Josh Eastburn.com

I have been considering getting an HDTV for about 2 years now. We had a shift in priorities a little over a year ago, with the goal of eliminating all debt except for our mortgage, so upgrading my TV was put on hold. As of last week, we are now debt free except for our house. I felt that deserved a bit of a reward, so it’s time to do some TV shopping.

Aside from knowing where to look for deals online, the biggest factor in getting a great price seems to be patience. Since I knew I would be purchasing a TV early this year, I started looking about 3 months ago. Prices have gone up and down, but I got a good feel for what is a good price and what isn’t. The easiest way of doing this is to find a product on Amazon.com, add it to your cart (or “save for later”), and check your cart every now and then. If a price has increased or decreased, you will be notified at the top of the cart page.

As for knowing where to shop, I used to rely on Froogle or PriceGrabber. However, just this week, I discovered a site that found a price that was $100 lower than any price I had seen for this TV: Bountii.com. Bountii only lists prices from reputable sellers and it lets you track price changes by RSS or email. But the real genius of the site is that it pays people to find the best deal. You can go to the “price hunt” page and if you find a better deal, they will pay you a small reward, or I suppose I should say “bounty” (between $4 and $8). While I haven’t been able to find any prices that beat theirs, it definitely gives people with time on their hands incentive to find the best deal which can be shared with others.

In the end, I got my Sharp Aquos TV from Dell and a 6′ 24AWG HDMI cable for less than $10 from Monoprice. In the coming weeks, I’ll be using Bountii to get the best deal on a Tivo HD.

While at my parents’ house over the holidays, I found my journal from elementary school. It is fun to read my perspective on life from so many years ago.

This got me thinking about starting the habit of writing a daily (or at least semi-daily) journal again. Since I can type much faster than I can write longhand, I looked around for a program that would do this for me. In the end, I decided to go with something I already use every day: Gmail.

Gmail allows me to search and label every entry for easy access in the future. This also means that your personal musings are stored on Google’s servers, but that is up to you to decide if you are comfortable with it.

To set this up, I used Gmail plus-addressing, which lets you create unlimited personal email addresses by adding a plus sign (+) and text after your email username. Here is how I set it up in my Gmail account:

1. Create a new label called “Journal” (or whatever you’d like to call it)
2. Create a new Contact using a plus-address. I named the new contact “Journal” and set the email as username+journal@gmail.com.
3. Create a new filter. When To = username+journal@gmail.com then Archive it, Mark as read, and apply the label “Journal”

Now you’re ready to start journaling. Just compose a new message, set the “To” address to the “Journal” contact you created and type away. When you click “Send” it will not show up as new email but it will be listed under your “Journal” label. For the subject line, I’ve been using the journal entry date, but other suggestions are welcome (I’ve also added short descriptions in the subject like “Europe Trip” after the journal date).

Another great thing about Gmail labels is you can apply multiple labels to each journal entry. So if you are writing a vacation journal entry, you can apply another label, like “Travel,” and you can now easily search for just vacation journal entries by viewing those two tags.

The only thing left to do is to make journaling a habit.

I suppose I was asking for trouble when I mentioned that I would never trade in my DirecTV TiVo for the DirecTV Plus DVR. Super Bowl XLI, 3rd quarter, the picture suddenly freezes. I didn’t press the pause button and nothing on the remote seems to work. This had happened a handful of times over the last few weeks, but a reboot would always solve the problem. Not this time. After I accepted the fact that my TiVo was not coming back, I placed a call with DirecTV. I explained the situation to the rep who kindly offered to ship out their DirecTV Plus DVR in exchange for a new 2-year commitment. I said, “no thank you, your DVR is awful.” The rep asked, “have you ever USED our DVR?” I answered, “yes, have you ever USED TiVo??” He told me that he had, but I think he was lying.
As I saw it, I was left with 3 options:

1. Give in and take the DirecTV DVR (I refused this as a matter of principle)
2. Buy another DirecTV TiVo at Weaknees or eBay (over $150 to get what I have now)
3. Give up DirecTV entirely and get a standalone TiVo

After much contemplation, I went with a refurbished standalone TiVo for $50 and $13/month TiVo service. Paired with the basic, basic cable package from Comcast, I would be paying $40 less each month than I was with DirecTV. Sure, I’ll miss the excellent picture quality and the huge storage upgrade I had with my DirecTV TiVo, but now I’ll finally get to try some of the features that are only available on standalone TiVos, such as the Home Media Option and hopefully in the near future, Amazon Unbox on TiVo.

