Crowders Mountain

I considered heading up to the Appalachian trail this morning, but reports from the National Weather Service ("TRAVEL IS EXPECTED TO BECOME VERY HAZARDOUS OR IMPOSSIBLE.") encouraged me to stay closer to home.  Plus, the Volvo needs some maintenance.  So Dexter and I took off for Crowders Mountain.


He's hiked it before, as have I, but it really does offer some spectacular views.
  
The only wildlife we saw was a hawk soaring below us.  The top offered a 360° view of North and South Carolina.  Despite the clouds, I could see the city of Charlotte and beyond.


I noticed that the Ridgeline trail, the one that connects the North and South Carolina parks, has been completed since the last time I was on the trail.  I think I may hike that on my next day off as a bit of a challenge.  It's posted 210 minutes, one way, so I should start out once it gets light out. 


But it would be nice to hike around some of the white, fluffy stuff.

WinMo ROM

For a couple of weeks it seems as though my phone (an HTC Raphael stripped-down mod by at&t called the Fuze) would choose to ignore some mail pushed by google, so I thought it might be a good time to re-up the ROM.

Lately I've been preferring the ROMs put together by NRGZ28. The latest stable for Windows Mobile 6.5 (based on the 21889 Build from the OEM COM2 tree) is EnergyROM.

There's still a lot of activity on the XDA Raphael forums, but I think it'll die down a bit as more and more people get Android phones, and the like.

But anyway, the EnergyROM is running quick and smooth.  It's amazing how much better it is than the software that came installed on the thing.  It's a testament to what kind of advances can be made when software is open.  Oh wait, I guess MS isn't open.  I guess it's a testament to what kind of advances can be made when a company looks the other way as others reverse-engineer, recalibrate, and then redistribute their software.

XBOX XBMC PlayOn

We've been using the old skool XBOX as a media center with XBMC for some time now. XBMC is a great piece of software -- probably the best at what it does. I used the IDE Hot Swap Method to softmod the XBOX back when we lived in Baltimore, but only recently we've been using PlayOn to stream video from the office computer to the XBOX via ethernet.

If I told Nicole how much money we saved by not paying for cable she'd probably be momentarily pleased, but then she'd remember all of the programs that were cut short or all the time I spent fiddling with it.

Being denied The Daily Show for a week I figured is was time to reinstall a new build. Since Microsoft won't open up the system, or XDK, (even though it doesn't develop for it anymore) the only way to obtain new binaries is through illicit means and there are only a few that I know of. Right now it seems to be working great. This is what I've got:

+ T3CH XBMC 2010-01-03 SVN rev26316 from http://t3ch.yi.se/
+ PlayOn Version: 2.59.3664 from http://www.playon.tv
+ PM3HD skin as included with T3CH build

And it seems to be working quite well!

I also just tried a different build, but it couldn't display the PlayOn categories using the same skin.

The Transparency! skin can view all of the categories, but it can't play any from Hulu or CNN - which is a shame because it looks great. The older Rapier skin seems to work well, with Hulu at least, but I'll check out the new release.

One thing that I suspect may have been a problem was the extent of thumbnails that existed in the User directory of the old build. I don't know if XBMC manages these, but I didn't copy them over to the new build.

I'll have to test it out a bit more and decorate with a suitable skin.