Damn the man!

It has been a long long time since I have posted but I hope to have a few more things to write about these days.

Lately I have been on a quest to damn the man! Which means I am F'N tired of paying for shit because some monopoly forces us to. When I say paying for shit I mean MONEY or even worse MY TIME (which is worth way more then money :P ) The two big offenders?

Phone and TV

Both of these areas are full of big fat companies who make loads of cash exploiting you either by charging way too much for a simple service OR in the case of TV waisting your life away with commercials for shit I don't need to buy.

So! the quest has come up with a few treasures.
The first to get the boot is the phone company. We got a new service called Naked ADSL which is a new ADSL style that does not require an activated phone line! :D So you call the phone company and tell them to go drown themselves. Next you contract for your Naked ADSL. They kindly provide you with ADSL over a phone line AND give you VoIP with a REAL phone number.

So we now have
* A real phone number
* Free calls anywhere in ozzie land
* No fk'n bill from the phone company :D

Next? TV
This was a little harder to crack. We recently bought a new computer to act as our linux server for home (Web proxy, DNS cache, file server, file download system, etc). So I installed the MythTV software which specializes in capturing TV and allowing you to setup recording times and the big kicker? It can "save space" by stripping out commercials!

So I went and spent 70$ on a HighDef TV capture card and set to work. After awhile of reading bad info on the net I finally got it all working! I am going to post up my solution later for others.

Now I can record, digital TV and HD TV which are free in ozzie land and all the commercials are being stripped out :D So we can watch shows now without all the crap!

TV 0$ a month!!

Damn the man! :D

Future work is to get these videos to play on the TV downstairs over the network. This isn't hard just need more equipment. I'll build a slick looking system that can do all kinds of playback. Blue-Ray, MythTV, Music, Etc etc.

Lemons o moi

Well yesterday we scored a nice dwarfing lemon tree and planted it out front. Our soil is shit out there as it is mostly clay :-/ So digging the hole out we replaced a lot of it with compost and got the sucker in there!

We also scored a coffee tree! :D Woot. So that should be interesting. Still haven't planted that one yet.

The screens for the windows come in today (score) so the only thing left is the phone line and we are set.

Sub-note: Kasey's new computer should be built this weekend. Woot. The CPU, Memory, a few other bits showed up from USA (Thanks mom) and the other parts we will pickup this Friday when they arrive. Most notably is the 24" LCD of DOOM! Videos will come ;-)

Speaking of which. I did the videos for downstairs I am just lazy. Will post soon.

Share the net

Kasey sent me a link to the next ten great things this year and this was one of them!

meraki.com

A cool idea of sharing the net around you with others. This wouldn't work for small towns like Yuba Duba, but its a great idea for high density places.