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.
Tidbits this week and last week had gift ideas for iPod owners.
http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=07480
Since I don’t know any iPod owners except for me, I bought myself a gift (in ultra-violet):
http://www.radtech.us/podsleevz.html
The Tidbits guy likes it because (among other things) it takes some of the sensitivity away from the buttons.
One other accessory that is pretty neat is podlet that you connect to the top of the iPod that receives signals from a remote control. So that way you can hook up the iPod to your stereo and then skip forward, back, pause, control the volume, etc. with a remote. This guy suggests connecting the iPod to . . . . a PAL for a dynamite portable audio system. And he has a picture of it (the trouble, as he points out, is that while you can control the iPod from across the room, you can’t actually see anything on the display from across the room):
http://www.danfrakes.com/writing/images/TidBITS/iPodTivoliNavPod.jpg
It’s as if there is complete closure in the world. No doubt he has some way of turning the iPod into an Apache server so he can host Movable Type web logs too while listening to Lyle Lovett and Randy Newman.
I have a database of all my CD’s in Access. I’ve included lyrics and some reviews but one thing I always wanted to do was be able to play a selected song at the click of a button. Once I started ripping all my CD’s this became possible even though it wouldn’t be practical to store all the files in the database itself.
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
