Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Democracy cannot function without a free press.

We can show the world that autocracy can be defeated.

“When somebody takes the time to draw up a playbook, they’re gonna use it.”

Accused of treason; bitches about the ratings. I am in awe.

Jack Smith: “Why did you start campaigning in the middle of my investigation?!”

Authoritarian republicans are opposed to freedom for the rest of us.

One way or another, he’s a liar.

We will not go quietly into the night; we will not vanish without a fight.

Republicans want to make it harder to vote and easier for them to cheat.

“Everybody’s entitled to be an idiot.”

You can’t attract Republican voters. You can only out organize them.

Usually wrong but never in doubt

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

The snowflake in chief appeared visibly frustrated when questioned by a reporter about egg prices.

Let me file that under fuck it.

The poor and middle-class pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the wealthy pay politicians.

“Alexa, change the president.”

Anne Laurie is a fucking hero in so many ways. ~ Betty Cracker

Hot air and ill-informed banter

Let’s not be the monsters we hate.

Sadly, media malpractice has become standard practice.

Nancy smash is sick of your bullshit.

Come on, media. you have one job. start doing it.

We cannot abandon the truth and remain a free nation.

You are here: Home / Science & Technology / Tech Question

Reader Interactions

42Comments

  2. 2.

    burnspbesq

    I am Luddite, hear me roar.

    Xfinity? Qu’est-ce que c’est?

    ETA: answering my own question:

    XFINITY® is the new brand for Comcast’s technology platform, products, and services.

    I think I’m kinda not interested.

  4. 4.

    jheartney

    It may depend on the age of the Mini. We have a G4 mini, which can hook directly into the HDTV, but doesn’t display a proper fullscreen image. I think they fixed that later.

  5. 5.

    burbank15

    Does the Mac Mini support the CableCard standard? To connect the cable signal from Comcast to the Mac and be able to use the Mac as a DVR, it will need to have a slot for the CableCard like the Ceton card used by some HTPCs or the HDHomeRun from Silicon Dust.

  7. 7.

    burnspbesq

    AppleTV might be a better option.

    Watched the second half of Ireland – Armenia on my Thunderbolt monitor in the office today (courtesy of watchespn.com). That is one crisp screen.

  8. 8.

    slag

    can you watch Xfinity content

    Another potential source of your ennui. Is television sucking the life out of you? It happens to the best of us.

  9. 9.

    different-church-lady

    @jheartney: Go to the Display preference panel, look for an “options” button, and see if it allows you to change the overscan settings.

    When it comes to “television” formats it’s usually something like that

  10. 10.

    different-church-lady

    And nobody asked, but just because the signal from the cable company is “digital” doesn’t mean it looks any good. I could show you some pretty crappy digital video any time you like.

    Basically they’ve got X amount of bandwidth and they can decide to provide like 50 channels of really high quality HD TV, or they can slice it up into 500 channels of crappy-looking HD TV. Which option do we think Comcast goes for?

  12. 12.

    handy

    @different-church-lady:

    I can attest when I had Charter not only was their HD signal (this was in the “old days” of 2008 things might be better now) highly compressed the colors were awful–so much so that at first I thought it was my TV that was the problem. Then I switched to DirecTV and saw decent improvement.

    I have U-Verse now, which I find is the best of the pay services I’ve experienced, but honestly if you can get a decent signal nothing beats plain ole OTA.

  14. 14.

    Martin

    The newer Mini has a dedicated HDMI out, so from that perspective, it’s pretty much just plug-n-go to the TV.

    The question is how do you pick up the Xfinity content on the Mini?

    There’s an iPhone/iPod/iPad app for it, which if it supports AirPlay would likely be MUCH better. Plug in Apple TV, pick up Xfinity via the iOS app and then push it over to the TV via AirPlay. The iOS device then acts like the remote and you just navigate everything on that. $99 for Apple TV + $199 for an iPod Touch gets you there. Half the price of the Mini.

  16. 16.

    JGabriel

    John Cole:

    If you hook up a mac mini to an HDTV, can you watch Xfinity content?

    Given your history, you shouldn’t be hooking up anything electronic. You’re liable to electrocute yourself.

    You should hire someone to hook it up for you, the way some Orthodox Jews hire gentile kids (cause they’re going to hell anyway) to press elevator buttons and light switches for them on the sabbath.

    .

  20. 20.

    Bill E Pilgrim

    You know, despite the claims of “progress has stopped”, do you realize that someone from even say 1975 actually wouldn’t understand a word we were saying?

    “Huh? If you introduce a guy wearing a short skirt to a heavy duty transvestite, can you be content forever? Uh, beats me.”

  21. 21.

    Bago

    I like the fact that I am getting compression artifacts on my streams, (xbox and bit torrent) on my 60 inch screen and 12 inch speakers. I’m solid on my irony.

