Opium Tea.

I have 2x 4U rackmount fileservers and a 16 port Gbit switch in my bedroom, the gentle hum of the server fans luls me off to sleep nicely. I rarely need to turn the radiator on in the winter either!

Indeed, I remember playing Quake 2 on dialup with 150-200 ping... This feels like the service has been built with the assurance that the associated technologies that it's going to be relying on will have caught up by then. This type of gaming service might just about be viable in 3-4 years, but only to the city dwellers. I can't see it ever working properly out in the rural areas where carriers just don't see enough return against upgrades due to sparse populations.

How else would you account for the success of reality TV shows?

Clip it's hooves, wipe it's arse and put it on a plate!

...but abstract it from any locational or identifying data. Wrap it up in a bow and let them waste their time wading through it.

Wait... how did we get on to Seasonal Affective Disorder?

How about not bothering to cap and process it yourself at all? Just download it from usenet or torrents with all the processing, advert chopping, etc done for you.

In fact, just point your download software at the right RSS feed, plug in the right set of wildcard filters and let it get on with it.... Most new TV shows are up on the internet within 1-2 hours of their initial air date....

Get the howto writers to stop using Vim. Seriously, people who are used to windows are driven away by stuff like that, just tell them to use nano!

I predict a lot of WoW players getting together to form 24hr drop-in DnD centres.

The thought that people would bother to do this for a reason other than piracy baffles me.

I just leech them off usenet and the free filehosts.

That's the problem, trying to record and encode TV on a regular schedual yourself instead of getting someone else to do the hard work for you....

I grab all my regular TV shows from usenet. I have the Alt.binz usenet client hooked up to the the tv and hdtv rss feeds from newzleech. It checks my wildcard text filters against the rss feeds, grabs the nzb files for the tv shows I want to watch and then downloads them for me overnight, automatically runs the parity check and fixes broken files then unrars the shows to the correct folders on my FreeNAS box.

I switch on my XBMC Windows HTPC, which boots and loads XBMC without any problems (boot time is a little longer than I'd like, but I live with it). XBMC scans the smb shares on the FreeNAS box, finds the new TV shows, runs the filenames through the tvdb.com scraper, collects episode information, plot synopsis, generates a thumbnail and adds it to the library where I can view all the episodes, with fullscreen background art, cast lists, etc.

Setting up XBMC for Windows was trivial. Setting up the FreeNAS box was prety simple. Setting up the rss filter list was reasonably straight-forward, once you understand how you use a modern usenet provider as an alternative to torrenting. The usenet subscription costs me Euro 8.50 /quarter for unlimited downloads at up to 2.5mbps, which I find to be excelent value as I use it quite a lot.

This sort of setup may not be everyone's cup of tea, especially if you want to record less popular shows that don't get a scene release. It does occasionally glitch and miss a show, so I end up having to download roughly 2 missing episodes per month, which Isn't exactly a hardship if you consider I'm watching 10+ shows at any one time with 4 episodes a month, so a 2/40 or 5% miss rate roughly. This solution is working well for me at the moment and I'll stick with it until somthing better comes along.

... our new remote controlled president!