Twelve Black Code Monkeys

First, let me apologize for the lack of content here recently. I was traveling for the holidays, developed a cold that made doing anything a real pain, then came back and have been trying to catch up on reading all the gadget news. With CES just ending, it’s been a landslide of content. I just figure it’s still going to be a while, so I want to start writing something. I thought I’d give you a few quick items that I’m planning on writing about in more depth in come days. I figure posting a little bit about them now will give you at least something and it will keep me honest! The theme is definitely content overload, as you will see:

I happened across a program/service that is supposed to act like TiVo but for your radio. If you are a big talk-radio fan, or just a radio fan in general, this might prove really useful. I’m a big NPR addict myself, but I just don’t get the time to listen to the shows I want to all the time. I get busy and it’s really a shame they haven’t come out with something like this already, it would be a lot easier than a TiVo because you don’t have to deal with video and my sense is that scheduling is much more regular for radio. It does this by listening to streaming Internet radio broadcasts and recording these as mp3 files. It will even send them to iTunes so if you have an iPod all the better. The application is called Replay Radio and they have a demo version if you want to try it out. I am probably going to purchase the full version and give a more detailed piece about soon.

Speaking of TiVo, there’s a lot of TiVo news recently, most notably about the newest feature called TiVo ToGo, which will enable people who can use this service to download their TiVo content to their laptop, portable media player, or even to DVD. However, there are some inherent problems that I see with the implementation, which in my mind make it more trouble then it’s worth.

As I think I’ve mentioned here before, I’ve only recently started using TiVo myself, but I purchased a TiVo unit that also records to DVD. In fact, it does so much more easily than via TiVo ToGo. The unit is the Humax DRT-800. I’ve only seen one review of this unit, but I figured I would write a review myself that concentrates on the dvd writing part of the picture and the other things that separate this unit from your average TiVo.