Identifying a loss ?

Off late, I have come to the sad realization that I dont have much free-time anymore.

Dont get me wrong, I do relax, watch the occasional movie and sleep just fine ... but the sort of sustained hacking I could do earlier, the really long hours spent in playing some game, following up movies from a director/actor, or even chipping away at the huge pile of movies I own - that is "lost".

Cant even remember when was the last time I finished a solo game, or a book - did a part time project ... been almost 15 months since I even touched my chess program !

Things need to change, and for the better ... hopefully I will be able to better manage time soon !

Vuze rocks !!

As some of you might know, I have been trying to get audio/video from my comp onto my tv - except I dont want to clutter the house with wires.


I checked out wireless HDMI, and even contemplated writing something over wifi to do streaming ... but gave up considering the cost and other aspects of it (not to mention, a naive impl [which is what I can afford to do] will require quite a bit of bandwidth !)


Next logical option was to try to use my XBox 360 as an extender and get to stream through that ... except for some brain dead asinine reason Microsoft restricts what can be played - DRM worries I am told, bunch of MPAA lapdogs ! Bottomline, I could not use the Media Center which comes with Vista for this purpose. I did not find any viable option in Linux to do the same.


Next up, I tried to use one of those transcoders available online, fiddled around with a bunch of them ... and finally gave up after a few sleepless nights.


And there I was, pretty dejected about my efforts - all the reconfig for nothing ... and then I notice the innocous button 'devices' in Vuze (formerly Azureus) yesterday night. Configured it, and voila, it works beautifully !!
Considering all the effort I had gone through until that moment, it was almost anti-climatic how easy it was to get things to work ! It supports a transcoder (as a plugin) which does on-demand conversion.
The few videos I tried - jitter free sound, and crystal clear video !
Check this link out for more info - in my opinion, it is a seriously cool piece of effort ... Give it a whirl people :-)