Still here
Posted by Ben | Filed under Random
Took a trip to Vegas last week Friday, got back Wednesday. Gathering my new post ideas. More to come soon.
Social Gaming™
Posted by Ben | Filed under Geekin' Out, Random
Hello ladies. Look at your profile, now back to mine, now back to yours, now back to mine! Sadly, your profile is littered with social gaming, but if you stopped playing flash games on a substandard web platform, your profile could be like mine. Look down, back up, where are you? You’re sitting in front of a 27″ widescreen LCD with a REAL game if you had a game like my game. Whats in your hand, back to mine – it’s a game time card for that game you love the most. Look again, the game card is now that computer upgrade you desperately need. Anything is possible when you say no to social gaming. I’m on the moon.
Copyright acutegeekitis 2010 
Oh joy! I’m being followed!
Posted by Ben | Filed under Random
I have a twitter presence, much like many others that I communicate with via other methods, like Facebook. But it amuses me to no end that I post on Twitter only slighly relevant things, and often times they’re extremely random or totally pissed off posts that I just have to vent about. So when I get a note saying that “MattressWorld” has started following me (or whoever else happens to follow me at the time) I have to stop a moment, re-read the Email to make sure I saw what I indeed saw, and then tilt back and ROFL all over the place. Why in the world would some company like “MattressWorld” want to follow me? I’m really not all that exciting, which brings me to another point that I want to bring up about Twitter. People obsessed with being followed by others, really?
In all honesty, I use Twitter for the service that it provides to me. My local city government has a traffic updater that they post to when accidents occur or other road-way related problems happen. That’s insanely cool. Another one I follow is the ever venerable Ryan Bliss of Digital Blasphemy fame. I like to know the minute he posts new wallpapers. Or the local coffee cafe that I keep track of (well, that and since I run his website and if he’s having issues, he usually PMs me via Twitter) so Twitter is more of a utility to me than some gross over indulgence in popularity on the interwebs. I frankly don’t care who follows me, I just find it amusing to discover who does, and what their motives are. If I’m being datamined, that’s ok too I suppose, because I’m all for skewing the results so fucking bad, that they just look crosseyed at their final tabulations. Serves ya right, ya fokkers.
I’ve had my share of celebrity follows. Ok just one, but it’s still kind of cool to be added when you just add someone to follow them for what they do in your community. (I’m looking at you John Tesh, thanks for the follow, man.) I of course follow other choice celebrities, but only because I’m genuinely interested in what they have to say. Ok except for that Brent Spiner guy. He’s just weird. You’d think that Jim Carrey would be the one who posts things to Twitter that make you go “WTF” but instead Brent does it. Thanks for keeping me on my toes, Spiner. I also enjoy LeVar Burton’s posts, as well as Leonard Nemoy’s.
So for those of you who have been looking down your nose at Twitter thinking it’s just a home for depraved social addicts and digital sheep, to you I say,
“Well, you’re probably fucking right, but at least it’s got trending topics and Ashton Kutcher, bitches!”
How I learned to ditch TV and Love It
Posted by Ben | Filed under Random
It’s pretty obvious that people are cutting expenses, and many of those people are cutting services that they can augment elsewhere. It should be no surprise to some of you that TV is one of those services that you really have to sit back and wonder, is it really worth paying extra for anymore?
When I signed up for satellite TV, I was trying to fill a gap that my step father had left. We had gotten so used to having it, that not having it after his departure was pretty odd, and I stepped in to help out. I had that service installed for about 6 years, and was repeatedly referred to as a “long time, faithful customer” whenever I called in. I was able to get steep discounts, sometimes even getting free satellite service on my account for months at a time. I wasn’t out to abuse the system, I just kept calling and saying that I was having financial problems, and I was having a hard time justifying the cost anymore. $75 a month for two receivers, both of which were Digital Video Recorder units, was just getting a little steep given the popular climate of today.
That climate includes such streaming services as Hulu, NetFlix, and even the publishers websites themselves, like SyFy, and even to a limited extent, Discovery and Animal Planet. So where’s the real value for me as a TV subscriber, other than I’m forking out nearly two tanks worth of gas to maintain something I wasn’t really using.
