A smattering of opinions on technology, books, business, and culture. Now in its 4th technology iteration.
10 February 2005
Finally feeling good enough to start tinkering again, and to blog about it.
I’m continuing my odyssey to attach every piece of technology I can to my sharp aquous beast of a tv. My Mac Mini arrived last week and I have it hooked up now to the DVI port. Looks great. The gotchas: Apple saves money by shipping the mini with no cables, so you have to go buy a DVI cable ($70 at least) and a stereo mini-jack cable (Aside – why does Apple even bother putting a speaker in the mac mini???). 2nd gotcha – the sharp defaults to an analog video signal from the pc, and you have to go wade thru the menus to force it to look for a digital signal – seems like this could be auto-detected. The mini makes a great hometheater pc – small, quiet, a fine dvd player. And I have bittorrent running on it to fill up the hard disk with tv content.
For additional fun I plugged a kingston pcmcia hard drive into the pcmcia port on aquous. What a bizarre feature. I can play slide shows and videos off the pccard. Oh and I can take snapshots and video captures of the current signal, as long as it is from a crappy analog input – analog coax, analog s-video. the tv won’t capture the signal from a digital input or from the component inputs, probably to make the mpaa et al happy. So basically it is a really funky and limited DVR. Just goes to show again how much trouble Tivo is in – it is trivial to slam DVR software into any box now, and storage is cheap.
I still have to fill up the hdmi and 1394 inputs…