The Chumby One – Cheaper but just as wonderful
A few months back Chumby announced the Chumby One. We got ours in just before Thanksgiving and I am loving mine.
Let me tell you what a Chumby is exactly. It is an internet connected, touch screen, wifi alarm clock with 1,500 different widgets you can add to personalize it and use however you see fit. Sarah got me a Chumby last year for Christmas and I have really enjoyed it, but it is kind of a pain to take it back and forth to work everyday if I want to use it in the office. Plus Sarah had stolen mine so that she could have multiple alarms at night when Lyla nurses without changing it every time. I wanted a digital picture frame for the office, but when I saw the price drop on the new Chumby I knew it would be a digital picture frame and so much more. So I told Sarah that the new Chumby One was only going to be half the price at $99 and it does pretty much everything that the old Chumby did. The only major changes they made were taking away one speaker, one USB port, and it is no longer a beanbag device, but more of a standard alarm clock look. Other than that, the functionality is the same, and they even added an external volume knob, and an FM radio. You can see from the picture below the difference in the old and new Chumby’s. The old one is more of a play toy, but higher priced, and the newer one is cheaper, but the same insides for the most part.
Sarah got hers early last week and I got my original Chumby back to use as my alarm clock, and mine came in the day after Thanksgiving. I have been using it at work all week this week and I couldn’t be happier. I can plug in my iPhone via the back USB port and listen to the music directly off of it while it is being charged. I can have a slideshow running on the Chumby’s screen from my Flickr Photos, or Facebook photos at the same time of my baby girl. I’ve also got it setup to listen to Love 89, Life 88.3, NPR, and TWIT.tv. Not only that, but it has Pandora built in and lots of other streaming radio options. It is a really slick device that I am getting more and more dependant on and really loving. And there are tons of other widgets you can add like webcams, games, news, mail, social applications, really whatever you need. It is an extremely cool little device that does so many things. Plus if you are the type that likes to go in and hack, it is totally hackable since it is really just a custom Linux build.
So, if you are looking for a gift for someone, or think this sounds like something you would like, then check out Chumby.com and see if it will fit your needs.
Windows Home Server – My New Toy
I know i haven’t written in quite a bit, but I think I may have to start back up as I don’t see as many people as I used to, and I like to be the person who informs others of interesting articles or other findings.
My latest toy is my new Windows Home Server. Last week Newegg had a deal where you could get the HP Mediasmart LX195 Home Server for $199, which is half the MSRP. I talked to Sarah and she approved my purchase so I was off. I ordered it and it shipped from Memphis so it was here the next day. It took all of 10 minutes to install and since it was so small, I simply have it sitting behind some DVD’s on my entertainment center. It doesn’t use a monitor or mouse, simply a power cord and an ethernet cable and it is up and running. You can see from the picture below, that i retrieved off of another website for scale, just how small the server actually is. It’s not much bigger than a couple of hardback books.
This device does all sorts of very cool things that are typically only done by either spending a lot of money or in big corporations. Here are the items that I find the most useful.
- Media Collection – It actually goes out to all of our house computers and grabs all of the music, videos, and pictures and puts them in the appropriate shared folder on the server so we have a central shared repository for all of our media. Instead of saying ” is that on the desktop or the laptop?”, we just have to go to the server and grab the file.
- Full Backups – It does full backups of all of the computers in the background. So if anything goes wrong on a computer, I just put in the connector boot CD and boot off of it and it pulls all of the information off of the server. So I don’t have to try to figure out how to get all of the information back, and don’t have to think about getting drivers or keeping the install cd’s. Spyware doesn’t have to be a problem anymore.
- Plugins – It has these things called add-ins that are additional programs that add functionality like publishing to Tivo so that i can watch TV or listen to music directly from tivo without thinking about it. There are also plugins for things like iTunes that will publish the entire music collection to the home sharing tab in iTunes. So no more finding what song is on which computer either.
- Home Website – The home website that it serves up automatically and is viewable from anywhere has links for being able to get to files on the server from anywhere, as well as photo sharing, and remote desktop built in. So I can get to all of my stuff from anywhere and even listen to music from wherever I am.
- Folder Duplication – In IT, there is a practice called RAID, which is when you take a bunch of hard drives and put the same data on all of them so that if one hard drive dies, you still have all of your information. But it is kind of hard to administer and over the heads of most laymen. WHS has a feature called duplication that allows you to add another hard drive through USB or internally that holds a copy of your most precious information so that if the server goes down, you still have all of your information on the other hard drive. Or if the house is burning down and you need all of your pictures, just grab the external hard drive, and you have everything you need. It is an amazing feature that all homes should have.