Netflix is gradually rolling out its new streaming movie service. Subscribers get 1 hour of streaming movies for every $1 in their subscription price. Those with the $17.99 plan will get 18 hours every month for no additional charge. The selection is a bit limited now and you can only watch movies on your computer (XP with Internet Explorer), but it is a nice extra feature that may or may not keep people from defecting to Blockbuster’s Total Access.

If you do not see a link on your account page, it seems like just viewing this link while signed in will activate the service on your account:
http://www.netflix.com/WatchNow

For the past 3 years, I have been a very happy DirecTV+TiVo customer. Before DirecTV and TiVo severed ties a year ago, you could get one of these satellite receivers for $50 or less after rebate. With a $120 hard drive upgrade from Weaknees, you’d have enough space to store almost 150 hours of programming. Now that DirecTV no longer subsidizes TiVo receivers, it will cost you around $300 for a TiVo DVR. At that price, the free 100-hour DirecTV DVR seems like a good option.

I had always heard disappointing reviews for both Comcast’s and DirecTV’s non-TiVo DVRs. After convincing my parents on the merits of a (free) DVR, I had the opportunity to try one out myself.

It should come as no surprise that it is quite inferior to TiVo. As I was using it, I kept saying to myself, “have the designers of this system ever USED a TiVo?” However, there are a few welcome features provided with the DirecTV DVR:

• A bar graph shows you what percentage of disk space you are using
• 100 hours of storage comes standard and like the DirecTV TiVo, it has dual tuners, s-video output and optical audio output
• Unwatched programs are marked as “new”

When using the DVR, the negative aspects stuck out more clearly:

• While in menus, the top half of the screen shows live TV or the currently-playing program–a waste of space.
• The remote: The “left” navigation button takes you back, sometimes. Other times you need to use the “back” button or the “exit” button. Ambiguous, multi-function color buttons.
• Non-intuitive interface: it took quite some time to figure out how to set up a “Series Link” (Season Pass). Tasks that should be simple take several steps to accomplish.
• Bugs abound: during the one week I used the system, it locked up twice and when trying to record a program, it simply told me that “the prioritizer is full.” Huh?

Any DVR is better than no DVR, but if you’ve ever owned, or used, a TiVo, it will be an exercise in frustration. So I will be sticking with my DirecTV TiVo until the Series3 drops below $800. Read a full comparison of the two systems.

Today TiVo unveiled the long-awaited Series3 DVR. It has most of the features that were promised: record 2 shows at once, HD support, CableCard slots, and an upgraded remote. Sadly, several features are “disabled” for now–the external hard drive port and TiVoToGo–most likely at the request of the Cable Labs group which hands out CableCard certifications. As much as I’d love to swap out my DirecTV TiVo for the Series3, I’m not ready to spend $799 plus subscription costs. Read the full review here.

For a long time I have been in search of the perfect backup program.  Necessary features include: remote backup via FTP, compression, and encryption.  Cobian Backup is the best free backup program I’ve seen.  It includes all the important features and it lets you customize just about everything. Link

FutureLab has a free service that lets you remove people and other moving objects from your photos. It compares multiple pictures and leaves you with empty cityscapes and tourist-free vacation photos. Link

Listen to Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) explain how the Internet works during his speech against Net Neutrality.

The Internet is a series of tubes. And if you don’t understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and its going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.

It is a bit disturbing that these are the people writing legislation for the Internet.

I have recently come across an impressive new web site called Farecast which goes beyond what other travel sites offer. While Orbitz and Expedia will allow you to find the best price for a flight on any given day, they do not show you what that flight cost yesterday or a week ago. Farecast will show price history for your flight and gives advice on whether to buy the flight now, or wait for prices to drop. It is still in a private beta and currently only lets you search trips from Boston or Seattle, but I am looking forward to using the full service. Contact me if you want an invite to try it out. Link

Farecast’s price history chart: