A souflade of Vegetables

Just another picture of food, what we like to call a "souflade" (pr. soof-lard) of vegetables, cooked alongside the turkey in the oven on Christmas day, a portion of which will be used for our boxing day fry-up and subsequent repeats over the next day or so.

Make Fire, drink, eat..

Goodbye Cable

The blog is a journal about where we are, sure we still have nature stuff (when the weather permits) but just today I will add a technical bit about our media delivery system.

Netflix (Canada) via any of the three boxes shown, left to right, dual Atom based mini-itx PC (eight inches square) running at 2.13GHz with HDMI out, next, Roku 2 XD streaming box and last, but certainly not least, the 3rd Generation Apple TV.

Attached to the PC is a Hauppauge 850 Hybrid ATSC/NTSC stick, for PVR capability and OTA through the Atom if we want it. The Atom is running XBMC as it's primary media centre. That little dongle at the base of the PC is a unifying remote for a wireless Logitech K400r with full size keyboard and trackpad.

Of course, our TV has an ATSC/QAM tuner, so we're grabbing any OTA with that.

More TV than we will ever need in this lifetime, goodbye cable....

Merry Christmas via Skype

Another great first today, a Skype session with mum and dad, probably about forty-five minutes without any technical problems, discussion about all sorts, an appearance from the new cat and ramblings about family, food and cheese.

We drank a sherry or two of course (at this end) and they were drinking what looked like vodka at their end, although they insisted it was water.

Oh no...Rod Stewart

This year we have started a new tradition, Cable TV and Satellite TV have been discarded and we have "cut the cord" on the big companies. Six months ago we thought Satellite would be the answer, but as we discovered, if you're angry with one massive corporation, the next corporation is really not going to be any better. So, we now receive about four useful channels OTA (over the air, digital HD) and use Netflix, Apple TV, Roku and a PC streaming box to fill in the rest.

Today though, the morning Christmas offering from PBS was "Merry Christmas Baby" and by golly, we thought we had a lot of cheese in the house until this delivery...

Was that a year since the last bacon buttie?

Here we are again, Christmas in the workhouse, well, no work as usual except the toil and trouble of planting the turkey in the oven after eating the obligatory Canadian back bacon sandwich and drinking a few cups of excellent Christmas coffee.