more useful uses for boat anchors

By basd on Jul 17, 2010 | In -arghhh!!

Not an arghhh!! actually, but what category does this go in? My family wasted $25/mo. on Blockbuster for some years which ultimately resulted in the same two dvds sitting on top of the tv for mos. at a time, which means we may just as well have bought them, but didn't. Often returned unwatched, no less.

...

Needless to say, that resulted in a fair amount of complaining from me, to no avail.

Then one day my daughter decided she needed Netflix. Dear Blockbuster: this was not due to any issues with picking up and dropping off dvds, it had to do with the lack of dvds we are actually interested in watching. Netflix has them, you don't. (And neither does any theatre within reasonable driving distance.) Addendum: Please note, we're not interested in 3d either and it is not the revolutionary new wave of artistic cinema. I'm old enough to remember cardboard movie "glasses" with a red and a green lens. But then again, we probably are, in fact, out-of-step with mainstream culture in any event. The last movie we actually paid to see was in a 20 person theatre in West L.A. and not in English.

So, you get the picture more or less. And personally, I very seldom watch movies and/or tv and/or whatever. So, for a few months my daughter has been having an intense correspondence with Netflix via the US Postal Service, most of which I haven't seen. But I was bored at my San Diego apt. one day and I asked for "our" account # so I could actually see a movie. Watched "Girl with a Dragon Tattoo", if you care.

Point is, it worked out pretty well except for the part where I banged my head on the edge of the photocopier tray in the dark, which left a bloody wound, but we will have to just consider that a freak accident unrelated to the new technology.

Which got me to thinking. I've already got one retired laptop running our music collection and I have another retired computer not doing much other than acting as an iFolder server for (again) the music server backup and some random other stuff. Being of the era of excessively hot cpus and noisy cooling fans, it's a bit distracting to leave running on a regular basis -- but it does have the convenient plus of a video out.

Which led to a project. I have a lot of equipment hooked into my ethernet router, plus two switches. Part of this is due to the fact we have AT&T Uverse, which uses ethernet for the tv feeds. I was staring at my system thinking I did not have enough long ethernet cables running through the wall into the front room, when it occurred to me, somewhat belatedly (as in years) that if I simply moved the one switch to the front room, I could reduce my wiring clutter considerably and I would not need to make any more long cables for the project. And that, as a matter of fact, I did not need the iFolder server to necessarily be in the back room, it would work from anywhere on the network.

So, after a bit of rewiring we were ready for the test event. Would this elderly, noisy laptop with only 512 meg ram function as a video server? And since I have mentioned Blockbuster's lack of foward vision, let me also mention Uverse. It does, after all, have "video on demand." Unfortunately, just not any video I actually want to watch. Same goes for HBO and all those other premium channels. Are we picky or what? OK, so our peer group is apparently a few hundred people scattered worldwide and not a commercially viable audience. Do I care? No.

So, I will admit that there were a few momentary freezes. But then again, Uverse has been delivering up a few freezes lately -- and not just momentary ones. So, the test gets an A+ and we didn't even have to invest in any new hardware. We just moved around old hardware for better effectiveness. Our maiden-voyage test movie was "Departures" from Japan. Again, not that you care. (But we recommend it.)

Now that I've got something to watch that isn't Basketball, Association Football or House reruns, we may have to buy a new big(ger) screen tv.

Or not.

(I'm not fond of the "b" word.)

(Though I'm contemplating a new tech toy & report coming soon if I spring for it.)