Can't tell you more than I told you already
I let Jeb borrow my Archos indefinitely. It is a great device, with a 20 GB hard drive that will play MP3’s but also act as an external hard drive (at least to Windows machines).
You can download the drivers at:
http://www.archos.com/download/drivers.html?country=us
It is a Archos Jukebox, not a recorder. In particular it is the Archos Jukebox Studio 20.
This is a response to a person on AMUG who was thinking about buying a PVR and asked for advice . . .
I bought a Dish PVR 500 (or 501?) a couple of years ago. It’s the greatest thing since color. It records about 1 hour per gigabyte. Mine has a 40 GB drive in it and that’s really plenty. I’ve got stuff on there I’ve saved for months (if you don’t protect a show, then the oldest shows will automatically be deleted to make room for new shows when the hard drive gets full) and not watched that I could get rid of if I needed the space. Now they have much bigger hard drives so I don’t see that as being a problem.
I cancelled my Netflix membership after 4 months (see original post. My plan wasn’t to stay subscribed to it for long, just long enough to get caught up on watching a lot of movies. I was happy with the service. It rarely took more than one work day for movies to make it from me to them or vice versa. So if you were really diligent you could watch a movie just about every day.
Really the limiting factor is how much time you have to watch movies and how many movies do you really want to see? If you start picking marginal movies then you will procrastinate watching them. Or if you have a busy life you won’t be able to watch them.
Anyway, I was able to watch 13 movies in August, 12 in September, 11 in October, and 7 in November. For $20 a month, plus tax, that comes out to about $2 per rental. I think I only returned one movie that I decided I just wasn’t going to watch, plus a couple that I didn’t watch all the way through.
For the newest hottest movies, you may have to wait a couple of weeks to see them. One in particular, The Italian Job, had a “long wait” on it for several weeks. But most of what I was looking for were movies that had been out for a while and they were available as soon as they worked their way to the top of my queue.
It’s a neat concept and it works great for a few months.
Follow-up: Two years later I tried Netflix again
This was in response to one of Jeb’s postings but I don’t know how to link to that. He said my comment was too long and should be its own blog entry.
There are already Palm/cell phones. Since Palms support mp3’s then why not add one of those tiny hard drives and GPS? Maybe the Palm is the device. And if it is, the Tungsten 3 is awfully nice . . .
I think maybe Jeb told me about the whole concept of Where’s George. Where’s George is a web site where you can register the serial number and year of dollar bills you have. Then you write “www.wheresgeorge.com” on the bill and hope someone knows what to do it with it when they come across one.
Well, I got one in change yesterday at Waffle House (Susan and I like to go to a special restaurant on Friday nights) and told Susan about it. So we came home and logged on. We were the first person to report back on this dollar. It had come from Florida a couple of months earlier.
Neat concept. Keep your eye out. It’s like doing GPS Travel Bugs but you don’t have to leave the house!