The courier arrived about 1pm today to relieve my of my Powerbook. It's not a sad occasion really - I haven't used it for over a week whilst waiting for them to collect it. He asserted that "they generally take about a week to fix them", but since when is the courier likely to know ?

Forwarding Address: OS Xwas generating a whole bunch of repeat emails for me (the two most notable being those by George Scribanabout AppleScript). I fiddled with the Python a bit, and the problem seems to have gone away.

Unfortunately, my fiddling involved changing the tag stored to indicate that an item was already seen, so all of the old articles are downloaded again :-(

The relevant section of code now reads:

if (seen.has_key(i['link'] + id)) and (seen[i['link'] + id] == id):
    # print 'have seen', i['title'], id
    continue
else:
    # print 'have not seen', i['title'], id
    seen[i['link'] + id] = id

Basically, include the MD5 hash of the description in with the URL when storing the seen-ness of the item.

A friend mentioned that they'd recently spent $400 buying a Microsoft Xbox, a 120G hard disk and a mod-chip. This apparently allows the owner to copy games from CD (or whatever the Xbox disks are) onto the hard-disk and play from there.

Surely this is a disaster for Microsoft ?

If the Xbox hardware is really selling at a loss, on the basis that the revenue will be recovered from games, the ability to share disk images over the internet and play without paying may kill the market.

Granted, perhaps not many people will be bothered to open up their console and apply the relevant modification, but based on experience of the Sony Playstation, lots will.

Modiyfing the Playstation so that it would play copied disks was a thriving mini-industry. You can go to local markets and buy CDRW copies of all the big name games. The Xbox situation is a bit different - once you've installed the hard-disk and the mod chip, presumably you don't ever need to see a CD again, you can download images or tar archives from the net.

If games were less expensive, there would be a lot less incentive for the average person to bother with any of this. I wonder how much of the 40ukp that we pay for a Playstation 2 or Xbox game is profit ?

After discovering a long-lost PCI TV card in a cupboard, it was difficult not to think about recording TV programs that I always miss (I'm reasonably convinced that 10% of the TV we watch is interesting, 90% is complete rubbish and that there is another 10% interesting stuff out there that we miss).

Asking around, it seems that Showshifteris the `definitive' solution for PC based PVR. They have a 15 day demo version available, so it was easy to test.

The application is very good. Configuration is relatively simple, and marrying it with the EPG at tvtvwas easy. Now I can go to the tvtvwebsite (while I'm at work) and indicate that various shows should be recorded. The PC (at home) periodically synchronises with the requests from tvtv, and the rest `just happens'.

Image quality of the TV feed is not great, though I wonder if that is more to do with the signal quality or the TV card (which is a simple Brooktree based thing).

Showshifter has lots of features, it can:

It's very tempting to build a Showshifter based system for installation next to the real TV. Mini-ITXsystems might cope (at least the 800Mhz one), and they are small and quiet. Total cost of the machine would be under 400ukp with around 100Gb of storage, remote control, etc.. Add a copy of Windows 2000 or XP (what does that cost now ?) and Showshifter ($50) and you're all set.

If only someone would finish a Linux application that was quite as accomplished...

Kottke.orghas an articleincluding a geographical map of the London Underground train network. It's quite nice to look at - somewhat different from the schematic version.

The previous version of dme:blog.el wouldn't commit entries to the first destination in dme:blog-destinations. If you only had one element in the list, that means that your entries weren't saved. Oops.

Now fixed.

Why does vimwant to talk to the X server, even when I don't ask it to be graphical ? -Xstops it, but I keep forgetting.

The documentation indicates that when called as vi, it should behave like vi. Clearly this is not the case.

Take a look at the vpr Matrix 200A5. It would appear to be a Pentium 4 M machine in a Powerbook G4 chassis. It's the PC that you "always wanted".

Unfortunately, it looks horrible. I wonder what it would be like to use with a reasonable operating system?

From Wasted Bits, Anakin finally decides that enough is enough.

After spending time agonising over an ATI All-in-wonder 8500 LE (almost 200ukp), I bought a 25ukp no-name card with an NVidia GeForce 2 MX/400. It works well under Windows 2000 - much better than the NVidia Vanta it replaces. Sure, it doesn't have a DVI connector, but I figured that I would sort that out when I upgrade my TFT panel to one with a DVI port :-)

Linux drivers for the GeForce 2 MX seem to be binary only from NVidia, so that's a joy that I'll deal with when I need to do so (downloading a new Debian now...).