i was hopeful that the 2.20 firmware update would fix all of my divx/xvid streaming woes with the addition of more codecs and better support for playing video files in general. and after the firmware update, it’s true, the ps3 does play more files than it used to. but, i am still getting the dreaded streaming error. part of the movie will play and then it’ll crash at the same place over and over. the xbox can play the movies fine, so i’m hoping that eventually when ps3 streaming support is more mature, it’ll work itself out.

in the meantime, this means that the ps3 has been demoted as my media center (which really was the dream) and is now just a blu-ray and rock band player. i hope that sony resolves these issues soon because it’s a shame not being able to use the ps3 as a media center.

i’m currently using mediatomb as my DLNA server on a D-Link DNS-323 NAS.

i have been using this little thing for the last 6 years. it is basically this device that will clean your contact lenses with ultrasonic vibrations. think of it as a touchless sonicare toothbrush, but for contacts. there are no bristles involved, just the ultrasonic waves rippling in the chamber.

it’s been pretty good to me, but the other day i put my contacts into the LenSoClean chamber and in the morning i found that my contacts were crispy. it turns out that the device broke and the auto-shutoff never shut off. the result? the solution in the chamber evaporated and my contacts got dry.

i had to throw out the pair of contacts and device, but i have been happy with it so i ordered a unit from amazon. it should be coming in a few days and then i’ll be back to my normal clean contact routine.

over the weekend, i decided to install a new torrent client on the NAS. apparently there’s a port of transmission for the nas. coupled with clutch, a webUI for the command line client, it looks and feels like the mac os x transmission client. the memory footprint on this client is significantly smaller than that of mlnet, even if you have php+lighttpd running in the background. CPU usage seems considerably higher though with transmission. i’m not sure if the memory/cpu trade-off is going to be worth it, i’ll have to play with it and see.