To more clearly understand my reasoning for this cut, you have to realize that I am a true, died in the wool geek. I own the TV set that my mom purchased many years ago, while I was still in Elementary school, and it still works just fine today. Granted, it only supports coax input, requiring a converter box for anything but a TV signal from an external device, but it did do duty as my Satellite point for a while. For as nice as it is to have, I wouldn’t watch anything on a regular basis other than my local news at 10pm, and from time to time, catch up on some TV series I found interesting. I averaged 1 hour a week of TV watching. Even with a 30 minute news cast every week night, I was only watching about 10 minutes of that by the time you factor out the commercial breaks, and the (sorry Lee) sports segments. I’m a geek, not a sports nut. I know there are geeks that are sports nuts, I’m just not one of them. That’s why I was having a hard time justifying MY own watching habits. But there was also my family to consider. Other folks in the house were watching things all the time, and recording until the DVR itself was nearly packed to the vents. But I did a quick survey of the shows on that unit, and found that for everything they were watching, 90% of it was available online, for free. They each have a fairly high end computer, a nice monitor to watch on, and we have a fast internet service. It doesn’t take a genius here to figure out that paying a premium for TV is necessary anymore, especially considering it would save me well over $900 a year. Yes friends, $900 a YEAR. I could EASILY take that amount of money and put it to better use.
I have no hard feelings for the satellite company I left behind, and I’m grateful for their flawless service over the past 6 years, but at $75 a month, it’s just a bit much for someone who doesn’t watch much, and for others who can find it elsewhere for less.
How did I move on?
If you’re searching for information on this, hopefully this helps you out. Feel free to comment on this post, and I can provide feedback if anyone needs a hand.
- Standard PC computer system
- Storage Drive
- Hauppauge WinTV HVR-1250 Hybrid TV Tuner (supports both HDTV and analog signals, like Cable QAM) Purchase Link here
- Video card with TV Output (I’m using a Radeon HD 3850)
- Standard definition TV (no LCD or HDTV here…yet)
- Windows 7 Home Premium
- Multicore Processor w/ 4GB DDR Memory
The system is set up in the livingroom, is turned on 24/7 and sips power – for my particular build, about as much as a 70 watt lightbulb.
I have the Windows 7 Media Center program running, and have the box set up to use Hulu’s beta desktop software – the benefit here is that I can press the power button on the tuner’s remote control, and it’ll switch for me from Media Center, to Hulu. Just exit Hulu via the menu, and Media Center starts up again. It’s a custom script, piece of cake to install, just go here.
Now I have an open DVR, where I can map network drives out so that every other PC on the network can access my TV shows without relying on a closed standard from the satellite company which doesn’t allow a custom PC solution, and coupled with services like NetFlix’s streaming service, Hulu, and Windows Media Center’s own integrated channels, we get 90% of the shows we used to watch on Satellite TV. I just have a mapped share to the PC’s name, and you can watch the shows via Windows Media Player on any PC in the house, or even over my VPN care of my pfsense box’s OpenVPN configuration. No need for Slingbox here. What about that other 10%? To be honest, it’s stuff I won’t miss, or can augment in the future. There’s always improvement going on, and some day I may find that number to be closer to 99-100%. Just like video card benchmarks reviews, I don’t need a free video card to perform like a $100 video card if the free video card does 90% of what the $100 card does – in other words, the value for the dollar here is awesome.
You can change this up a bit by adding your own dual tuner DVR card, but I knew that for our house, since most of the really watched shows are online, a single tuner should be fine for 90% of our usage.
The killer
Posted by Ben | Filed under Geekin' Out, Random
Hey, whoever captioned this, Kirk wouldn’t ever call Picard by his first name. It would’ve been “Captain.” Sheesh.
Definition of ID Ten T.
Posted by Ben | Filed under Random
ID Ten T explained
The beauty of this image is that while it was made on GraphJam, I made it. So I can use it on my site without feeling like a knockoff. So there. *raspberry*
This however is not my doing, but a blatant ripoff of the definition over on Urban Dictionary.
An error, caused by the idiot behind the keyboard. He is usually blaming the tech support that his mouse is not working, regardless that it is not plugged in. He is absolutely sure that he is right and nothing can prove the opposite. The error is read “ai-dee ten tee”.
Tech Support – TS
C: Hey, is this the tech supply?
TS: Yes sir, this is the tech support. How can I help you?
C: My mouse is not moving!!
TS: OK sir, what operating system you are using?
C: Pentium!!!
TS (whispers to someone): Not again… we have “id 10 t” error…
TS: Sir, is your mouse plugged into the computer?
C: Fuck you, do you think I am an idiot? … Let me check …
(5 minutes later)
C: Thank you guys, you are experts!