  23. 23.

    Allen

    @Bago: I find funny. I remember back when I designed Intel plants I remember one day when we were building D1B, some Intel folks decided to show us their multi-media lab. They were proud of the fact they had a video and audio signal coming out of one computer. Looking impressed I turned to the Intel folks and said, “Just like my TV”. Can’t believe the looks I got. Remember, Intel is the company who hired Andy Schlafly as an engineer. This was the type of person Intel was famous for hiring.

  24. 24.

    Yutsano

    Well since I no haz open thread…

    Laying around in the condo doing a whole lotta nothing when a very drunk man comes strolling through my door. He looked at me, asked, “Who the hell are you?”, then refused to leave when I told him he was lost. I thought for a second he was going to come after me. Needless to say the door is deadbolted now. And I’m almost too creeped out to sleep. At least I wasn’t naked.

  25. 25.

    Newsouthzach

    @Allen: Ha. I just interviewed for a job at PTD. They seriously creeped me out — I asked what I thought was a standard question about work-life balance. The engineer looked at me like I had grown horns and said, “There is no balance, only Zuul.”

    Ok, kidding about the Zuul part. Not a place I care to work.

  29. 29.

    harlana

    This is a most unsatisfying post on which to comment on in the early morning hours since i have no idea what you are talking about. Even worse, I don’t want to know.

    I feel so cold and alone.

  30. 30.

    harlana

    I request an obligatory republican-kicking post each morning, before 5:00 a.m. EST.

    Frikkin whippersnappers with your new-fangled thingies and the interwebs and the texting and the twitter and the GPS and the apple tv and the Infinity (wtf EVEN is that? I’m supposed to fucking know?) and . . .

    GET OFF MY LAWN!

    AND TAKE YOUR TWITTERS WITH YOU!

  32. 32.

    A Mom Anon

    @BethanyAnne: OMG I laughed so hard I scared the dog.

    Have no clue about the tech stuff. I’ve spent the last 10 days dealing with 2 computer crashes,3 trips to the computer repair shop ending in a new hard drive and a new verion of Windows 7. All is well now,but god what a pain in the ass. Plus I’m a couple hundred dollars poorer.

  34. 34.

    zmulls

    @BethanyAnne: I’ve been reading The Bloggess for a while. She rocks. The #PR Fail this past weekend, was a classic, when the PR agent called her a “fucking bitch” in an office e-mail and accidentally replay all-ed it to her. They tried to get snippy with her and she sicced the whole damn internet on the PR firm.

    Seriously the whole internet. Wil Wheaton and Neil Gaiman are fans as well, and they were tweeting to their 2.5M followers about it.

  35. 35.

    Agoraphobic Kleptomaniac

    Getting Xfinity to work at all usually involves black magic and chanting. I can’t update my Firefox, because Xfinity doesn’t like the newer firefox versions, and I refuse to use IE. Chrome doesn’t work either. Then, 80% of the time i’ll be watching a video and the stream will abruptly stop in the middle and tell me that the video is no longer available.

    So, yeah, good luck with that.

  36. 36.

    Heez

    Let me cut to the chase;

    Yes. An Intel Mac Mini running OS X 10.5.x or 10.6.x will run XFINITY TV and will output HD quality (if Comcast actually delivers… which they won’t). Not sure about 10.7.x.

    Hardware-wise you’re not going to get the greatest picture from the 3,x series Mac Minis (with the white top) unless your TV has a DVI input. The 4,x series (slimmer with a silver top) have HDMI out.

  37. 37.

    Akreit

    I’d second what Heez said about the mac mini (tho I don’t know about xfinity) and add that it works with 10.7.x (at least it has for me.). I think hooking up a mini to your HDTV with a wireless mouse/keyboard is all around great. I’ve found that the content from Netflix, YouTube, hulu, etc all shows up in very good quality. I highly recommend it.

  40. 40.

    kd

    A somewhat related question. I haven’t had tv for years and watch what I want via the web or Netflix and hulu. However my brother-in-law is sports mad and I’m very afraid he will stand us up for thanksgiving if he can’t watch the games (which I’m thinking are college football). How can I make sure we have these – I’m willing to pay for a premium service for the month of November on amazon or roku if such a thing exists??

  41. 41.

    BTJUNKIE

    So, we have a mac mini hooked up to our HDTV but we don’t subscribe to comcast. We use “alternative” methods to receive our shows which we view via the Plex app and the picture quality is actually pretty awesome.

    The only thing missing is live sport (damnit)

  42. 42.

    BethanyAnne

    @zmulls: Lol, that’s actually how I found her – via #PRFail and Wil Wheaton. I’m glad y’all liked her, too. :) “Reward: Large rattlesnake, very friendly, gives hugs with mouth”

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