- Search – You can even search across your home server and get all of the files that meet certain criteria. So if you are looking for that John Mayer song, you can search for it on the server and find it easily.
So as you can see, it does quite a bit, and these are just the big ones. It has a lot of other capabilities that I don’t even want to get into cause most people won’t care. But I am absolutely loving this thing. It is quiet, small, and does a whole lot of fun stuff that I have wanted to do for a long time. It is great for our home, and would be extremely good for a small office of 10 or less machines as it would do all of the backups, and have all of the file shares that a lot of companies use Small business server for. Couple a WHS computer with something like Google apps for email and other business critical apps, and you would be all set for so much cheaper than your typical business, and you would have a lot more functionality as well.
These are the things that I do for fun. Most of you will turn your noses up and think, this is so boring, and the rest will think it’s pretty cool. Either way, wouldn’t you love if your home network was as well organized as your work network and you didn’t have to think about spyware and adware?
How We Dropped Cable
The Idea
A couple of months ago we started looking at how we could save money on the things we really didn’t need so we would have money for the things we really wanted to spend money on. One of the things we looked at and thought we could do without was cable television. We were spending almost $70 per month on just the cable TV portion of our bill from Charter. Between the regular cable service, the upgrade to digital, then the upgrade to High Def with the cable card, it made a pretty significant impact on our budget. So we decided we would drop all of that and go with over the air HD instead for all of our live shows. We decided we would keep the Tivo so we could watch what we wanted on our time frame.
The Change Begins
So, on April 15th, I twittered that I was about to drop cable and run far away from charter and it was twitter to the rescue. But a user named UMatter2Chtr2 sent me a message and asked if there was anything he could do to keep me as a customer. I told him that I would want to drop cable TV, but keep my phone and internet for cheaper than I would be paying if I went with someone like Bellsouth or TDS. So he dropped our service down to under $60 per month for both, with the 5 meg package for Cable, which is what I wanted. This way I didn’t have to worry about the change of providers and I have been relatively happy with Charter in everything but price.
The Antenna
The next step was to figure out how best to get the HD channels on the TV’s at our house. We first tried an RCA Indoor Amplified Tv Antenna
The Un-Tivo
Then i started thinking about how I could get all of the shows we had missed. I had an old media center computer that isn’t anything special (Athlon 64 3000+, 1GB RAM, 5 year old Nvidia video card) just sitting in our extra bedroom so I thought a good use of it might be to put it next to the TV and use it for watching videos, but wanted an easy way to watch those without having to deal with a keyboard and mouse most of the time. I also wanted to download shows easily so I could catch up on anything we might have missed. I have been torrenting for awhile, so the idea of downloading shows wasn’t foreign to me, but setting up the RSS feeds and remembering to look and see what has been downloaded and needs to be downloaded did not sound like a good time. I remembered Lifehacker talking about using TED to download shows automatically through your bittorrent client and thought I would give it a shot. I use uTorrent for all of my torrenting needs. That coupled with the WebUI allows me to keep an eye on my downloads from anywhere I have web access. I started using TED and was very impressed with the amount of shows and the ease of use. So it looked like that part was taken care of. But I still needed to figure out two more issues, ease of use and 10 foot remote usability.
The Player
I have always been a big VLC fan just because it will open almost any file format you can imagine without having to fool with codecs, but I didn’t know much about using VLC remotely until I saw the VLC Remote app in the iPhone app store. At that point, my brain started churning to figure out how we could use that in our living room. I downloaded the app from the app store, then installed the setup assistant from here. At that point, we were off and running. And not only could I control it from my iPhone or Sarah’s iPod touch, but it could be controlled from a browser window by just putting in the right URL. It was a beautiful day and it worked really well for us for the first couple of weeks we were living a cable-less life. We felt so liberated just to not be relying on Charter for watching TV anymore.
The Online Shows
Then we had a few times where we would want to watch Hulu or ABC.com or CBS.com to catch up on something that wasn’t in the Torrent RSS feed yet, but we wanted to catch. So I started researching to find out what was out there that I could use to watch shows like this from my couch. I thought about using something like Boxee, but I didn’t want to have to think about doing things on Linux, and the Windows version of Boxee isn’t available quite yet so I was kind of stuck and we still would have to futz around with a keyboard and mouse.
