A Little Ludwig Goes A Long Way

To take full advantage of the Network Magic beta release (i’m on the board), I decided to upgrade my router/firewall from a sonicwall box I’ve had for 3-4 years to a Linksys gigabit ethernet router (i’ll be switching all my nics to gigabit nics as well — $29 for the cheapest GBE nics at fry’s).

The thing you must must must do — note the mac address of your old router first, because comcast ties your service to a specific mac address. I failed to do this and spent 10 minutes trying to figure out why my net wasn’t working and then noticed that my new linksys box was unable to acquire an address via dhcp. thankfully the linksys box lets you set its mac address to whatever you want, once i made this change, things were happy.

How regular humans will ever figure this out is beyond me. I guess they will call comcast. Why doesn’t comcast make this easy for their customers?

• Windley’s tutorial on creating podcasts
• Satellite iPod rumors

Rich and I are having a running discussion about the iPod and Apple’s ability to continue to dominate this business. Certainly the development of a community of developers and partners as the above links illustrate is a powerful asset for Apple. As a 4 iPod household, I’ve certainly voted with my feet. But…it is not a very sticky experience, I could move all my media to a competitive player tomorrow and lose very little. A network of related apps and solutions might start to create stickiness.

• More on digital camera file formats than you wanted to know. Hugely helpful to understand pros and cons of RAW, TIFF, and various levels of JPEG.
• Genesis joypad. Old games never die.
• VINC upscaling DVD player — I’ve noticed a couple of these recently, do I need one?
• Wireless gamepads — boy i’d love to get rid of the console cables. None of them seem to work with the xbox headset tho?
• The sonos system looks cool but i really really want my ipod to be the remote controller…
• Media PCs I’ve noticed — FSC, HP (pdf). I’m not getting one this Christmas but soon…

Look at my choices for TV watching:

• Akimbo service now available for MCE boxes, and Akimbo itself aggregates a lot of content.
• How to stick rss and bittorrent together. Great tutorial to how to bind these together to find the content you want
• An example use of bittorrent to find very targetted content of interest
• Then I have the DVR/service choice — a comparison chart of many of the options; a claim that people are moving from tivo to comcast/msft. God forbid you have multiple pvr/service variants in your house (as I do), figuring out where Fox Sports Northwest is on any given box is hard.
• Then of course there is game content. Xbox and xbox live; pc games on win mce with all their live components; and for extra fun phil has pointed me towards the mameox emulator for the xbox.
• And finally DVDs and ripped DVDs.

How do I find what I want to watch or do at any given time? I am tired to hell of learning all the different program guides, search interfaces, etc. And it seems like the complexity is only going to grow for people as video downloads over IP (ala bittorrent) become easier and easier to do.

No answers here, just whining.

• Via Furrygoat, a MAME emulator for MCE. Seems like MCE could become an interesting platform.
• A review of BeyondTV in case MCE isn’t your cup of tea. My bet is every home ends up with a PC next to their TV.
• Siemens sell Skype adapter for their cordless handsets. Once consumers can use mainstream handsets for VOIP calling, this market will explode.
• Another way to bridge VOIP and mainstream handsets.

The home is just getting more complex…