Several weekends ago the family and I went out yardsale shopping. Spotz, the middle child, was so excited he even carried his tin bank with him. He knows yardsales are the place to find the glittery junk he loves. In fact he wanted to buy just about every homemade Christmas ornament he ran across. Homemade Christmas ornaments seem to rival coffee mugs in their ubiquity. Spotz doesn’t appreciate coffee mugs, yet.
We went to only two yardsales that morning. I think it was the poorly advertised official First Saturday for yardsales. There weren’t that many people with junk set up, but amazingly enough we met with success. Read the rest of this entry »
You have two televisions. One is a nice replacement for a 450 lb albatross that you had passed down from the older generation, and rocks out in the living room. The other is a smaller, bedroom TV.
The content provided to watch is located on DVD players (one in each room), Computer (living room), and cable TV (both rooms).
The goal here is twofold:
Watch all content on both TVs as independantly as possible (meaning be able to watch a DVD in one room, and an avi from the computer in the other).
Have IR control over the whole shebang from either room.
Hmm. That means I have problems. Last time I did this, I drew up a nice little flowchart thing of my old situation, which I haven’t recovered from the mighty godaddysucks server crash of ‘ought six. I don’t really have a flowchart, so I drew a picture of how it will look when we’re done.
Yes, I’m a genius when it comes to perspective, but lets not get ahead of ourselves. We still need to make this a reality. Here comes the geeky.
First order of business is figuring out what the hell the problem is. The big thing is to get computer visuals on that TV in the bedroom with a minimum of buying stuff, because, y’know, I’m poor. The computer’s video card has an S-Video TV out, which delivers a bitchin picture along with the associated problems with not having an easy way to split Svideo. To compound the problem, the TV in the bedroom sports only a coaxial input, so we need to get everything dumped onto that coax line at some point. I’ve eyed these things to the left, because they’re relatively inexpensive, and do a decent enough looking job of filtering in some Svideo and RCA audio into a coax connection, but I’m not sure if this will still allow a cable connection, which means I’d need some sort of device to reconcile which input (cable TV or Svideo bastardization) is coming into the bedroom TV.
Just checked specs on this thing (along with paying attention to the fact that theres two little barrels on it) and it looks like this will take the cable input from the cable company along with the TV out input on the computer. Problem is, the sucker is auto-switching, which is jim-dandy if its a DVD player, but that computer TV out jack is always being used.
So, solution 1:
Cable TV coax + computer S-video out combined in this guy, with output coax split to go to both TVs.
I don’t think this will work, because of the auto switching. It seems like the box will just stay on the split mode. Now, I’m sure they make these boxes where you specify which input to use, but then I have to keep getting up to swap em, and I want to be lazy for a change.
That, and I don’t think splitting that connection will do the picture quality a favor.
Another nitpicky problem is that I like the way the TV is currently working with regards to the Svideo input, because just switching the aux setting on the TV to the s-video jack is more intuitive than about anything else I can think of (a hell of a lot easier than the previous 7 step method of switching the living room TV from cable coax to computer svideo, which damn near caused domestic violence and husband abuse when GAC had a hard time with it).
This would all be easier if the TV would accept the Svideo connection, and then spit it back out on the component signal out jack, because I could capture that connection. However, after a half hour of tinkering all I could get was a flickering blue screen in the bedroom, meaning either the TV is incapable of forwarding the Svideo signal, or the bedroom TV doesn’t know what to do with it. That might need more work.
OK, so solution 1 = lame.
Lets try another direction. Solution 2 = Would it be easier to split the Svideo, instead of the coax?
Well, no, not really, because s-video is a bitch to work with (see how I can’t even settle on how to spell it?), and splitters are real bitches. I mean, yes, true, you can go with something like this, but the picture quality is supposed to really suffer, and you know we can’t have that. Also, another problem here is if I split the Svideo at the computer we’ll have to run about 60 or so feet of Svideo under the house, which I’m not crazy about. If we buy cheap cable (because with a splitter like above, it probably couldn’t hurt the picture quality any more), it’d still cost 20 or 30 bucks, which is two nights worth of beer right there for me and GAC.
