Journal of a Sysadmin

Farscape

Quick note, we’ve watched ALL of Farscape now. Season 1 through Season 4 and now Peace Keeper Wars too. The internet is great for TV shows isn’t it?

What I want to do is build a small tower, decent TV out and cable in video card, and a big drive or two for lots of video. Basically, build a home-made Tivo.

Season 7, so that’s that

What are we going to do now jhb?

Buffy Season 6

So, finished Buffy season 6 last night and now we’re on to season 7. I might note that it does get much darker in season 5 and it looks like it’s not going to recover at all… I like my sci-fi-fantasy-comedy-tongue-in-cheek-tv-series to stay that way, turning it into a dark-vampirish-version-of-xfiles show doesn’t do the same thing for me. Although, I do still like the series and we’ll watch season 7 (and the bits of 1 we didn’t watch). In total less then 30 episodes left!

Season 5

Finished season 5, and we’re officially over the 1/2 way point. Only question I have is, wtf will they do with season 6? Today will tell.

Buffy-A-Thon

What’s the best way to start a month long vacation?

Watching some show, now on dvd, that you’ve never seen before of course. So time is spent walking to the vid store, selecting the episodes (in order of course) and downloading those that are no easily findable then the whole task culminates in a week long fest of lying about on the couch and laughing at actresses and actors on the TV. Yes, this years first task is to watch all the episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, from seasons 1 through 7.

At this point we’ve watched all of season 2 and 3, part of season 4 (should finish that one tomorrow night) and part of season 1 (Sunday night maybe?). The video store only has seasons 1 through 4 so we’re downloading 5-7 instead of renting those. The way we see it, 22 episodes in seasons 2 to 7, and 12 in season 1 is a total of 144 episodes at about 45 minutes each is a total of 108 hours of Buffy… At 6 hours average per day it will take us about 18 days total to complete it. Since we’ve already watched 2, 3, and 1/2 of 4 (total of 6.9 days worth) we are someplace around 11 or 12 days left until we finish the entire set. I’ve not watched this much TV since I was a teen at my friends place with his parents satelite dish!

Of course, it’s no fun watching this kind of thing on the computer (since we are downloading some of it) so I rigged the GeForce FX5200 card in rio to have it’s video out go to the VCR and of course sound as well. Works really well, when I’m in normal video mode (1024×768) it doesn’t display to the tv, but if I change to 800×600 or 640×480 it does. Then, I use mplayer in full screen mode and viola, instant digital video to TV. I’ll just have to watch and try and find a video capture card now too, that would be cool, as we’d basically have a digital record/playback system…

Anyway, too much Buffy to watch right now, so that’ll have to wait.