Surprise Con

On Friday night, after the trip to Fry's I wanted to make (another post), we were wondering what to do. So, aware that Google knows all, we googled "stuff to do in Austin" and discovered that something called ArmadilloCon was that weekend.

So yesterday we bought one-day badges and went.

It's hard not to compare it to Technicon. See, Origins, the only other con I go to regularly, is a whole different beast, world-famous, thousands of members, and focused on a whole different thing. ArmadilloCon reminded me of TCon back when it was awesome, only it was just a bit better in most ways.

The gaming was one tiny room stuffed way out of the way, that hardly had anyone in it. I was a little disappointed by that, but it was cool.

The dealers room was a little disappointing, consisting of fewer games and more books (and rare books).

But the guests were outstanding. Joe Haldeman, who signed my copy of Forever War and a board game, John Scalzi, who I didn't actually see (most of his stuff was Friday and Sunday), and Steven Brust, who still had the hat.

And, because Cassie is actually a writer and wanted to, for the first time I went to a few writing panels, and watched authors bounce off each other. It was a lot of fun watching Cassie geek on writing-ness for an evening.

All in all, it was awesome. Definitely going back next year.

Neurothingy

I have been wanting an Xbox.

I have no real desire to play Xbox games, except maybe MechAssault a little bit (but the DS version is fine). What I've been wanting to do is watch TV shows with Cassie.

See, everyone has this problem. You find a show you might like, but the DVDs cost like $75, which you don't want to spend without watching it, so you download the show, and then you have to watch it on the computer, or jump through hoops to watch it on the TV (burn a DVD, which means hours of transcoding, or hook the computer to the TV, which means cables and bad controls).

There are ways around this, like AppleTV, and an Xbox running Linux, but they have problems. AppleTV is burdened with DRM, and Linux only works on Xboxes made 2003 and earlier, so you have to go buy a used one and decode the serial number first, and it's a huge hassle.

There's also something called a Neuros OSD, hereafter referred to as a Neurothingy.

The Neurothingy's slogan is "record anything, store anywhere, play everywhere". It's got no DRM, and is fanatically against it, in fact (Cory Doctorow loves it). It's got no internal storage, but that's about the only problem with it. It reads SD, CF, and USB memory, has a network jack, plays like every format in the world (xvid and divx, naturally).

So I bought one ($180) from Fry's, along with another Apple network thingy to hook it to wireless, and proceeded to play with it some.

It's not without problems. I haven't upgraded the firmware yet (and likely won't, until I get back Tuesday or Wednesday), but with the out-of-the-box firmware it's slow. Fast-forwarding a large file is almost unusable; it doesn't respond fast enough to the remote when doing stuff to large files. Their site recommends against using a wireless network with it, like I have any choice. It's got both AV in and out, but they're non-standard plugs (RCA on one end, what looks like a 4-pin minijack on the other) which makes it a little hard to plug other things (like a Wii) into it. I'll need to actually set up my switchbox. Also, the total lack of memory is irritating. I bought a big SD card to go with it, which freezes it whenever I put it in (more testing of that will be needed; it's probably just unformatted).

But, out of the box, it does do exactly what I wanted it to, hassle-free. I put it on the network and I was immediately able to see the shared folder full of videos on the Big Mac. Click on one, and it starts playing. No sync issues, nothing. I see horror stories on the forums about it freezing while playing large MP3 playlists, or audio sync problems on big files, but I haven't had any issues at all (I haven't played MP3s yet, just videos. I have AirTunes for music).

Really the only problems I've had are the fast-forward and rewind being too slow, and there being no simple way to jump to a spot in a movie (I'd love 30-secs-fwd and 30-secs-back buttons, or a TiVo-like "jump forward to the next 15-minute block" thing). I'm hoping the new firmware will add these, or that they'll be simple to hack in (it's got free dev tools, and a few unbound buttons on the remote).

But for the main thing I wanted, which was to download BSG and Stargate and watch them on the TV downstairs, it's perfect.