All Things Patrick - Working Hard to be Lazy!

For those that aren't familiar with Pirate Bay, it provides links to lots and lots of torrents, both legal and illegal... Well, at least illegal in certain places in the world. Where Pirate Bay exists Copyright Law does not apply to software and is therefore operating legally according to it's local laws.

Pirate Bay has recently been dealing with several lawyers (yet again). More details can be found in the blog post Pirate Bay IP Addresses Assigned to Prosecution Lawyers.

Some people just have way too much time on their hands...

Somebody posted a link in IRC to this very long screenshot of the Bohemian Rhapsody with each user posting a single line... Geeze, the things that take talent and social engineering these days...

Granted this has been out for a couple weeks now (literally), but I figured it was time to post my support for it. Normally I may watch fan made stuff, but a lot of it I really don't find all that exciting. However, this is an exception. I've not told much of anyone about any of the fan made stuff I've seen since I came across Maboroshi Studios' stuff back in 2000 or 2001 - 4 or 5 different videos, each matched clips from a single anime to some music (e.g. Record of Loddoss War to John Williams: Duel of the Fates, Escaflowne to Megadeth: Sweating Bullets, Nausicca of the Valley of Wind to Legend: Loved by the Sun).

WormyTV posted a Thundercats: Sword of Omens trailer on YouTube that is absolutely amazing. Even if you absolutely hated Thundercats growing up you should get a kick out of this video. It has clips from other movies and tv series that have been photoshopped to look like Thundercats... Here's a list:

I've been talking about putting together a set of MythTV boxes for quite a while. I've been looking at hardware for the last couple of years and last summer I had stumbled across an mini-ITX board that I wanted to test, but I had need a file server, my job ended, and then I got overly busy with a new job. This last christmas I ended up buying parts for a new desktop (the timing just ended up being right) and the project got delayed again.

A friend of mine has kept nagging me about why would I want to build my own and possibly spend a lot of money on this crap if I could just spend money over time to rent a TiVo or whatever cable company's DVR. When I was down in Tulsa this last year I did just that - I rented a dvr from Cox cable and other than the hard drive being to small (and not being able to upgrade), being limited to 2 channels total, and not being able to archive something for later viewing... it worked great! Well, at least until I was getting ready to move out... I had been keeping up with a particular series and hadn't had time to watch a couple episodes and as I was heading up to visit my parents I figured I'd drag it along and show my parents the greatness of what a dvr does. I plugged it into the TV and got nothing initially. I then figured I'd plug it into their cable and see if that might help and if I might be able to record something from their cable provider... How niave. Plugging it into their cable provider completely reset the dvr (deleting everything I had recorded and had been hoping to watch). Ok, my stuff is gone, but surely I can at least record stuff for them - even on the non digital channels that don't require a set top box? Nope, nothing... just sat there trying to configure itself and boot up. Of course, when I got back to Tulsa it came right up, reconfigured itself, and was ready to go - I think it even remembered what TV shows I was recording. Yay for proprietary crap.