We went out to run a bunch of errands today prior to my trip to Seattle, not the least of which was to hunt down Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga for the DS. With the forthcoming Indy game in the Lego genre, I remembered that I had a lot of interest in getting the whole Star Wars series game. It allegedly has some extra goodies in the DS version too. I've barely used the DS since Kara stole my Wario Ware, so I figured it'd be fun to play something while flying.
While at Best Buy, I made some comment about how I often wished we had a TV in the bedroom to watch movies or whatever. I had been looking at a 26" Westinghouse for a long time with a built-in DVD player, and since it was finally on sale, I figured what the hell.
The TV has a ClearQAM tuner in it, so I figured it might be a good chance to see if the cable had the local HD channels on it. I don't pay for cable TV, but I do get my Internet connection with it. To wire it up though, I needed to connect that cable to the bedroom from the outside of the house. Home Depot happened to have the cable stripper I had when I worked in TV, and it even works with RG-6 and RG-59. It's a little thing with two blades in it at different depths, so you squeeze it on the end of the cable, whirl it around a couple of times, and get a perfectly stripped cable to crimp on to. Sweet.
Well surprisingly enough, yes, the cable did have the local HD channels, so we can view them on the TV. Yay! This got me thinking about Beyond TV, the PC-based DVR that I've been using now for four years on a computer I built. They have link software that allows you to play back anything you record on other machines. It's pretty seamless. So I'm thinking about building another comprooder to link to. I priced out parts and I can build a little one in a little case for about $400.
Or maybe I'll get a second Apple TV. That would actually be cheaper, especially since Beyond TV can synchronize stuff to iTunes.
The funny thing is, the cable stripper is the purchase I was most excited about.
So we spent the day stimulating the economy. Diana picked up some shorts at Old Navy, we had shakes and smoothies at Mustard Seed, new headphones for Diana's iPod and boneless wings from BWW. all in all, a fun day on the anniversary of our first date. The real party is next weekend...