Holly Hop
As if fighting to keep a web site on the air over something like six or seven weeks wasn’t enough, I can also announced that I have slain another technical dragon: I finally declared victory on getting the wife’s living room media center PC working, and only a few weeks after Mother’s Day too. It plays Master Of Orion II, it plays movies, it plays music, it plays Monopoly. In theory it can browse the web and do e-mail too, but let’s not get too carried away – it’s using a fairly old TV as its monitor and I’m having a hard time imagining trying to do a lot of reading off of it.
Thank God the machine’s previous owner set up a restore partition on the hard drive; I must have reinstalled the OS something like 20 times. The thing is, while the machine runs on XP Media Center edition, I was never actually able to get the Media Center crap to work. The Media Center functionality is really cool, at least in the brochure – you have a remote control that lets you navigate your media files in a very-easy-to-read-on-a-TV environment and play any of them at the touch of a button. Neato, eh? But the problem, I suspect, is the fact that I put a new video card in it that would do S-video out. Somewhere, having that new card in the machine gummed up the works with some arcane hardware conflict, and so I finally said “@#$% it, I’ll install Nero.” Except that didn’t work too gracefully either. Reinstall again.
I had previously planned on naming this system “Gambit” for network purposes, but after all the reinstalls, I started to think that Holly – from Red Dwarf – would be considerably more appropriate.
Another few reinstalls later, I was scratching my head as I installed Winamp (for music purposes). Now, I’ve been using Winamp since it came out. You know what? Nobody ever told me that it’s suddenly become a damn good video player as well as a damn good music player. I had no idea. Solved all my problems right there. Didn’t bother with Nero. Didn’t need to. With the possible exception of the Media Center-specific DVR functions, that pretty much got me on track. I’m still not sure what to do there – I suspect, however, that I’ll continue to use binaries newsgroups as my DVR for recently-aired stuff that’ll be wiped again as soon as it’s watched. (I know, I know – tut tut tut, shame, iTunes is out there and it’s legal! But how much do you pay for every show that you record and then wipe off of your DVR/Tivo? Heh. Thought so.)
My wife’s favorite part about the new machine: the wireless keyboard. This and the new video card were virtually the only pieces of the machine bought brand new. Total expenditure on the whole project barely crossed the $250 line – hooray for tax refunds!
To sidetrack for a moment: I was gazing at Winamp doing a damn good job of playing some video when I noticed that the playlist window was still up. And that I could add stuff to it. And that’s when it dawned on me: around 1995 or so, when I was working at the (original) Fort Smith Fox station, the station purchased a computer-based commercial playback system which, when hooked up to a cable spot insertion timer (normally used to drop local spots into place unattended at a cable TV head end), could practically run prime time by itself. There are no words to describe what hot shit that was in 1995.
And here we are, barely 15 years later, with a system, in my living room, that could basically run a whole station. If one carved up a show into segments, and then had commercials on the hard drive to run between those segments…
…one would really be onto something if there was still room in the world for standard definition. It’s a neat idea, but I don’t think it’s one I’m going to put into practice anytime soon, not even for fun. Because unlike the guy I worked for back in the day, not every single little idea that occurs to me needs to become a company memo and a “hey, let’s try this!” But it sure would’ve been neat in 1995, aside from the whole thing about not needing many human operators anymore that almost certainly would’ve followed.
In the meantime…happy Mother’s Day. Only about a month or so late.
P.S. I’ve kicked off a summer special for some of our DVDs, to celebrate the site’s seismic shift to a vastly superior hosting service; you can order a bundle consisting of the 4-DVD Classic Gaming Expo set plus either Phosphor Dot Fossils Level 2 or the Phosphor Dot Fossils Brown Box (Level 2 + the first Phosphor Dot Fossils DVD). If your DVD shelf has a gaping, “stuff-produced-by-Earl”-shaped hole in it, and you dig video game history, you can find the limited time special prices here. I had tried to start this deal earlier in the month, but then we got bitten by vampire Globats. The prices on these are good both inside and outside the U.S., so get ’em while you can! End of plug.… Read more
