Beach baby

Christopher is digging the beach. The boys have gone from deathly
afraid of the waves, to fearless. I am still trying to figure out which
I prefer.

Now we're having fun - VW update

So now we're having fun. I've removed all four fenders. Have a broken bolt count of 10. Not too many surprises overall. Got rust rot in a few common places. There's clearly been a rear impact at some point in the car's 40 year history - a minor bend in the right rear wheel well.

Thinking about taking an auto body shop at the community college -- but not sure I can swing the evening hours.

TWX - delisted by Google?

So I typically google my stock quotes. AAPL, GOOG, TWX, MSFT, KO, among others that I like to track. Google seemed to always give an inline graph and current standings of these and other stocks for the first search result.

But a funny thing happened sometime last week. Google apparently delisted TWX (Time Warner) - instead of being the top search hit --- complete with the current bid price, and historical chart - it wasn't. Google's own financial link to TWX has fallen to the 5th hit. Oddly Yahoo's finance page is now the first hit.

What's the deal with that? It's odd that it happened just a few days after the announcement about how AOL is on top of the game in the new Nielsen rankings.

XBMC -- still satisfying

So, back in June I picked up another used original XBOX -- and it was already softmoded with XBMC. Hooked it up this weekend with some new Netgear AC 200mbps Ethernet extenders (much better experience than last time I tried 802.11g). Now I've got DVD-less goodness on the two TV's in the house. No more broken & scratched kids DVD's for me.

XBMC even recognizes and browses other XBMC's on the network and supports playing content off of them.

Most of my content is offloaded on a 1.2 TB NAS - so all of it is available to both TVs.

One hint that I just figured out. You really want to keep all your ripped DVD's as ISO images. XBMC can't figure out that VIDEO_TS folders don't have to be DeCSS'ed -- and it fails to cache this knowledge. When they are in ISO format - this is cached and the second time you watch the video, it pops in a second. Also, the feature which remembers where you left off on each movie only seems to work on ISO images. So now I've got to batch convert all my VIDEO_TS folders to ISOs again (mkisofs is my new friend).

One note, ISO images over 4GB can't be played off the XBox's internal harddrive - it is running a variant of FAT32. Your best bet is to store it all on another drive formated with NTFS or UFS (which is what I'm using on my NAS).

It's all so beautiful