it…out

Lindsey asked me if I had finished Fable. Usually when you defeat the main bad guy in a game, and they show the credits for said game, it means that you have in fact completed it. Not so with Fable. Or maybe it is. I really don’t know, but they let you keep on playing and do stuff. So maybe the game spends its first half having the main Fable guy become a hero, and then once you defeat the big bad guy the whole rest of the game turns into the fracking Sims. As far as I can tell, now that the Kingdom has been saved, Mr Fable Man gets to focus his time on:
1) Making money
2) Buying Property, fixing it up and renting it out
3) Gambling
4) Flirting with women in every town, and sometimes ‘missing’ and flirting with men too
5) Kicking chickens

It’s sort of like after you beat Questron, and they give you Geraldtown and just let you keep playing with no real goal. This is not as cool as it sounds as at this point in the game, Mangar has burned Geraldtown to the ground.

So I got tired of all that and installed MythTV on my Linux box downstairs. Installing this with Ubuntu was easy — apt basically held my hand and then did it all for me. I hooked the coax out of our dish 322 into the TV capture card and fired up mythtv and configured it. It worked like a charm. Oh my friends, this software is incredible. I can now turn any PC into a unfettered-by-DRM-annoyances DVR. It’s like a DVR that doesn’t suck, and that’s because it’s not only like that, it is that.

Except mine because all I have is a 5 year old Duron, and it stutters like Rain Man. So getting this software to work as an actual solution would require some bigger beef in the computer, and some way of getting the computer to talk to the dish so that mythtv can change channels, etc. I guess a lot of people just use lirc and an IR dongle, but this looks cool too. It looks like a hardware MPEG2 encoder like this one or this one is also a popular way of taking the heat off of the CPU.

It was amaizing that mythtv “just worked.” With some better hardware, I could timeshift all my programming into the future…of the past!