Wow. I lucked out, looks like. I was actually impressed with my Amazon customer service. (Yes, I caved my one-click boycott from a decade ago, their prices were $40 under their competitor. Forty bucks!) They sent via USPS to my street address, and I'm so rural that I don't get postal service, so I had to call them and tell them their package wasn't going to show up, and I didn't want to wait the four weeks the instructions said to, and what could I do? They said no problem, placed a free replacement order with gratis overnight shipping. Part arrived two days ago, and the rest today. It was supposed to come yesterday but, snow!

Anyway, Christmas is saved and the SO will be very happy with his themed present when he gets to open them tomorrow.

Bummer about the breakdown for everyone else last minute shopping.

It occurs that if I set up a second Google Voice account at some point, one that say, is in the Minneapolis Metro area, I can have it so I can call home for free from anywhere in the MPLS-STP metro area.

I could also set up a Google Voice local phone number for my mom, so she or my friend Kerdunge could call it and get forwarded to my home phone.

This could get interesting.

Why, we could set up a Buffistas local calling network.

I use my Vonage number that way. There wasn't one available in my area when I was setting up my company number. So I made it an Indianapolis number so our family could call us without it being long-distance. But now everyone calls from their cel phones, so it hardly matters. But it's still handy sometimes.

Tommyrot, look into DLNA server/client setups. Your MacBook can play videos and stream them to a client (there are many client options, including the ps3 and bd390 previously discussed). The computer does all the decoding. You can also use that combined with a program called PlayOn to stream hulu and netflix to such a client, though it's annoying to have to have the computer running for that, at least to me.

A PS3 is good value because the new PlayTV device lets it work as a HDD recorder. I'll be getting one soon, and upgrading the HDD from whatever it is at the moment, to at least a 500GB.

I'm still holding out for something I know will support region-free safely.

ita ... I'm not sure if this is valid for the US but Kogan [link] have a new blu-ray player out that plays all regions of DVDs and Blu-ray discs.

I don't argue that the PS3 is a good value if you are going to use the other things that it is capable of doing, but as a standalone device with the primary duty of playing Blu-Ray discs it is no longer king of the hill.

Thanks for the suggestion, jimi. I'm not sure about the electrics of the whole thing, though.

I thought pyTiVo was supposed be easy! I just compiled ffmpeg on my box and am running the pyTiVo software--the downloaded files show up on TiVo but won't play. I don't even know where to start troubleshooting.

Are you using pyTivoX? I don't remember having to compile ffmpeg or anything else to get it to run.

is there anything like this TiVo stuff for U-verse?

Are you using pyTivoX?

No, just pyTivo. For some reason the web config tool doesn't save changes to the configuration file, so it wasn't finding the location of ffmpeg.

Not sure how to fix the saving issue, but I can edit the file manually to work around it.

Now to focus on migrating my sister to her new Gateway laptop.