Stress Fracture

I have no real point tonight except to vent a bit about my frustrations with technology.

You see, I am one of the earliest adopters of TiVo. I won one of their first model in a sort of essay contest promotion they did and I’ve had one ever since — probably on my fifth or sixth now, I honestly forget. (Not all broken down, there were various reasons, upgrades, that sort of thing.) But really, TiVo seems to me to be about done, at least for the tech edge folks. Charging $13 per month after charging hundreds of dollars for the box and then you want to find new ways to stuff ads in? Never mind the way they treat the Series 2 folks deliberately poorly to encourage springing for yet another model. Nah. It was one thing when I was a 500 channels sort, but nowadays I don’t even have extended cable — just the local channels via an inexpensive analog cable package because I haven’t gotten around to getting a huge whacking OTA antenna that I’d need to get TV stations from 60 miles away. Yet.

So I spent part of the evening contemplating (again) building my own using MythTV or something like that. I have a spare machine right now, even, not anything very new to be sure but probably up to the job under the right circumstances and with the right hardware. But it just started to look like more and more hassle and uncertainty and honestly, given how inclined I am to just watch something on Hulu or Netflix it later or whatever, I lost interest. But that reminded me of Boxee.

In brief, Boxee’s sort of the opposite thing — it’s for showing streaming video on your TV. It can do Hulu, Comedy Central, CBS, YouTube, a bazillion other things I’m not thinking of, stuff from your shared drives, and so on. Boxee’s in alpha, sure, but plenty of people using it, and this month they started letting anyone in on it, not just the private signed up folks. So I figured it was time to give it a shot. All I’d need for the machine in question is a wifi card (I had to swipe the one it used to have for something else) and a hard drive as the one that’s in it is dead, which is why it’s unused right now. Then I realized I also need a monitor. (And a keyboard and mouse, but I probably can scare those up, plus they’re dirt cheap.) I started looking at solutions for hooking it to the TV in the bedroom, which seemed nice, but that started seeming kind of awful, too. (It becomes easy when we shell out $500 for an HDTV, which I guess we eventually will, but you know, this is just an experiment, for crying out loud.)

Now, at this point I should mention Boxee runs on really two platforms: Ubuntu Linux and Apple’s OS X. (The latter includes the AppleTV unit, which is interesting indeed, although it’s missing a few things like the Netflix streaming, as it’s not powerful enough. Of course, the Linux port is also missing the Netflix streaming for other reasons, so…) While they’re working on a Windows version, you, well, can’t have it right now. So I remember that I was thinking of trying Ubuntu on my laptop anyway, although with my move to Chrome as a browser I’m losing enthusiasm for that. Still, there are several ways to run Ubuntu without wiping out Windows, so why not? Well, the answer to that turns out to be: because the chipset my Dell Inspiron B130’s wireless uses is a known troublemaker where Ubuntu is concerned, so it doesn’t work out of the box. This can be sorted out if you use a wired connection for a while; if only I had one available…

So, it’s basically that kind of night. Lots of ideas. None of them panned out. I’m still keen to give Boxee a twirl and see if it matches up with my idea of the future of watching television. I’m just not sure what’s going to be the soft approach to trying it out right now.

Maybe I should just read a book instead.

R