wysereeser.com

Just installed an email notification plugin that’s similar to what I had when I was using moveabletype.

Hooray! For the moment efforts by the MPAA to establish a broadcast flag that could be used to prevent normal use of digital broadcasts has been stopped. And here I was looking forward to getting the pressure to build my own DVR using one of these.

Update: So in thinking about this one a little more, all the article and other information suggests is that the MPAA is merely (potentially) losing the current bill its taken. Their overall effort to put into place some control measures for digital content will most likely still attempt to be pushed forward through other bills later.

Alex King has a pretty interesting collection of tools/utilities that I stumbled across today. Interesting to note that he’s one of the Wordpress developers.

Overheard in a podcast how to upload your own custom made ringtones. This really isn’t anything new, but I’ve got a pretty old phone and we’re looking at changing our service plan and will probably upgrade phones as well. So this feature on engadget talked about how to make your own ringtone.

Another site was mentioned as well, http://mobile17.smashsworld.com/ as a place to upload ringtones to your phone. I think mine is too old to do anything too crazy. But the stuff’s cool anyhow.

So I was fiddling around a little bit this morning and decided to try, out of curiousity, to find anything that helped address a problem I’ve had with my Dell 8600 running under Ubuntu/Gnome. The issue was basically one of properly displaying screen resolution. My display is capable of 1920×1200. Initially when I would apply this setting the screen would actually spill off of the viewable range, so I had to revert to 1600×1200 which resulted in a horizontal stretching effect of the *stuff* on screen. So I did a little searching this morning and stumbled across the solution that seems to be working great and I had to make a record of it somewhere.

http://resolute.ucsd.edu/diwaker/articles/linux-dell-8600.html#video

Cool. I found one of the participants from the Build-In mentioned in the article I linked previously. Building a HD-PVR — pcHDTV and MythTV

PVR stuff again, but I didn’t want to lose this little bit of information. San Francisco Bay Guardian News

Cool.

Mapping Toolbox - Free GPS Programs

One of these days I’d have the idea in the back of my head to take all our home computing equipment off of the power grid. Sites like Gnet Power Systems and CirKits will help.

One portable power generation idea that came to me the other day is our video monitoring system. My brother gave us an infant monitoring system that consists of a camera and a monitor. The problem I ‘ve thought with both is that neither device of the pair is battery operated. Meaning, if I want to relocate to another part of the house, rather than just grabbing the device I have to make sure I unplug and carry the device to another part of the house and find an outlet that’s near where I’ll be. Also with toddlers soon to run around, finding places to hide the cords has also come up on a couple of occasions. Something that was all self-contained would be nice to not have to worry about someone little getting themselves tangled up in.

Saw this post today on Slashdot.org. I read the Wired article that is mention in the post a few days ago. Very interesting stuff. My wife recently turned to me and mentioned that she thinks our owning a Digital Video Recorder of some kind is warranted. I was floored. Normally I don’t hear requests of a technological nature from her. Moreso its me trying to justify the expense. But in her words, it seems easier to use (based on experiences that friends and family have had). The fact that she’s pressured me on a couple occassions to get recordings of her favorite tv shows that were missed through bittorrent is also amazing to me to see happen. She even went so far as to say she needed to bookmark a particular web site that listed torrents of the shows she’s interested in viewing. Couple this with the notion of ‘peercasting’ (its always interesting to see the new terms that evolve out of popular culture), and the models for doing business relative to tv drastically change.