So, before I even suggest it, solution 2 is down the hole.
Its looking like the first switch solution(<1992 gangsta>switches for my bitches) is the best one so far, despite its flaws. Now, heres some outside the box thinking that I’m just throwing out there.
Solution 3: What about another computer, eh?
What about it indeed? No, says GAC. But we’ll pretend that I’m not married for a minute (hello, ladies) and explore the possibilities. See, if I throw up another computer and put it in the bedroom, I could use it as another hub. I already have another video card with Svideo and RCA output (”AT,” you ask “why not just use this RCA output card in the living room and make this all go away?” “Because,” I reply,) and I could easily switch the RCA output to coax and merge that bad boy in with the incoming cable.
The benefit of this is that watching content on the home network wouldn’t be slaved to the whims of the living room computer, which is a good thing because it is already the greatest object of desire within the house. I have most everything I need to put together a computer dedicated to servicing the viewing needs of the bedroom, just needing to wire a little cat5 to set it up, which I happen to have in abundance. So really all I need is RAM, decent connectors, and a quick crawl under the house (if the motherboard works, which is a different story).
I won’t lie, I have plans for this kinda thing. It would be bitching to put together a PVR running MythTV or something along those lines, but that would require a TV tuner card, and I’m not yet interested in trying to talk GAC into that (see, I can’t pretend I’m not married for very long), because I think we’d need full on cable TV to really reap the benefits of having a digital TV recorder. Hmm.
So, taking stock of the situation, I realize that I’ve spent all day typing this, and this is totally what they get for making me work on Memorial Day.
Poor bastard’s been through the ringer in making Southland Tales, his long awaited follow up to Donnie Darko, which is one of the better movies ever made (if you’re not afraid of not knowing what the hell is going on the first 12 times you watch it).
The movie, set in 2008 in a post bomb America, has been called a willfully confusing apocalyptic sci-fi comedy epic, and was assembled with the damnedest cast I ever did see. Thats right, Jon Lovitz and John Larroquette, together in the same movie with The Rock and Sarah Michelle Gellar. It evidently features machine gun sniper-cum-omniscient narrator Justin Timberlake, backed by a chorus line, singing The Killers covers in front of skee-ball lanes. Its swipes at the security laden ’00s, and completely sucks, according to prettymucheveryreviewI’vefound.
How can this be? Is the film a victim of critital misunderstanding like its predecessor, which died at Sundance, and debuted (along with central theme of falling airplane parts) to distracted audiences in September 2001?
Its tough for me to say. Right now, it appears that Southland Tales is having a hard time finding distributors willing to show the 160 minute movie in its current incarnation, which is exactly what happened with Donnie Darko, resulting in studios editing the movie for its theatrical and first DVD release. Problem is, when the Director’s Cut came out, GAC and I agreed that it lost a lot of the ambiguity that made the first movie so great. Does Kelly work best with another hand in the soup?
I fear that this is indicative of a major problem infesting this dark year 2006, that of the piss poor follow up. We’ve seen it in music, with amazing first records from bands like Futureheads and Zutons giving way to damn near unlistenable second attempts. Is it unthinkable that this trend will follow into the movies I like?
Is it the government fucking with me? If not me, it certainly appears that somethings happening to Richard Kelly himself, because when he left the country to get to Cannes, his ass ended up in DHS purgatory when he had the gall to have a name like suspected turrurist James Richard Kelly (no doubt, giving this James Kelly a big sigh of relief, and a quick change of any air travel plans). Would the government be dastardly enough to not only hold a film director who just made a movie involving things like federal control of the internet, and “Homeland Security” run amok, but to brainwash every critic to pan the movie?
Well, thats silly. Just because thats what I’d do, doesn’t mean thats what GWB’d do. For the record, I’d also replace Richard with a cleverly disguised robot designed to explode at close contact with Paris Hilton, but thats a different story.
Alright, this has certainly taken a turn for the worse. Its difficult to write objectively about a movie that
a) I haven’t seen yet
b) Is follow up a seriously good movie like Donnie Darko
c) Is getting the jab from everybody who is paid to watch movies
eyed 
Poor bastard’s been through the ringer in making 
