Ryan Homan

Well as some of you know about over here in the midwest part of the United States is that greed has moved not only from the NFL, but over to college football as well. This year, games that used to be broadcast regionally over ABC have now been moved to a new network called the Big Ten Network. Now every Ohio State game that is not nationally broadcast can only be found on the big ten network. This also applies to men’s basketball as well. So as for right now, the only provider in my area that will have the big ten network is DirecTV. The big ten network is charging an enormous amount of $1.10 per subscriber and wants it part of the basic cable package therefore the cable companies have to pay that for each subscriber which all of my local providers were unwilling to do. So as for me, I’ve decided to make the switch to DirecTV so I can get all the games, but it poses a problem with my simple MythTv setup. I now only have a limited number of feeds available for my myth box and also need to be able to handle changing the channel. This project is in the works and I hope to be able to document step by step what I did to get it working.

For those of you who use MythTV for their DVR got some exciting news this last day or two. Schedules Direct just released the pricing of $15 / 3 months to start out, but after they get a lot of subscribers, they hope to get pricing down to $20/year. I know its not free, but I could gladly pay $20/year once they get it all worked out. I’m just glad those guys have been able to get something together so we can continue to use MythTV. Check out their website at www.schedulesdirect.com for more information as the time gets closer to the Sept 1st deadline.

Well first off I want to thank Matt Schmandt for telling me to try this out. Check out his blog from my blogroll. I set this up for my domain ryanspcservice.com and have pointed my MX record over to google. Google now handles all of my mail for my domain. It goes through google’s spam filtering and gives me all the features of gmail. It also allows me to have up to 100 users on the free version all with individual 2GB inboxes. You can also pay google a flat yearly fee per user for more features and a larger number of users. Along with the mail, I also get a docs and spreadsheets which I can share just within users on my domain or also outside people. I also get an individual start page for my domain and chat within my domain to the other users using google talk. I also get a personal calendar for each user with individual sharing options. So far it is very neat and is a great product for personal or business use with the awesome price of FREE!! I hope they continue to improve on it and I’ll try to post again after I’ve played with it more.