On Monday night I sat down to watch one of my favorite shows Chuck.  If you haven’t seen it in a while (or ever) you should give it another watch has it has picked up considerably over the last 4-5 episodes this season.  I’m not sure if they hired new writers or just decided to change the show a bit but whatever they did really stepped it up a big notch.  On Monday night I watched the first 38 minutes of the episode, thanks to my DVR that’s all I got to see.  I’m not sure what happened but of course it cut off right before the climax of the episode.

So I decided to head to NBC.com so I could watch the last few minutes.  Fail.  Major fail.  After spending over 20 minutes trying to get it to stream (it would constantly stutter and stop, and I have 50MB cable modem service) I decided to download and install their plugin.  It claims to give you access offline, HD quality and no buffering as it downloads the video for local playback.  Sounds perfect but it isn’t.  After another 15 minutes I said screw it and stopped.

I then searched my favorite BitTorrent site to see if I could find it.  Yup, in less than 10 seconds.  With more than 20,000 people sharing it.  It downloaded in less than 10 minutes.  And looks great (720p HD).  And I now have the episode forever if I want.

I truly hope that the content publishers figure this out and soon.  After trying for almost 45 minutes to do it the “right” way I was able to watch what I wanted in less than 15 the “wrong” way.  Score one for the wrong way…

A few months back I moved into a new house.  Since then I’ve finished most of my unpacking and moving in but a few projects have definitely lingered.  Most notably is running Ethernet cable all around the house.  The issue is I’ve got hardwood floors in the upstairs so running along baseboards/carpet just isn’t an option, nor is running in the ceilings.  So my only option is to drill into the side of the house and run it outside and that isn’t fun either.  So for now I’ve just had a long Ethernet cable running through the main floor of the house.  While it’s esthetically wonderful I should probably come up with a better solution as clearly I’ll trip over it and kill myself soon.

Belkin recently announced a powerline Ethernet adaptor that is capable of 1GB/sec.  Yup, 1GB/sec.  Given that, I figured it was time to try these little things out so I stopped off a BestBuy and picked up a set (they didn’t have the new Belkin ones so I went with the Netgear XAV101).  For $129 a set they are perfect.

Setup took all of 3 minutes.  The hardest part was getting behind my stereo in the living room to get to the wall outlet.  I plugged in there, plugged in my office, plug into networking on both ends and DONE.  My first test was to stream a 1080p Bluray rip from my PC to my Xbox in the living room.  Perfect, not a single stutter.  Next I streamed live 1080i television (so uncompressed and takes gobs of bandwidth) from my Media Center PC to the Xbox – again perfect, no issues at all.  Wow.

So if you need to get Ethernet around the house and don’t have cable get a set of these and try them out.  Isn’t it great when things just work?

A few months ago I went to stay at Brad’s place up in Keystone and was greeted by a large box in his basement that held the Ion Drum Rocker.  I quickly tore into the box as I’d read about it many times and was very curious to see them in action.  If you can’t tell from the picture the Drum Rocker is a premium drum kit for Rock Band and Guitar Hero.

The difference in these drums and the toy that comes with the game is remarkable.  The standard drums are very light and flimsy, the heads are hard and loud and the pedal, well it sucks.  The Drum Rocker is basically a small, inexpensive digital drum kit.  A real digital drum kit I might add.  You can get an add-on module for it that turns it into a fully standalone drum set that you could play with real musicians.  The heads are quiet and very responsive, allowing for rolls and fast fills with ease.  While the cymbals are a bit hard (they don’t quite crash like a cymbal should) they are years beyond the Guitar Hero World Tour cymbals.  While I’m not a drummer (I can keep a beat fairly well) playing the game with these drums feels like you are actually playing drums, not a toy.

At $300 for the basic kit (the picture above adds the third cymbal for an extra $50) it’s not cheap.  Given the excellent quality if you enjoy playing drums it’s worth it.  Highly recommended.

So this is going to be a little bit of a rant as this is a huge pet peeve of mine.  Ever since I’ve been into electronics (AV stuff specifically) I’ve been a fan of just about the cheapest cables I can get.  I usually get my cables at Home Depot and the best advice I got a long time ago was to use lamp cord (you know the bulk stuff you can buy to rewire lamps and such).  I’ve argued this a lot with people, mostly with sales guys trying to sell me the expensive stuff.  There have been study after study (and even a $1 Million dollar bounty if you can prove the difference) that show that the human ear (or eyes) can not hear the difference these extremely high end cables give.

While this is a little hard to argue for analog sources, for digital the argument is totally ridiculous.  Recently a salesman at Best Buy tried to sell me a 3 foot $265 Monster HDMI cable.  I burst out laughing when he suggested it and tried to explain to him “if it’s digital, then it’s digital”.  He just couldn’t understand that if ones and zeros are flowing then ones and zeros are flowing – the fucking cable makes no difference whatsoever.  Then yesterday I find this great post on Engadget showing that not only can people not hear the difference between Monster cable and cheap cables they went one step further and used COAT HANGERS to connect the speakers!  And guess what, no one could hear the difference between the coat hangers and expensive Monster cable.  Hey, anyone want to buy some $100 coat hangers???

Next time you need cables get the cheapest ones you can find, especially if they are HDMI.  Don’t ever let the sales guy talk you into the expensive stuff no matter how hard he pushes.  If you need HDMI cables here are the ones I have, I have about 5 of them and they all work great (oh and they are $4.99 each!).

So today I’m beginning the bragging toys section of my blog. Ok, so in all seriousness what I’m planning is a “Toys” section of my blog so others can see what I’m playing with. When I thought about what I do/know different/better than others its all the toys I’m lucky enough to play with. What better toy to start off with than a Plasma display.

So about 6 months ago I made the jump to Plasma. If you don’t know I’m a HUGE home theatre buff (yes I’m very lucky that my wife LOVES our home theatre too and let’s me spend all this money!). We just love movies but haven’t been out to the movies in about 3 years thanks to our home theatre. People often think I’m crazy that I don’t go to movies and wait for them to come to DVD (no, I haven’t seen Episode III yet). Then they come over and watch a movie, or a short demo from something (the pod race scene in Episode I is awesome). Then they get it. It only takes about 10 seconds and they get it. Then they realize I have many things a movie theatre doesn’t: pause button, bathroom, beer, reclining leather sofas, stadium seating, my dogs, pause button (I mentioned that one, right?). They also realize that the picture and sound are far better than pretty much any main stream movie theatre.

Ok, so enough ranting about my home theatre is better. Did I also mention that I’m a snob about it? The ONLY true home theatre is front projection. Period. No big screen, no plasma, sorry, that just doesn’t cut it. Ok, but this post is on my plasma which is really in my bedroom. It is NOT for home theatre. We got it for a few reasons, but the biggest was that it’s 3 inches thick. It is amazing the amount of space it gives back to the room.

On to the picture. I’m sure if you’re reading this you’ve seen High Definition programming on a plasma somewhere. It’s amazing. You know that. What you might be wondering is about Plasma vs. LCD, HD vs. ED, connectors, formats, etc. There is a TON to know before getting one. DO NOT go to Costco and just buy one, you will probably regret it. Learn about them, read, study, and if you can’t do that ask someone who knows (feel free to ask me). Soon I’ll write some posts about connectors, formats, LCD vs. Plasma, HD vs. ED, etc to help you out some. As I said I really just wanted to start my Toys section off right.