Also since don’t have the ftp server enabled on my server, this would make adding/upgrading plugins a lot easier.

I am leaning towards WordPress.com, as it is an easy export of my blog into that server.  (I have already done this.)  I would just need to pay $10 to have my domain pointed to their servers.

Update:  I am going to stick with running WordPress on my own server.  There are several things that are missing from WordPress.com:

1. You can’t have a custom permalink format
2. You can’t upload themes or plugin (Adsense and Bad Behavior plugins are not available)
3. If I don’t want their ads, I need to pay an extra $30 a year.

Over the Air Content

HDHomeRun

We are using a HDHomeRun Dual for our ATSC source.  The HDHomeRun allows me to keep the antenna in the attic, and the PC downstairs, without having to run a antenna drop down the several floors.  It will also be possible for us to add an additonal HDHomeRun if we want to add extra tuners.  The tuners on the HDHomeRun can also be used on other computers in the house, though I am not currently using that feature.

My recommendation for anyone using an HDHomeRun is to use Gigabit Ethernet for the drop between the main network switch and the Media Center PC.  When recording two 19Mbs ATSC streams, you will want to leave enough network bandwidth, so if anything is happening on you network, the video quality is not affected.  For example, on our Media Center I want to make sure that I can record two shows, while the Media Center is backed up, movie that is stored on the Windows Home Server is being watched one the Media Center, and some recorded content from the Media Center is being watched on one of the Media Center Extenders.

I was seeing some degradation of video quality when using 100 Mb Ethernet, but haven’t had a problem since upgrading to Gigabit Ethernet.  I haven’t upgrade my whole network to Gigabit, but that isn’t a problem as most of the other devices can barely saturate a 100Mbs drop.

Non-Over the Air content

With the ATSC tuners, I was able to most of the OTA content, but obviously it doesn’t include the content that is only available on cable channels.  I am using a combination of sources to get this content.

Built-in to Windows Media Center

Windows Meda Center Internet TV

Window Media Center in Windows 7 offers a good selection of content of internet TV.  This content includes CBS content, including both current shows as well as classic ones (Original Star Trek).  The Windows Media Center content also includes news content from MSNBC and podcasts from Zune.

Netflix

Netflix streaming is also built-in to Windows Media Center.  We use this for shows for our kids, as well as movies.  The quality of this content is very good.  The selection is good, especially if you don’t want the most recent shows.

Not built-in to Windows Media Center

PlayOn

PlayOn is a UPnP Digital Media Server that will make internet video content available to any UPnP Media Player. PlayOn has some built-in plugins, as well supports third party plugins.  Built-in to PlayOn is support for Hulu, Amazon on Demand, Netflix, YouTube and others.

Some third party plugins that I have installed adds support for SyFy, South Park Studios, and SpikeTV.  The third party plugins can be found on this page.

tubeCore

By default, Windows Media Center doesn’t support displaying content from a UPnP media server.  tubeCore is an add-on for Windows Media Center that adds this functionality.  This plugin is the best looking plugin that does this,and it works well with PlayOn.  The best feature of tubeCore is that it works with Media Center Extenders, so I can watch this content on any of the TVs in the house.

Xbox

Where our house is located, and how the antenna is positioned, we don’t have a strong signal for our local ABC channel.  This content is available on Hulu, but for some shows the lack of HD quality video signal bothers me.  For those shows, I can purchase the high quality video on the Xbox 360.  It is pretty infrequent that I actually do this, but it is nice to know that the option is available.

Summary

With this setup we are able to watch the content that we want to, without having to pay Comcast their rates for cable, plus all of the extra costs that they tack on

• extra charge for every CableCard/tuner.  (When you have multiple CableCards, Comcast not only charges you for each card, but also charges you for an jack, for evert tuner past the first one, even if the two cable card are connected to the same jack in the wall
• charge for HD content (Even if you only want to have access to the over-the-air HD channels, you have to pay to enable HD)

Since it appears that Microsoft will continue to support Windows Media Center, and there is a large developer comminity working on enhancing Windows Media Center, I am sure that when new content becomes available, it will be fairly easy to access it from Windows Media Center.

While setting up and listening to the Slacker stations, I had to mark songs that I liked and didn’t like.  This is the same thing that have done on my Pandora and Last.fm stations.  Unfortunately, Pandora and Last.fm do not let you export your ratings.

The same problem also exists for video.  For example, Netflix has a list of ratings that a user has given to DVDs, and Flixster has ratings that users have given to movies.

