Watching TV

Tue February 15 2011 by Christopher Aedo

So as much as I wish I didn't want to watch TV, sometimes I just can't help it (it generally feels like I'm shutting my brain down when I watch TV and sometimes I just need that). We cancelled satellite a few years ago, though we still downloaded a few TV shows each week because quitting cold turkey was just too hard. Back then the system was basically a computer downloading TV shows via bittorrent, and a hacked AppleTV streaming the content on our TV.

It's about time for a quick update on the system, because it's really been pretty great. The only real change since my last post is that we've replaced the first generation AppleTV with a cheaper, more powerful, and significantly smaller second generation AppleTV.

The new AppleTV is easy to hack, and now that the fine folks behindXBMC have ported their software to  this hardware, you can do everything you would want to do with the AppleTV.

What's the best new thing I've found? Adding the TED Talks RSS feed.  Now we can "flip channels" when we feel like watching TV, and we're NOT really shutting down our brains!

Write me if you have any questions about "adjusting" your AppleTV to better suit your own needs!


tivo is for suckers

Tue September 21 2010 by Christopher Aedo

OK, that title is unfair. TiVo is pretty great, I bought a series 1 in 2000, and within the first year added a giant hard drive (120gb WAS pretty big in 2001!) and a network card. A year later I got DirecTV and the Philips TiVo that worked with DirecTV …

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