Four tech-related posts

A few weeks ago I ordered the $40 government coupon to get a digital converter box. On the advice of Carlos I got this particular model from Best Buy. It had a few features I thought were important, like the ability to set the aspect ratio for each individual channel and buttons to change the channel on the box itself. We lose or break remotes so frequently that I refused to buy a box that required the use of the remote to change the channel. After we got this high-tech gadget, we went to Big Lots and bought a low-tech "rabbit ears" antenna for $2.99 and hooked it up to the converter box. So far I've actually be quite pleased with the set-up. We get about five channels using the rabbit ears antenna without the converter box, and only three of them have a decent picture. But with the converter box we get about 20 channels, and about 15 of those come in well. The picture is crystal clear and vivid -- I notice a big difference even on our small television set. Obviously, since these are all locally broadcasted channels, the results vary a lot by area. About six of our channels are religious channels, which we won't use much, but I really like some of the new channels that we didn't get before. We now get a second Nashville Public Television channel, and we get Telemundo (I like to watch Spanish shows sometimes). And the basic channels like NBC, ABC, CBS, FOX, and the CW all come in fine. So the digital box is pretty cool. We get about a dozen channels on cable right now because our Internet is cheaper if we get a basic cable package, but we haven't even used the cable since we hooked up the digital converter. At some point I may consider switching to a cheaper DSL Internet connection now that we don't need the TV channels anymore.

Every once in a while I come across some high-tech solutions for some age-old problems. Like most parents, I have trouble keeping the Babe busy sometimes. She really likes animals, so sometimes we will look at pictures of animals online. Wikipedia is a great place to find pictures of animals, so I can just do searches of dogs, cats, cows, horses, elephants, etc. and she likes it. But it's kind of annoying to have her demanding to see animals every time I'm on the computer. So I decided to automate the process. I found and downloaded a bunch of pictures of animals and then uploaded them to a Flickr account. I tagged all the pictures "animal slide show," so now my pictures come up first in any web search for "animalslideshow." Now all I have to do is go to the picture page and view all the pictures as a slide show. She can watch the slide show from any computer. It would be really sweet if I could set it up to watch the slide show on the television through the Internet browser on our Nintendo Wii, but alas, Flickr doesn't fully support Opera-based browsers, so the slide show function doesn't really work. But I feel clever for figuring out how to cut out some work.

I have an old desktop computer that I built from some spare parts in 2002. It's too slow to run Windows XP, let alone Vista, but I have used a couple different Linux operating systems with success. That old piece of junk has been a lifesaver when my laptop was in for repairs. I've been running Xubuntu Linux for a while, which is a lighter-weight version of Ubuntu. It is really easy to use and it looks great, but it takes more resources than other versions of Linux. So last week I installed Puppy Linux 4, which is a very efficient version of Linux. My computer was much more responsive using Puppy, so even though Xubuntu was easier to use and more polished, I was going to stick with Puppy. Ironically, however, I had a hardware problem creep up just a few days later. I'm pretty sure it's unrelated to the new install, but it probably means that old machine is reaching the end of its usefulness. So sad! I feel like I'm losing an old friend.

My final tech-related issue is more of a complaint. Both Becca and I upgraded to Windows Service Pack 3 last week after constant nagging by the updating system. Downloading the updates slowed our Internet connection to a crawl and took several hours. Same with the installation. But now that we have SP3 installed, both our computers are running more slowly than before, with several significant problems. SP3 changd the file associations of some of my media files without my permission, which made me very annoyed. But we had much bigger problems with connecting over a LAN. Several of our computer games, like Starcraft and Warcraft 3, can't play over LAN anymore, even when we disable our firewalls. We did some Web searches and discovered that we weren't the only ones with that problem. It's apparently a real problem for businesses that rely on using some of that connectivity, but until Microsoft addresses the issue, there's nothing we can do. Boo, Microsoft.