This got me thinking that there could be a be a better solution for the user.  A user should be able to delegate a “preference service” to maintain their ratings.  When a user signs into a service that would like access to a user’s ratings, like Pandora or Netflix, they are prompted to grant permission for the new service to access the user’s ratings.  If the user agrees, the user’s ratings can be imported into the service.  The user could also grant the new service the ability to update their ratings, so for example if a user gives a rating to a movie in Netflix, it could update the users rating in the rating store.

Since we would want this connection to be easy to setup, the user shouldn’t have to manually setup this linking.  One way to solve this is to extend the frederated login services to contain the uri for the user’s rating store.  For example, this could be easily added to the OpenID record for the user returned when the user authenticates.

We would have have to agree on the name space for the rateable items.  I propose using Freebase ids as the unique identifiers.  Then services that use the ratings can map these ids to its own name space.

This idea would allow the user to quickly train new services with their ratings, as well as the ability to export their data.

I am trying CloudBerry Backup for Windows Home Server.  This is very similar to HP’s online backup add-in and the old JungleDisk Windows Home server.  CloudBerry lets you pick any share or a connected drive to backup.  Also you can set a time range when backups can happen.

I did have a problem after setting this up.  I has some paths on some of the shares that were too long for Windows (These were copied from my linux computer).  When CloudBerry encountered this error, it listed the error in the error email that was sent.

I will probably pay for CloudBerry Backup once the trial is over

I mentioned before several solutions on getting access to Hulu content in Media Center.  vmcPlayIt allowed you to play content from a PlayOn media server, but the UI didn’t look good at all.  Then there are solutions that let you launch Hulu Desktop, like HuluDesktopWMC and Hulu Desktop Integration, but those have problem when switching back and forth between the applications.

tubeCore appears to be the best solution.  It is similar to vmcPlayIt, where it connects to a DNLA server like PlayOn, but the UI is a lot better.  The other good thing about tubeCore is that it is compatible with Media Center Extenders

I installed it in our attic, where our networking panel is, and the installation was very easy.  All I had to do was connect the antenna cables and connect the tuner to the network.  When I installed the software on one of my computers, I was able to scan for channels and make sure that the antenna was pointed in the right direction.

I was then able to install the tuner software on our Windows 7 Media Center.  The tuners were instantly recognized, and the Microsoft’s program guide had all of the data for those channels.  The quality of video is very good.  I can tell that the video is not as compressed as it is through Comcast.

There is one thing that I still want to do to make this setup better.  I will be upgrading the Ethernet drop from the network closet to the media center to Gigabit Ethernet.  I want to make sure that there is enough bandwidth to handle recording two HD streams, while playing a video from our Home Server, while potentially a backup is happening.

I will be cancelling my cable TV service soon.

Here is a list of the third party Android applicaitons that I have installed:

• Amazon
• Backgrounds
• Bank of America
• Barcode Scanner
• CNET Scan & Shop
• Evernote
• Jewels
• Last.fm
• LastPass
• Listen
• Movies
• OneTouch Timer Free
• Pandora
• PhoneFlicks
• Remember The Milk
• Seesmic
• Shazam
• SqueezeControl
• SqueezeDroid
• TripIt
• TuneWiki
• Ultimate Stopwatch
• WordPress
• Yelp

I took this opportunity to upgrade to a 802.11n base station, so I bought the D-Link DAP-2553.  This was one of the few dual-band, non-router, base stations.  Once I set it up,  things have been working a lot better than they were with the Apple base stations.

Setting it up was a pain, though.  The manual suggested that all I had to do was connect it to my network, and I would be able to log into the web interface.  It also suggested that I could connect it directly to a computer to do the same thing.  This wasn’t as easy as they claim.  By default the base station is configured to have the ip address 192.168.0.50.  Since out LAN uses a different subnet, just connecting it to the network doesn’t make it accessible to the other computers on the network.  Also, connecting it directly to a computer, without doing anything else, doesn’t work as the base station doesn’t have a DHCP server, so the computer ends up with a self-assigned address.

What worked was to directly connect it to a computer, then I gave the computer a static ip address of 192.168.0.49, with mask of 255.255.255.0.  This allowed me to connect to the router, and configured it to get it’s address over DHCP.  Once I did that, I was able to connect it directly to my network.

This time I was having a hard time creating a volume large enough to back up all of my data.  The disc image creation would fail and state that there wasn’t enough space on the server, even though that there was plenty.

In this post I mentioned that I was trying to uninstall Avast! antivirus and see what would happen.  It looks like Avast! was preventing me from creating a disc image large enough.  I believe that the scan was causing the reads to time out on the Mac, so the process just stopped.

This post has a some steps that worked for me to uninstall Avast! antivirus.  It looks like the disk image creation is also working better without Avast!, so I probably will not reinstall it.