Brain Enema of a Savage Mind

It’s taken a stupid long time to get to this point since I started the new blog, but I have now hit the very uninspiring 100th post milestone!  I’m not sure if its irony, or some sort of sign that this milestone comes right at one of my pushes to get back in to my writing habit.  I’m not setting any particular goals such as daily posting or some such, but I would like to at least do four or five posts a week throughout the year.  For most posts I’ll at least try and find some particular topic to post on - most likely I’ll browse the web for inspiration, there’s always plenty of wacky shit out there I can use to post about.  But for this one (in part because I’m both tired and lazy), I’ll just ramble on a bit.  In fact I have rambled on a bit thanks to the fact that this is the 100th post so it gave me something perfectly inane to babble about.

A while ago I did a post when we got our AppleTV.  I promised a followup after I had played around with it for a bit, but fell out of the habit of updating this blog.  Well I’ve certainly had plenty of time to play with the AppleTV and I thought now that I was trying to update this a little more frequently I’d follow up on some posts of the past, and this one seemed like a good one to start with.

After playing with the AppleTV for a little bit it was time to get down to the business of hacking it so that it could play a multitude of video formats as well as allow the attachment of an external storage device.  There are lots of instructions online for rolling your own hacks on to a USB key, but out of laziness, and the fact I’m willing to let better qualified people do the work for me, I went with the guys at aTV Flash.  They frequently update the software which is especially helpful as some of Apple’s updates to the units firmware can tend to break the things you so meticulously went about hacking.

The 160GB internal storage of the AppleTV wasn’t going to cut it once I started making digital copies of my DVD’s to transfer to the device.  We ended up hooking up a 1TB external USB drive to it, which was a snap.  I formatted it as HFS+ Journaled, plugged it in to the AppleTV, and it was immediately recognized.  I was able to FTP in to the unit and copy files over to the external HD.  After the finished copying the were accessible through the AppleTV’s menu - specifically in the “DVD” section of the expanded menu that appears after initially hacking the unit.  For ripping the video I find that Handbrake’s default settings work quite well - a great compromise between file size and quality of both picture and sound.

One of the other benefits that came from hacking the device is access to Hulu (along with other services)through Boxee.  I’ve watched some old episodes of ALF for nostalgic purposes as well as a few other gems (Airwolf and Knight Rider in particular).  It’s hit or miss with newer episodes of some shows through Hulu, but I use it more when I don’t know what I want to watch as opposed to stay current with series I follow.  More recent series I’ve slowly been acquiring from the Apple Store.  Following the series that I do as well as purchasing a couple I haven’t seen in awhile works out to the same, if not a little cheaper than the cable bill had been.  Boxee has also enabled me to have access to every episode of South Park that has been made thus far - something I take frequent advantage of.

The AppleTV has been working great as a replacement for live TV.  Yes, I do miss popping on the occasional football or hockey game, but I can always go to a friends house or one of the sports bars in town to see those.  I certainly haven’t felt any less transitioning to this digital centered, cable tv free lifestyles.

People have asked me before why I don’t write more about beer; especially reviews of beers or breweries. The subject is actually a bit of a dilema for me since I work for Ithaca Beer. I’d hate for comments I make to come off as attacks on other breweries if I wrote anything but the most positive of reviews. And should I write an exceptionally glowing review it could come of as me attempting to be polite or worse in this day and age when even our personal lives are mired in politics. With the position I’m in itnjust wouldn’t be prudent for me to do more indepth looks in to specific beers or breweries. I certainly have plenty to say on the subject, andni like to think I have a fairly informed perspective on it, but for now I will save those conversations with a good friend over a beer somewhere. Don’t worry, I’ll still share when I find something truly outstanding out there, or all sorts of talk about homebrewing, but indepth commentary and reviews of the microbeer world just isn’t something you’ll find here. Fortunately there are plenty of good sites where you can get you beer reviewing fix.

It’s the time of the year when I start to reflect on things I wanted to do, didn’t do, and go over all the things I actually did do.  One of the things I always think about is actually keeping this blog updated.  While I make no promises in that regard, I have updated some things on the site, most notably the complete theme change.  I’ve also added a widget for linking articles to Digg, Facebook, and other social networking type things that some people may be using.  Most of the other updates are on the back-end so are transparent to the reader (if there are any).

I’m sure I’ll manage at least a few more post before my mind wanders elsewhere, but I’ll give it all a good try.

I used to have an offsite machine where I could easily sync backups off my laptop to (I like to have both local and offsite backups), but since that server is no longer in play I had been going for awhile without offsite backups.  While poking through some home inventory forms (you know, in case there is some home disaster), I realized that I no longer had any of my data offsite so I began looking at some various options for backing up data to an offsite location.  Right now I am playing around with Mozy.  It’s been one of the most reccomended services that I could find.  I’m playing with their free account which allows me to backup 2GB’s of files.  It runs in the background on my machine and backups up files from selected folders when any changes to them are made.  Eventually I want to backup all my photos as well but that will require something more than 2GB’s.  Fortunately I can upgrade the Mozy account to one with unlimited storage for only $4.95 a month.  Tht’s pretty hard to beat.  I’ll play around with the free account for awhile to see if this is the service I want to go with.  Feel free to comment with your Mozy experiences or any other backup service I should take a good hard look at.