The Interface
About a week later, I just happened to pickup this post from Treehugger that showed how to turn your old laptop into a media hub. I watched the video, and wasn’t as amazed with what they did, as I was with a piece of software that they were using. They were using an interface I had never heard of called Zinc TV. It was, and is, amazing. It works using a Media Center Remote and Receiver
The Antenna (Again)
We are still using this interface, and have been for over a month, and love it. So it looks like it may be here to stay, which is fine with me. The last thing I needed to figure out was how to get the best reception to all of our TV’s using this homemade antenna I had made. It wasn’t the prettiest thing so Sarah didn’t want it in our living room. And with all of the coat hangers hanging off of it, it wasn’t exactly safe, especially since we are planning on having a baby in a few months. So I talked to a friend at work and we batted some ideas around as to how to distribute the antenna signal throughout the house and came up with this as my preferred method.
The Setup
I would put the antenna in the attic where it would get the best reception and then distribute that signal throughout the entire house. Sounds simple enough right? Well, almost. The problem is that we have a 2 story house, and all of the cable inputs are on the other end of the house. So that meant I was going to have to send the signal from one end of the house to the complete opposite. It meant I would have to get a pre-amp and an amp to pump up the signal. I bought a pre-amp that would sit within a few feet of the antenna. I bought a Dual Output Amp
that would sit at the distribution box and feed the rest of the house. Those items coupled with 50 feet of coax
The Finale
Yesterday the finale of this whole project came to a close as I finished things out and got it all up and running. It is working amazingly well and Sarah is extremely happy with how it works. The only thing she has to do now is flip to a different input on the TV whenever she wants to watch live TV versus anything through the media center. But with our Logitech Harmony Universal Remote
It is all working great, and I am really happy with the way it has turned out, plus it is saving us about $80 per month. I did have to buy a few things along the way, but since I had a lot of the electronics already like the computer and the remote, it still didn’t cost me more than a month of savings from our charter bill.
Pregnant
Yep, the word is out. Sarah is pregnant. We are both really excited and nervous at the same time. It’s going to be an exciting next…18 years.
Tithing Rap
This is some high quality stuff. Talk about creativity.
Worship Confessional
Well, today’s worship service went really well. We did
Praise you in this storm
You are Wanted and Welcome Here
Indescribable
Take My Life
One Pure and Holy Passion
We were going to do a couple of other songs. We had Let My Words Be Few and Grace Flows Down in our back pockets for the invitation, but I felt like we should do Pure and Holy passion again. Then we ended with Wanted and Welcome to end it.
Also Keith showed the “What if Starbucks Marketed like the Church” video, which is really good.
It went really well and really smooth. The sound was good, the slides were right on. It was a really good day and I hope we can keep that up for next week when we do the same at our drummer’s church.
YouTube – What if Starbucks Marketed Like a Church? A Parable.
YouTube – What if Starbucks Marketed Like a Church? A Parable.
Bible in a Year
This year Sarah and I are trying something new. We are going to read the bible through from cover to cover. It is something I have always wanted to do, but have never had the consistency to actually stick with past the third week of January.
But this year I am determined to stick with it. So, here is the way we are going to do this. We are going to use bibleinayear.org as our resource for what to read each day. We are doing the email based program that actually sends you what you are supposed to read in email each day. It has multiple versions, as well as multiple reading orders to choose from.
We decided to go with the chronological order since it makes the most sense to keep in continuity with how things actually happened.
We are almost a week in and really think this may work for us, at least I hope so. And it doesn’t have to start on New Year’s day, it can start any day you want. You just put in your email address and they send you a confirmation link, then the next day you get your first email.
Also, if you don’t want to do it by email, you can print off the list of what you should read each day. So for those of you who don’t check your email each day, you can just check your sheet and move on.
So if you don’t have a new years resolution, this is one that i would highly recommend. And this isn’t the only game in town, there are lots of websites who will help you in many ways do the same task, this is just the easiest one for what we want.
And Happy New Year.
Fireproof Movie
So we saw Fireproof last night and really liked it. We had a really good time and think that everyone should see this movie. It was created by the same church that made Facing the Giants. It is about a firefighter and his struggle to save his marriage. It is right now at the dollar movies, so you can get in for 2 dollars. Not bad for a really solid and positive movie.
Did You Know? on Vimeo
Did You Know? from Amybeth on Vimeo.
