reesesWeb

This is the HD STB/PVR that Comcast supplies.

Motorola DCT 6208 product page

Cost = $10/mo, or $3/mo for HD. (Not sure if the box is the same if you just get HD, or if it's the 6200) In Bethesda, MD.

Firewire output is output-only. Use VirtualDVHS on the Mac to record. Not sure about rumors that you can expand capacity with an external firewire diskpack if output-only limitation is true. Appears that most content is not 5c, so there aren't any recording problems right now.

Despite the fact that I hated my Treo 600 after a year of ownership, I bought a Treo 650 soon after its release. My three-day opinion is that I like it more than the 600, but I've made exactly one phone call, and that lasted as long as it took to say,"Hey. I'll meet you there. See you in five minutes."

I spent much of the Saturday after opening the box building a script to receive jpeg images as attachments via email, extracting the attachments, storing them on my server, and then uploading them to Flickr. I monkeyed with exim for SMTP auth and TLS, which is in that category of enjoyable activities called "wasting my life dorking with stupid Linux."

The AcomData External SATA Drive has the distinction of being the very first thing I have ever returned to a store. Ever. I've put up with a lot of expensive dreck just to avoid the inconvenience of gathering up my receipt and packaging, driving to the store, standing in line, and explaining to someone why I should get my money back. AcomData has given me reason to do this.

How did they manage to overcome my sloth?

The drive came with a PCI SATA card with an external connector. I thought this was a nice idea, because not everyone had external SATA or E-SATA connectivity, and for a desktop, the option was pop out one of the PCI slot covers to run the cable out from the motherboard, which isn't a smart idea, but one I was prepared to execute.

I'm fairly happy with the Garmin Nuvi 350. I haven't had one since my Garmin 45 that I got in 1995 (jeez!) back when I was working on marine navigation software. The reason I've done without is that we did cool stuff with GPS charting, and all of the handheld or portable units that offered similar functionality all came up very much wanting.

However, moving back to San Francisco coincided with automobile GPS kits becoming just good enough to tolerate their peccadillos while saving many hours navigating our way around the city.

Moving back to San Francisco and ordering a new Digital Cable/HD/PVR box from Comcast seems to be the easiest way to upgrade cable boxes. I had a 6208 in Bethesda for a couple years, and while better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick, had its downsides.

Quickly, the good things about the Motorola DCT 6412 Phase III compared to the 6208.

• Dual-tuner is sweet, especially after using the single-tuner 6208 for a while. I used to have frequent programming conflicts, and now, only when I have to do "start a few minutes early," or "end a few minutes late," recordings to get around ABC's obnoxious anti-Tivo programming.

I bought this because I was shopping at Fry's after returning the AcomData SATA drive. I almost bought the 500 GB FW800 version of the One Touch II, but then I noticed that the 600 GB version of the new One Touch III Turbo was there, and if I was going to spend $150 more on the 500 GB single-spindle unit, why not spend $100 over that for the 600 GB two-spindle unit that would be faster? I.e., I'd spend $150 knowing I'd be unhappy not spending $250, but $250 was too much to blow on "yet another" external hard drive when my wife was with me.

It's adequate, but I have too many firewire drives now -- in all, three drives providing about 1TB of storage hanging off of my Powerbook. This stinks when the Mac decides it needs to stat all the mounted drives for some reason, and all three spin up, and I get to enjoy the spinning beach ball of death.

The performance, according to iozone, is comparable with the Maxtor One Touch II I used to benchmark USB 2.0 vs FW400 performance. I.e., good enough. The only arguably bad thing I've noticed about it (other than its ugly case) is that it doesn't power up on its own after a power outage. Yes, I failed to plug it into the UPS because I was lazy and didn't want to crawl under my desk. However, my laptop didn't notice the outage, I was not home for the outage, but a shell window I had left open was freaking out every time I tried to ls or cd.

I had been waiting for the Samsung HD-941 upscaling DVD player for months. Amazon had listed the release date always a month in the future, starting some time in April or May, possibly earlier.

Finally, this month, the status had changed to "Discontinued", and Samsung announced that they were not going to produce the HD-941. The HD-931 was available, but it lacked digital output (either HDMI or DVI), and owners were complaining of signal crush.

When I saw that LG had released an inexpensive upscaling DVD player with the Faroudja DCDi chip AND an HDMI output, I immediately ordered one from BestBuy.com. Other people were excited as well.

For some daft reason, Mercedes stereos have a cassette tape-based head unit. Sure, I bought the cd changer option, but it's in the glovebox, out of arm's reach, and anyway, the changer caddy is rather a pain to work with. As it stands, it's impossible to play CDs upon demand, especially while driving. I've heard they've rectified this for the 2005 model year, approximately 15 years later than one would have expected.

Anyway, I thought,"Hey, iPod, they have those FM transmitters that probably work ok, since they've had over twenty years to perfect the technology since Mr. Microphone gave kids everywhere a way to put staticky ghost voices on an FM radio in the same room."