On eBay right now, there is an iMac G5 that 10 people have bid up to $37,000. The same seller also has another one that 5 people have bid up to $27,000.
From now on, whenever I sell computer equipment, I’ll be sure to list it in both the:
Collectibles > Arcade, Jukeboxes & Pinball > Pinball > Paper, Manuals
section, and also the:
Dolls & Bears > Dolls > Barbie Contemporary (1973-Now) > Pets & Animals
To clarify, I did ask the seller:
What specifically about this iMac makes it a paper pinball manual or a contemporary barbie pet?
The seller has not yet responded. I’ll be sure to let you know when he does.
If you’ve walked by some of the Apple stores and seen the cool snowflakes running on their screens - then run home to turn that one on your Mac… you might have been mad to find out you didn’t have it!
Here’s where to get it: http://www.alittlebitofnothingleft.net/snowfall/ - Enjoy!
This is not meant as a comprehensive set of hardware recommendations for MythTV. There are many other sites you can easily google to find that kind of information. This is soley focused on building a MythTV box on-the-cheap using Black Friday sales.
Introduction to MythTV
MythTV is a free open-source DVR package. In addition to the basic features such as pausing and rewinging live TV, MythTV does things that other more expensive DVR systems either don’t to or don’t do well. Here are some things MythTV can do for you:
- Pause Live TV
- Rewind Live TV
- Picture-in-Picture*
- Watch a show while recording another*
- Automatically skip commercials
- Back up your recorded TV onto DVD’s
- Enable any computer on your network to watch live TV
- Enable any computer on your network to watch recorded TV
- Listen to music
- View slideshows of your digital photos
- Browse the web
- Play vintage NES and other games
- Rip DVD’s to your hard drive for safe backup and later viewing
- Re-encode your LiveTV recordings to go on your iPod
- Let you schedule your recordings from a web interface
- Record HDTV signals
- Tons of other stuff
* depends on your tuner. you need two tuners to do things that involve two channels, or an HD input source for HD stuff
Building a MythTV Box using Black Friday Sales
The basic MythTV setup I’m going to recommend is one where you have a backend and a frontend on the same machine. There are other ways of setting up a backend, but this way is an easy way to get started.
I know, the weather is starting to get colder and sandal days seem a thing of the past, but maybe if you start on a pair of these now they will be finished by spring.
Sock monkeys are one thing when they are creatively made from a pair of socks and represent a toy of some sort. When you start to create hats that look like a sock trying to be a monkey, that’s where I would draw the line.
Just in time for Halloween, here is a wig for any one who wants to go as a gum drop or a Lego with colored hair.
I’m holding out for knitted hub caps. Fuzzy ones.
The local media in Utah has taken it upon themselves to incessently harp about gas prices in the region. Here’s the story being told:
- Gas prices around the country are dropping precipitously
- Utah gas prices are dropping slowly
- Utahns are paying 20 to 30 cents more per gallon than the rest of the country
The conclusion the media feeds to us is that Utah residents are being gouged. An all-out witch hunt has been started, even going so far as to call for state legislators to investigate the reason for the high prices. KSL called for a one-day “boycott”. Heck - even the governor has decided to start a probe into the prices.
Look at the data for yourself
The sensationalist media seems to prey on the uninformed public being too busy to actually look at the data and think for themselves.
One Simple Explanation: Utah prices lag the national average by a few weeks
Note in the chart above, that in March the Rocky Mountain region was paying less than the national average. Hmm… You will also notice that if you shift the price curve over a few weeks - you will see that the Rocky Mountain Region pretty well mirrors the national average, only it lags behind by a few weeks. When prices are increasing, this favors Utah - because people we will be paying two-week old prices… but when prices drop sharply in the national average, we pay more.
Why is this so hard to understand? Sure I don’t know exactly what CAUSES the lag in prices, but it’s pretty simple to see on the graph - if you allow for a 5% to 10% error it’s a pretty decent approximation.
Also notice this: Prices in the Rocky Mountain region (that contains utah) are dropping just as sharply as the national prices. (Funny side note: I’ve heard local media taking credit for this drop in Utah gas prices, saying such things as: “Yes, I know gas prices are down to 2.49 a gallon, but can you imagine where they would be if we didn’t bring so much attention to it?” (My guess - probably even lower. It seems the only thing the attention has done is curb a slight amount of demand which has, in turn, stretched out the lag time of gas prices in Utah because they can’t move their supply as quickly, and therefore they are stuck trying to sell off the old gas that they bought at two-week-ago prices for a longer period of time)
It’s not just Utah
It’s conventient to go on a rant about how we are paying higher than the national average - but anyone who passed high school algebra should know that when you have an average in a population with any variance, you are going to have some values above the average and some values below it. That’s why it’s called an average.
In the above graph, the national average has little red triangles on it to make it easy to identify. From the above graph, you can see that a lot of regions are paying above the national average - and the West Coast (the top line) is worse of than the Rocky Mountain region.Note, some regions seem to overlap - which is what makes it look like there are more regions paying above the average than there are paying below it. I didn’t slice the country into regions, I just used ones that the government already had.
According to the logic of the media - only people living in the Lower Atlantic, Midwest, or Gulf Coast regions of the country are not being “gouged” by “evil oil barrons.”
In Conclusion
If you are a member of the Utah media and are tempted to continue going off on this topic - please be aware that eventually the quiet thinking members of society will get fed up and expose you for the idiots you are. This is a non-issue. Go find someone abusing puppies or something to talk about, and stop wasting my time telling me how I’m being “taken advantage of” and showing clips of random people at gas stations answering the question: “Which do you feel: violated, or gang-raped by the big oil company that is stealing food from your starving children’s mouths?”
What else would you really wear when you are grilling in the chilly fall months? A sweatshirt? That is so last year . . .
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