Month: May 2016

cTiVo follow-up

When I got home from work today, the three movies I’d queued up to transfer from my TiVo and re-encode were all on my hard drive, apparently fully transferred. I started the process at around 7:30 am, I think, and it looks like it finished up just after 11 am, so I guess that’s not too bad for three long movies. I think the bulk of the time is the encoding process, not the actual transfer, though I’m not sure about that. I set it to encode for viewing on the Apple TV, which seemed like a good idea. There are a bunch of other settings, but I didn’t spend much time trying to figure them out.

So, bottom line, I think cTiVo is probably a pretty good tool for getting stuff off the TiVo, whenever I want to do that.

I had actually wanted to finish watching Stray Dog tonight, but there was a “Girls Night Out” event going on in Somerville tonight, and apparently “girls” like loud, blaring dance music, so quietly watching a foreign movie wasn’t really in the cards. Instead, I took a walk to the mall and grabbed a burger. Then, when I got back and found that the loud music was still going on, I watched an episode of The Flash with my headphones on, cranked up loud enough to drown out Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies.”

cTiVo

When I got my TiVo Bolt, I spent a little bit of time figuring out how I could offload shows from the TiVo to one of my computers. There used to be an official program from TiVo, but they discontinued that several years ago. I’d heard a bit about cTiVo for the Mac and PyTiVo for Mac/PC/Linux, but after taking a quick look, I decided that they were both probably too complicated to deal with at the time.

Back in March, TCM had a little Kurosawa marathon, and I recorded five movies from that. And, of course, then I just left them on the TiVo and never got around to watching them. This week, they started showing in the “going away soon” list, so I decided I should watch them, and maybe also look into offloading them from the TiVo.

So I went and looked into cTiVo again. It turns out that it’s actually really easy to install it and connect it to your TiVo. I’m having mixed success with it though. I set it to transfer Stray Dog and Seven Samurai last night. It copied Seven Samurai fine, but it only copied the first hour of Stray Dog for some reason. So I’m transferring Stray Dog again. It’s taking quite a long time to transfer and encode files, and I’m a little unclear as to whether it’s the transferring and/or the encoding that’s the issue. Well, either way, I’m going to leave it transferring some stuff while I’m at work, and see what it looks like after I get home.

Civil War

I went to see Civil War yesterday afternoon. (I took a half-day off from work.) I enjoyed it a lot. I like that the Marvel film universe has matured to the point where they can just throw a bunch of heroes into a movie and not feel like they need to recount everyone’s back story. The film is loosely based on Marvel’s Civil War series from about ten years ago. (I was surprised when I checked that and realized how long ago it was. Time is just flying by…)

I had read that series, and some of the tie-in books, when they came out, and I had mixed feelings about the event as whole, though parts of it are quite good. In particular, I liked J. Michael Straczynski’s Spider-Man tie-in. There’s a really good sequence that’s referenced in the movie, though in a different context and with the dialog coming from a different character. There’s a good article about it here, with the original comic pages included.

Spider-Man is included in the film, on loan from Sony, which is kind of neat but also kind of ridiculous. There’s an article from the LA Times about how this happened, and how hard it was to arrange to “borrow” the character from Sony. Spider-Man’s appearance does actually add something useful to the movie: the perspective of a new, young, hero who hasn’t interacted with all the “big shots” in the Marvel universe, like Cap and Iron Man. And of course some typical light-hearted Spider-Man banter.

The movie is quite long, almost two and a half hours, but it holds up pretty well over that length. I think that’s a little too long for a superhero movie. A tighter two-hour movie would have been better. It will probably work well on home video though, where you can pause it and take a break, or watch it in two or three sittings.

Met Gala

My Twitter feed tonight is full of photos from the Met Gala. The Times had a good article today explaining a bit about the Gala, and how it works. The whole thing is kind of ridiculous and leaves a bad taste in my mouth, though it is all kind of amusing, I guess.

I’m not a big fan of the Costume Institute, and generally don’t get much out of their exhibits. It doesn’t seem to me like the kind of stuff that should even be in the Met. But I know I’m probably in the minority here. And while the Gala apparently makes a lot of money, it seems like all of it is used to fund the Costume Institute and not other departments at the Met, if I understand it correctly. If they were using some of that money to buy up a few new Monet or Cezanne paintings, I’d be all for it. But I guess some of the Costume Institute exhibits bring a lot of people (and ticket money) into the Met, in general, so that’s something.

I was at the Met yesterday, and checked out the Vigée Le Brun exhibit again, and the new Pergamon exhibit. And I’m looking forward to a sunny day, so I can see the new roof garden installation.

F# for C# Developers

I finished reading F# for C# Developers today. I just checked, and I started reading it almost exactly two years ago. (I didn’t really read all the way through to the end today, admittedly; I skimmed some parts that weren’t that interesting to me. But I read most of it.) One part that was of interest was a section on WebSharper, which looks like a pretty nifty way to create web apps in F#. I’d like to play around with that some more.

I also made some more progress on Real-World Functional Programming, reading the chapter on testing, which used xUnit.net for unit testing in F#. I’d never tried xUnit.net before; I’ve previously used NUnit a bit, for C# unit testing, and I’ve also used the unit testing functionality built into recent versions of Visual Studio. So xUnit.net is another thing I’d like to play with some more.

I’m probably going to get side-tracked from this F# stuff again pretty soon, but hopefully I’ll have time this week to make some more progress.