Jason Crowther’s Blog

A while back, my pal Larry showed me a cool mapping site that lets you take out a virtual tape measure and measure distances arbitrarily. It really hit the spot for figuring out how far I’ve been running.

Today, via Make, I found a Google Maps hack called the Gmaps Pedometer.  Using the same awesome technology of Google maps, you can mark out your route it calculates distances automagically. The interface is a lot slicker than map24.com; Use a single click to center the map or drag to pan. Then just double click away to set waypoints.

Even better yet, you can generate your own links to routes you’ve mapped out previously. That’s a great feature. Here’s the route for my 10 mile out and about run.

Yep! Buy your pre-brewed coffee (or tea, soup, or even baby formula) in its own self heating container. A company called Ontech has blown through a cool $20 millon in development of the idea, now protected by 120 different patents. Be sure to check out their demo video.

Hmm. I can hardly wait for the law suites to start flying. If people are unable to prevent themselves from dumping a hot coffee in their lap at McDonalds, I’m not holding my breath on how well they’ll be able to handle these new high tech containers.

Props to Gizmodo for the pointer.

Slashdot reports about Picotux a new Linux compatible PC the size of a RJ-45 ethernet jack. Wow, that’s pretty darn small, and its only 99 Euros. Now if I just had a cool project to use it in!

Whoa, this is pretty cool. A tiki shaped USB drive. How cool is that? They’re a little pricey, but they’re hand made. Probably no more expensive than a one made by a street vendor in Maui.

Don’t be the last on your block to get yours.

In my last blog, I brought you up to date on the hell that is dealing with Time Warner Cable for service. In the comments, my pal Sean was surprised that I didn’t just dump the Time Warner DVR and buy my own. I don’t think I’d buy a dedicate DVR myself (like one from Scientific Atlanta) but, I have considered building my own. I thought I’d share my research so far…

Tired of paying way too much money to Time Warner Cable ($75/month) for cable TV service and DVR box rental, I started down the road of figuring out what it would take to build my own DVR. After spec’ing out a PC do the job, I eventually abondandoned the idea when I figured out that I’d only save about $15/month of the cable bill and lose a lot channels in the process. But, with my latest problems with Time Warner service, I think I’m gonna dust of the building a DVR idea again.

Let’s start with pros and cons…

Pros:

• Don’t have to rent it from Time Warner.
• If it blows up, I can (probably) fix it myself.
• I can have more than 2 tuners if I want (can record more than 2 shows concurrently; seems kinda silly, but it happens frequently)
• Capacity. I can have as much as I want.
• Storage Reliability. I can use RAID to protect my recordings.
• Flexibility. I can use a number of different PVR software packages (MythTV, SageTV, BeyondTV, etc.)
• Hackability. MythTV is of particular interest, it appears to be easy to add your own skins and additional functionality.
• Exportability. I can back up recordings to DVD.

Cons:

• No digital content. In the Time Warner Cable system, you must use their cable box (standalone or the one built into a DVR) to receive digital quality cable.
• No digital channels. In the Time Warner Cable system, a significant number of channels are only available when you have the digital package.
• No high def. Its not too big of a deal now because there are only about 8 high def channels available, but as more channels convert, it would be nice to get full usage of my high def TV.
• Noise. Unless I invest in pricey noiseproof pc components, I’ll have to live with the white noise of a standard pc. Not a deal breaker, but kind of annoying.

In my next installment, I’m going to start to spec and price a pc for DVR use. Stay tuned.