architecture allows for many viewers to watch TV off the
backend server. (Someone upstairs and downstairs can watch the same or different shows, both pause when they want etc..)
-
Intelligent scheduler to avoid conflicts.
- Configurable to work with ANY remote control signal, you can setup the power button for your TV to start playing knight rider on
mythTV - can plays recordings at an accelerated or decelerated rate, adjusting the audio pitch as necessary.
-
RSS feed news reader
- Weather
- web browser
-
MythWeb will allow you to control your
mythtv and schedule recordings from anywhere on the
Internet -
Netflix queue viewer.
- make
internet phone calls
- Encode your recordings as different and configurable (space saving or higher quality) formats
And all from behind your remote control.
The system itself is fully
configurable, I don't add
MythPhone, cause I
dont want to make
internet phone calls from my remote control. Nor do I really need my TV to be a browser, or
RSS reader, but I
loooove automatic commercial flagging, and the
intelligent scheduler.
I could get into the advantages of a free open source program here over a proprietary system like media center, but that would really change this conversation into something different, so I will just add that, security, upgrades, and price are also all better with
mythTV.
Matt out.
Mythtv 0.20 stable!!
Yay,
mythtv 0.20 is finally stable in the portage tree. (
lamens look away now)
I can now upgrade from my 2-3 year old 0.17 installation.
If you knew what I was talking about you might say,
"But Matt, you could have upgraded to the 0.19 and 0.18 when they went stable"
When I setup this system I decided to leave it when it was working. It's not broken, I don't care if there are any security holes (except in ssh) as no one has access to it but me.
But now the new 0.20 features have intrigued me, especially the ability to burn episodes
natively from
mythfrontend, as
DVD's!, apparently you can also tell it to use your commercial flags and remove those from the burned copy... all too cool.
I know what James is going to say something about media center, but I say
bs,
mythtv is cheaper and better, although it is harder to setup, but that is a plus for me anyway.
Happy New Year (and Merry Christmas)
I had a great, and action packed holidays.
My holidays started (Dec 22) with me getting off on call.
YAYThat night we went to a holiday supper/gathering at
Jolanda's, the food was great, but the weather was
baaad, I was very surprised everyone made it to her place in
farhaven, we passed 2 accidents on the way, one on
woodroffe, and one on her street, which resembled a long skating rink more than a road. I got to see Ava for the first time in months, she was
soo cute, and happy and active. Julie and Brian should start an Ava blog. :)
Next day started with breakfast with Cheryl (and a few others) as she was down from TO.
Followed by some cleaning of my place for my dinner hosting. My parents, my brother, his fiancee, Jenn and I were all there for a tasty
Christmas meal. Before calling it a night we played a little
Wii bowling.
Christmas eve came and Jenn and I headed to my parents for a large
Christmas lunch, and
pre Christmas gift exchange. Around 7 or 8
ish we packed up the car from my parents, left most of the gifts behind and headed up to TO to Jenn's parents, the drive was good, naturally the traffic was light.
Christmas morning woke up with at Jenn's place and opened presents again, The funniest present was Jenn's Grandma got a Nintendo
DS and Brain Age. The next couple days was a blur of gatherings with Jenn's family, I can't remember all the places we went. Finishing with a fun and late night at Deb's house playing some more
Wii and the Amazing Race
boardgame.
On Wednesday (27
th) around 3
ish I drove back home. Drive was
uneventful and clear, even though there was quite a bit of snow that morning. Got home and settled back in.
Next day I lazed around the house for the morning, then headed up to the cottage to help put in some hardwood floors. When I showed up Dad was working on a 9x9 pattern Mom wanted to put on the floor, cut up wood into small
pieces and arrange them, and he was getting frustrated with it. So I took over, after modifying the design to something more
symmetrical, I cut out all the
pieces, and put them in place. They finished laying the floor at around 5, it looks really good.
That night I headed over to Duncan's for a little
Xbox 360
ing, I have to say I am disappointed with the
multiplayer games we had, none of them would let us all play at once. And Co-op games were restricted to only 2 players. (I don't remember the name of the game, call of duty maybe), I cant wait until we get some good
multiplayer games for the
Wii, like
mario kart.
Friday I woke up with every intention of staying at home all day watching TV playing with Jennie, and playing a little Zelda, but I found out my
DS-X finally got shipped, so I kept my eye on the fed-ex site periodically through-out the day, and headed into work to wish everyone a happy new year and to get my grubby hands on a new toy. The rest of the day was spent partially in awe and partially frustrated with my new toy. Oh somewhere that day I called/
evited around and invited a handful of people over to my place for new years.
Saturday... was spent doing some cleaning, laundry, and other boring chores.
Sunday, I did most of my running around for the festivities that night, got some
h'orderves/drinks/booze and finished some cleaning off from Saturday. Guests showed up around 8:30, and we played games until with
wii hours of the night, stopping at 11:58 to watch me try to get live TV up to watch the ball drop, I failed, and now have been at the end of James S's jokes about how media center is better than
mythtv. Although I have not used media center, I am fairly sure James' insults are just a poor attempt to compensate for his
PVR.
Monday was Joelle's annual potluck dinner and games. The food was great, I especially liked the pineapple ham and vegetable soup,
yummmy.
It's Tuesday now and I am back at work *sigh* everything went by
soo fast...
Upgraded to Blogger beta (not really beta anymore) today
