Star Trek Voyager Season 1-7 DVD set

I received my Star Trek Voyager DVD collection yesterday and it all seems original and all but since I ordered it directly from China I do have my doubts. The video quality seems to be standard SDTV quality which would make sense since HDTV was not really that big when the series was aired. The soundtrack is also Dolby Digital 5.1, so it seems to checkout.

Video Streaming Hardware

I am very interested in the idea of streaming all my content via Wi-Fi at my house. The software seems to be available and ready. VideoLAN will take care of the streaming for me.

My problem is the hardware. If I want to be able to watch the streams anywhere in the house, I would need some portable media device which will be able to connect to the wireless network as well as output the stream via composite to some display device, either a TV or projector. It seems Gigabyte might have a solution in the form of a new motherboard. All I need then is a very small case that will allow me to carry the solution around the house.

Student Urinates on PS2

I found this interesting article on Kotaku today. Apparently some student decided it will be a good idea to urinate on his PS2. It seems the student was not part of the engineering faculty otherwise he would have known to unplug the PS2 from the wall socket first.

Baby Progress

My new baby is 9 weeks in development now. According to the manual he / she is now as big as a jelly baby. So just to put everything into context I bought a packet of jelly babies just to see how big my baby is now.

Notebook Suspend

Something I have noticed using Ubuntu 7.04 is that the suspend function works much better than Ubuntu 6.10. My notebook has been put into suspend mode and brought out of suspend mode frequently over the past weekend and Ubuntu 7.04 did it flawlessly every time. Ubuntu 6.10 would always fail to come out of suspend mode after a few suspends.

Program my DSTV PVR over the Internet

I was curious whether I could schedule recording times over the Internet. Basically I would use the DSTV website to set my recording times and then Multichoice would send the information to my PVR via the satellite connection.

Apparently a few other people also had the same idea as can be deducted from this forum post of mine. So hopefully by 2009 I will have this functionality.

Another instance where DRM causes more distress for the paying customer than the actual pirate they want to get rid of. If it was not for tight DRM policies DSTV could have opened their PVR for homebrew development which would have allowed this functionality to be developed by hobbyists like MythTV currently is.

I got DSTV

Since my wife fell pregnant we decided to get DSTV for the home. I had DSTV a few years back but I could not justify the cost of the subscription compared to the amount of TV I watched anymore. The problem usually was that the shows I wanted to see was screened at times I could not watch them and the amount of hassle involved in setting the VCR to record the shows every time was not worth it, not to even mention the amount of VHS tapes I required.

DSTV in their wisdom decided to release the PVR decoder and that put the whole subscription fee issue in a whole new light. The PVR allows me to set recording times for all my favorite shows thus insuring that I do not miss any of my shows, which means I finally get what I pay for, well almost.

I am a bit disappointed that DSTV decided to cancel the Sci-Fi channel, but I do like the extra nature shows and the new Disney channel. My frame of reference for old and new is 2002 vs. 2007, so the Disney channel might have been created a long time ago, but to me it is new.

I also bought myself a new Samsung DVD recorder. My LG DVD player packed up so I needed to replace it so I bought the DVD recorder instead of just a player. The upside is I can now play my recorded shows through my DVD recorder and record the shows I want to keep onto DVD-R. Shows like Nigella Feasts and Jamie's Kitchen are really shows I want to keep on DVD-R instead of on the PVR's hard drive.