-
No Profiles on Netflix?
I have been a Netflix user for years. I probably only watch one movie a week, so they are making money off of me. It doesn’t really bother me that I am not getting full use out of my Netflix account. The main reason I like it is that I never forget what movies I want to watch. When I hear about something that sounds good I just add it to my queue and I get to it when I get to it. I am years behind, but I don’t really care.We have the “two at a time” plan. It works well for us because of multiple profiles. I have my queue and my wife has hers. We each can watch the movies we want on the schedule we want.
Now, for some stupid reason Netflix is getting rid of their multiple profiles option on September 1st. That’s going to make me look at other options. I have never looked at Blockbusters online rental options because I was very happy with Netflix. Coming September that might change.
-
New Theme
It seems like I am changing my blog template more often than my underwear. For my last template I wanted something simple, and something that brought all my social network posts together. Shortly after I released that one, Chris Pirillo came out with his WicketPixie theme. It is pretty cool because you can enter all your social network links and it will automatically get the favicon and integrate them into your blog. You can visit my “social activity” page and see all my social network activity. I still have some CSS tweaking to do. I ran out of time last night, and wont have much time to play with it for a while now.
-
XBox Withdrawal
I don’t really believe in superstitions. I have some, but I don’t really believe in them. Nothing bad has ever happened to me on Friday the 13th, but I am always leery about them. Well, this past Friday the 13th was a bad one. Our XBox 360 suffered the dreaded “Red Ring of Death”.
Someone on Twitter suggested that I try the wrapping it in towels so it overheats trick. Supposedly overheating it melts some solder points and then fixes them. I was pretty skeptical about that, but I thought I would give it a try.
I was right, it didn’t work, so we will be sending it back to Microsoft to get fixed, so we will be XBoxless for four to five weeks. It’s not going to bother me that much. I don’t play it all that often, but the wife is going nuts already.
-
How Many Computers are too Many?
My wife’s desktop PC and laptop are both getting a little old. She always ends up getting my hand-me-down computers. I am happy with my current computers, so I just bought her a new laptop. She figured she could replace both of her computers with a laptop.
So that means I am going to inherit two more computers. I currently have five computers at my desk. Is that too many? I think I will turn her old PC into a Windows Home Server, which will go into the closet, and I think I will run Ubuntu on her old laptop. I have always wanted a Linux based laptop. I always seem to find a use for my old computers. I think I have only gotten rid of three of my really old computers. Yeah, I need help.
-
Streaming Netflix
Another thing I played around with over the weekend was streaming Netflix videos to my TV. I am sure a lot of you have heard about the Netflix streaming box from Roku. Well, you can do pretty much the same thing with a media center PC. There is a plug-in for Windows Media Center called vmcNetFlix. It allows you to watch streaming Netflix videos in Windows Media Center. I was able to watch streaming Netflix movies on my XBox 360. The software is a little slow and buggy, but for the most part worked really well. The quality wasn’t quite DVD quality, but that is Netflix’s problem mostly caused by the slow internets we have here in the US. It was more like standard definition TV quality. I don’t know if I would watch a movie this way, but it works great for TV shows. I watched and old episode of Criss Angel Mine Freak and it was quite enjoyable. I love having more and more ways to view what I want when I want.
-
Beta
I am usually not afraid of beta software. I am always looking for the latest and greatest thing, even if it breaks stuff sometimes. For some reason I was shying away from the FireFox 3 Beta. The main reason was that most of my favorite plug-ins weren’t FireFox 3 compatable. Now most of them are. Over the weekend it was pissing me off how slow FireFox 2 was. I love the browser, but it was just getting too slow for me, so I went to FireFox 3 Beta on all my computers. I was shocked how fast it is. There are lots of other new features too, but I haven’t dived down into much of them yet. One thing that is taking a little getting use to is the different themes. On my Macs it looks like an Apple app and on Vista it looks like a Vista app.