MN Maven

The podcast is now up, head over to Entertainment 2.0, download it, and enjoy. If you have any comments about my ramblings please feel free to hit me up on twitter or register here and post up a comment.

- Josh

Tonight I participated in a SageTV vs. Media center round table hosted by Josh Pollard and Adam Thursby the hosts of Entertainment 2.0 podcast. We were also joined by Brent Evans of Geek Tonic, and finally Tim Campbell the co-host of HTPCentric podcast.

We talked about various topics from cost, ease of use, 3rd party applications, our favorite things about each application, and our pet peeves about each applications. I think the show went really well and hope those of you who take the time to download and listen enjoy it as much as I enjoyed participating in the podcast.

Head over to Entertainment 2.0 / HTPCentric websites where you will be able find the podcast. As of 9pm CST Thursday March 12th, it wasn’t posted and probably won’t be until some time in the early AM Friday the 13th, so on lucky Friday the 13th head over and check out the podcast.

- Josh

For the last four days I have literally gone crazy. My main HTPC started showing signs of driver corruption issues as well as codec issues. I was getting a few BSOD as well as during boot up the hdd smart monitoring was throwing up a warning that my main OS hdd was showing signs of failure. So what any good nerd would do, I pulled out the old hdd, installed a new hdd, began to re-install Vista, and that is where the beginning of all my troubles started.

Back when Vista was just coming out and was “new” I was using Vista as the OS and main piece to my HTPC puzzle. I was using Vista back when people were putting it down, and saying how bad it was, and how “vista was a buddy piece of shit” however I have had nothing but great luck with Vista, never had issues, no driver issues, nothing, that is until recently.

So the re-install completed, I go to Asus’s website and grab the latest drivers, and get everything re-installed, re-setup, get the HTPC back into the rack in my basement, plugged everything in, and then go to setup media center. I get to the setup TV part, go through the prompts, put in the zip code, vista says it is downloading the new guide data, and finally says it is finished. I then go to the guide to setup my series recordings and I pull up the guide and I see “no data available” in the guide for each and every single channel. So at this point I am like no big deal, might be an issue with Zap2it the provider that provides the EPG data so I shut it down and go to bed.

The next day I go back down, turn everything on again, and get back to work, re-did the TV setup, went through all the prompts, it completes and again I still see “no data available” by this point it is 6:30pm Monday and the bulk of my tv shows that I record are about to start, I then panic and go through the TV setup several more times again to no avail. Finally I said fuck it, and did another OS re-install, and by this point I missed my time frame for recording my shows (thank god I have Torrents/Newsgroups as backups). The OS install completes, do all the windows updates, drivers, software, ect.. get everything completed, go to setup VMC, do the TV setup, and still again no guide data is showing up. By this point it is late (like 1am) Monday night and I am just pissed off to no end. I shut everything down and go to bed.

Over the next several days I did 5 more OS re-installs, some with SP1 some without, some with windows updates, some without. No matter what I did, tried, swapped out hdds, ram, cpu’s, with tuner cards, without, you name it I tried it, and I still could not get the EPG data to show up. Finally I broke down and reluctantly went and grabbed my Windows 7 (7000) beta dvd and installed that, and at first that was showing signs of issues, as it wouldn’t let me do windows updates and kept throwing an error code. I finally google’d the error code and it had to do with time being messed up, I did a windows time update, went back to windows update and it finally worked.

The reason I say I “reluctantly” went to Windows 7 is because I no longer have use of Webguide plugin as well as straight forward commercial skipping that I get with Vista. There are some ways to use DVRMSTollbox (DTB) to convert the new 7MC WTV file format to DVR-MS, then once the file is back into DVR-MS I can then use Showanalyzer/Lifextender to cut out the commercials in the tv recordings.

Other than not having Webguide and Lifextender, I am still happy with 7MC. I have windows 7 installed on my MSI Wind netbook, as well as my “test” box that “I have in my office, so it isn’t something new to me, its just out of my comfort zone as I like to keep my HTPC as clean and simple as possible without running very many extra applications, so running Windows 7 beta is pretty big step for me, so we will see how that goes.

Stay tuned for another post on how my adventures with automating my tv recordings to be automatically converted to DVR-MS files and then processed by lifextender, so stay tuned for that. As always hit me up on twitter or register here and post up a comment or two.

- Josh

This weekend I decided to cut out caffeine/pop out of my daily diet. I’ve been getting bad head aches lately and also have been trying to loose more weight so I decided to take out one of the biggest sources of sugars in my diet, mnt dew.

If you talk with my wife or any of my coworkers you will know I drink way too damn much dew or pop in general. Some days I was drinking up to 4 cans a day of pop, and wouldn’t eat all that well due to being full on pop. I was also buying 32oz giant cups of dew from the cafeteria at work.

I know that is had to be bad for me when I’d go too long and start getting with drawl head aches from the lack of caffeine, so I decided to cut it out completely. So far on day 3 it feels like I slept way better last night, and I found myself not needing a boost that I got from it.

So wish me luck, I am hoping that with cutting out the large sugar intake, as well as going out running or riding my bike when the weather gets warmer to reach a goal of loosing another 15 – 20 lbs by August.

So we will see how that goes.

- Josh