This is some good stuff. I downloaded the DirecTV2PC beta recently and have been using it to watch recorded shows in other rooms of the house. Read on for a full review with screen shots. Read the rest of this entry »

I have a few small topics that I’d like to mention that aren’t big enough for their own post yet.

The presidential debate and DirecTV

Am I the only one who has glitches throughout the broadcast? Pieces of their words are missing as the system seems to lose the stream and has to rebuild it. Then near the end one such glitch ended up with the audio and video way out of sync. The HD picture is great, but its hard to believe it costs so much for such lousy total experience. Wait, am I talking about the candidates or the DirecTV service?

MagicJack

I’ve been curious about this for a long time. How can they provide a product at such a low initial cost with no monthly fee? Well I bought one to find out since I can’t find a review of one that doesn’t sound like a paid advertisement or a baseless bash. I’ll be keeping you up to date on how that is going. My initial reactions are that the voice quality is great, and it seems like they are subsidizing the calling with advertising on the screen. Also, about all the little “rush processing” and “last chance for savings” that they try to pressure you into during the purchase process? Ignore them. You have the same opportunities after you receive it, and I chose standard shipping and got it in just a couple days.

Entrecard

I’ve commented around a few places about the ups and downs of the service. I am still happy with it, but there is a serious problem with the ranking system. Still. Any time a blog with half a dozen total posts that hasn’t been updated in a month and a half is ranked ahead of people who are obviously trying, that is a problem. I’ve figured out the system myself and am ranking between position 4-6 in the Technology section, but there are a lot of people way down the list with high quality blogs.

Blogging

I saw a website of a guy who absolutely hates blogging and is quite vocal (wordy) about it. I found it ironic that while his tirade wasn’t in a blog format, it sounded just like the kind of spewing opinion that he finds offensive about blogs. There are a lot of bloggers out there trying to make a quick buck at the expense of quality, but it is so obvious when people do sponsored posts that I have no problem ignoring it and moving on to real opinion that is interesting and thought provoking. On the flip side, even his opinion was interesting enough for me to mention it here. The best thing about the Internet is that you don’t have to visit every page.

It seems that almost all the DirecTV HD DVR boxes locked up sometime last night. The only semi-official information I can find on the subject is from the Satelliteguys forum. I went through DirecTV’s site and was not able to find any official information although their Tech forums have some complaining on them.

DirecTV says that the lockups were not related to an upgrade, but rather some kind of broadcast anomaly. An update was pushed out today which may result in another device reboot.

So far I only had to unplug and plug mine back in (the reset button did nothing). It has not rebooted a second time. My wife missed Dr. Phil today.