Well for those of you keeping track of my DVR I just wanted to note that with the recent rebuild and upgrade to KnoppMyth R5F1 (It looks like the version is now up to R527. So much for staying current!) I also add two new hardware components. The first was a 500 GB SATA hard drive that I have allocated directly to TV recordings. You can read about how I did this in one of my previous posting. I purchased this hard drive at CompUSA for $127.19. The other item I added was an HD over-the-air tuner card so that I could start watching and recording in high definition. The card I purchased was a pcHDTV hd-5500 for $129 that I bought from StormLogic. StormLogic is selling prebuilt KnoppMyth boxes for $1,157.57. They have the process down pretty well and have contributed several scripts to KnoppMyth. The card installed very easily. After installing the card though I found that my system did not have the processing power to handing watching live HD very well. It also had random issues when anything else wanted to share the processor with it. I resolved this problem, by buying the fastest processor the current motherboard could handle. This turned out to be an AMD Athlon X2 4200+ from NewEgg for $72.50. The fact that the system is now dual core greatly improved the processing power of the DVR and now I have no problems watching or recording HD. I've now got the ability to record three shows at once, two from my cable connection, and one from HD broadcast. I also have the storage capacity now to handle plenty of recordings without worrying about running out of storage space. Lastly, I am now paying for a TV guide subscription through SchedulesDirect. The subscription is down to $20 a year which I can't complain about too much. As a side note, blogging from Word 2007 seems to be working out great and is a lot easier!

    I've finally made the switch away from using DotNetNuke for my blog. DotNetNuke is a great CMS, but the blog module left a lot to be desired and I regretted using it from the start. The number one reason why I switched is I hated posting to my blog using the FreeTextBox control and wanted to find a blogging engine that allowed me to post text and images direct to it from Word 2007 which DasBlog does. Blogging with DNN was a royal pain sometimes and kept me from keeping my blog up to date, so hopefully now I have no excuse to not post regularly. DasBlog also has a lot more extras that I plan to take advantage of in the future. I still plan to run my main site off of DotNetNuke and the original blog in still there as well, but the last posting to it was today informing any readers that may happen to be subscribed to the direct rss feed to update their subscription to my Feedburner address.

    I was able to get all my old posts and comments migrated over. It took a few tries, but in the end I only had to update two links manually. I didn't migrate the images over to DasBlog, but left them stored on the original site so as to ease the migration pains. They still show up in line in the blog post, but if you look the link it is actually to the original site. All future images will be posted directly to DasBlog though.

    The migration was made easier by a C# application that Scott Hanselman had posted to his blog in 2005. I had to make modifications to it to have it read from DNN and to get it to create files in the proper format for the latest version of DasBlog. I also made some adjustments so that it would properly correct most of my links. You can download the modified C# Application from here. You'll need to update the connection string and the url, but then it should generate the proper xml fields for you.

    I still have a few more tweaks to make to the new blog, but things seem to be working well so far. This post was definitely a lot faster to put together and publish.

I just wanted to give everyone a quick heads up about the IADNUG meeting tomorrow night at the DMACC West campus.  Nick Parker will be doing a presentation on  dependency inversion in .NET.  I hope to see you there.