First post from my television…
The tuners arrived this afternoon. Installation and configuration with Media Center was simple enough but I was a bit disappointed that Microsoft doesn’t provide a chance to verify that the correct cable line-up was selected. For my zip code there were seven or eight different line-ups from my cable company.
Looks like I won’t be completely ridding myself of BitTorrent — as I was configuring my recordings there were two timeslots where I wanted to record three things at once. How’d that happen?
And what dipshit decided to put Alias opposite The West Wing?
Microsoft’s recording options seems carefully crafted to avoid running afoul of any patents that Tivo might have on the Season Pass concept. I wish Microsoft provided another Airtime option — Only in Primetime. It would be a nice way to accomodate scheduling changes without picking up re-runs from the daytime / late-night / weekend.
Over the weekend I picked up a Gyration Ultra GT Compact Keyboard Suite from Best Buy. Not inexpensive. It’s RF, not IR, which was important to me. The range can be pretty good but the antenna is very suseptable to obstructions and right now I’m dropping every 15-20th keystroke from about two meters. The keyboard is laptop-style with media keys, nice and compact. Too compact. The layout is driving me nuts. Backspace is the size of a regular alpha-numeric key, several other keys are 2/3rd-sized, Home/PgUp/PgDn/End are in a horizontal row. Too much compromise for a keyboard that is not actually embedded in a laptop.
The mouse is a total Geek-fest tho. Put it on a surface and it is an ordinary optical mouse with scroll wheel. Pick it up and pull the trigger to put it in gyroscopic mode — wave your arm around like an idiot to move the cursor. It’s a little weird and takes some getting used to, but… it’s actually not that bad. Very fine pointer control, however, is excruciatingly difficult.
What I’d really like is an RF keyboard with an 8-way button for a mouse. Laptop-style keys for compactness but with a sane layout. And backlit keys.
I won’t hold my breath waiting…
In the mean time I saw a sub-$20 IR keyboard on NewEgg with a pointing stick. That’ll do for now.
