Archives

Archive for October, 2005

Hotwire taxes and fees vs Orbitz and Expedia

( General )

This is interesting. I’m looking at this hotel in Manhattan on Hotwire, where it’s listed as normally being $169, but Hotwire is offering it at a whopping $8 off, so only $161 a night. I’m seeing only one hotel in that area with rooms available on Orbitz and Expedia, both listing it at [...]

Shim Crawler bot

( General )

Apparently I wasn’t the only one wondering what the Shim Crawler was in my access logs:
157.82.246.104 - - [20/Oct/2005:11:00:16 -0400] “GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1″ 200 295 “-” “Shim Crawler” “-”
And I also wasn’t the only one that was doing a Google search, finding that the only page that talked about it was at webmasterworld.com, and [...]

Spam at my Comcast e-mail address

( General )

Since I have Comcast’s cable internet service, I also have an e-mail address at comcast.net that I got with it. I don’t actually use it for anything, because I don’t want to have my e-mail address be tied to something like my Internet service that can change so easily. If I switch to [...]

LAME ACM 3.97 beta 1 crashes Virtualdub

( General )

I installed the LAME ACM MP3 codec so I could try re-encoding some PVR captures as XVIDs, since otherwise you can’t do MP3 encodes higher than 56 kbps, which is pretty useless. Thank you, Windows.
The problem was, after installing the ACM version of LAME, everything that tried to get the list of audio codecs [...]

Choosing a hard drive for the PVR

There isn’t too much competition in the high capacity, quiet hard drive space. Right now (September/October 2005) the only drive that is pretty much universally recommended as a good quiet drive is the Samsung Spinpoint.
I had read some good things about a few other manufacturers (notably Hitachi and Seagate) but it seems that quiet [...]

Choosing the PVR’s capture card(s)

Pretty much every post I read on PVR and HTPC discussion forums said the same thing: use a Hauppauge tuner card.
So I did.

Choosing the PVR’s motherboard and processor

For me, the processor speed for the PVR doesn’t need to be that high. Between the hardware MPEG2 encoders and the relatively low CPU loads of playing video, there just isn’t a need for a fast processor. And slower processors usually give off less heat, which means they can be kept at a [...]

Why I’m building my own PVR

I don’t know why, but it seems like this TV season suddenly has a rediculous number of things on that we want to watch, many of them at the same time.
So, the plan is to build a PVR and/or HTPC box (”HTPC” seems to usually mean that it does a lot more than just a [...]