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rpgKids

A co-worker introduced me to rpgKids last week.  After taking a look around the website, I plunked down the $5 and bought the game and the adventure pack and it was well worth the money.

rpgKids is a basic roleplaying game meant to introduce kids ages 4-7 to the wonderful world of using their imagination to roleplay.  The 24 page PDF includes the ruleset, an overview of the characters, hand drawn tokens for both heroes and monsters, a character sheet and a printable 1″ grid for mapping your adventures.  It also comes with with one adventure for you to run through with the kids, and the Adventure Pack (if you buy the $5 version) includes 4 more adventures.  The age recommendation was perfect, as Zoe is 7 and Jack is 5.

I packed up the kids Saturday morning and we headed out to our local game store.  While you don’t need to, we picked up a bunch of used miniatures for $2 bucks each for the game.  The tokens included in the PDF would have worked fine, but I wanted to give the kids that little extra experience.  We also picked up some dice – you’ll need a couple D12 and D6 dice for the game – I made sure to get each of the kids their own.

 

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The included adventure gives you the overview of the story, a script to follow (if you choose) and 4 encounters, including maps, where you’ll run into the “monsters” as you try to save the town of Springwell.

The kids choose their class (fighter, healer, wizard or archer) and you as the parent play the role of Dungeon Master, keeping the kids on path in the story and role playing the monsters in each encounter.  The kids had a blast as I roleplayed the monsters, especially the funny voices, and added to the script to make sure they were having a good time.

Zoe got it right away – she quickly named her character as they filled out their character sheets and chose a class, while Jack didn’t really get it until we were in the middle of the story and having our first encounter with the monsters.  Alex, who is 15, came and watched – as my wife later pointed out, you could tell that he thought he was too cool to play with the little kids, but deep down, he really wanted to.

Combat is simple – roll a die for initiative, then the monsters roll against the heroes to see if there is a “hit” – 2 hits and the character or monster is knocked out.  Depending on the class, you can attack from so many tiles away, adding a level of tactics and strategy to start the kids learning.  My Dungeon Master skills are a bit rusty, but thankfully the script kept the story going and I embellished and added to the story where appropriate.

They definitely enjoyed it and were asking to play again – this will definitely be a great way to get through the long Minnesota winter.  If you have a kids, I highly recommend rpgKids and it definitely lays the groundwork to introduce D&D when they get older.  Who needs video games anyway?!

Six Months Without Satellite TV

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It’s been six months since I cut the cable and canceled DirecTV, going over-the-air and internet only.

Do I miss DirecTV?

In a word, no.

This past Sunday started the real test as I’m a huge (American) football fan. Living in Minnesota and being a Green Bay Packers fan, this season is the first in ten years that I haven’t had DirecTV’s NFL Sunday ticket to watch out of market games (luckily the Packers were the national game this past Sunday). I also missed my beloved University of Wisconsin Badgers play the last two weeks, but I think I’m going to make it (especially as they play tomorrow on ABC).

None of this would have been possible except for three innovations: Boxee, MythTV and streaming Netflix.

The only hiccup I had was my antenna setup – the first couple of months everything was great, except NBC was a bit flaky, which was to be expected. The local NBC affiliate is the only TV station not on the HDTV antenna array here in the Twin Cities, and the antenna they use is notorious for its weak signal. But after a couple of months, I started experiencing signal strength issues with almost all of the channels. After doing a bit of research, I climbed up on the roof, and turned the antenna 90 degrees, as seen in the photo above so it faces the direction of the antenna tower. I was worried that even if I did so, I’d still have signal strength issues as the antenna is now parallel with the roof but under the roof line – but thankfully all of my signal strength issues appear fixed going in to the fall TV season. And now my satellite dish just sits on the roof, unused.

I’ve previously talked about my setup and with summer TV being mostly re-runs, I’ve been using Netflix. A lot. I’m glad to see Netflix continue to focus on expanding their catalog for streaming titles and was interested to read how much cheaper streaming is for them vs. mailing DVDs. With the new fall TV season starting, MythTV has proved invaluable in recording off-air TV shows and automatically removing the commercials helping make watching TV more enjoyable. I’m probably only using 20% of what MythTV is capable of. And for the cable shows I don’t have, Boxee’s Hulu integration continue to works pretty well. It’s standard def quality – but you get what you pay for, so you won’t find me complaining. Additionally, I’ve converted all of the movies I own and store them on my NAS, adding another library of content to watch through Boxee as well as stream to my old Netgear Eva in my bedroom.

I’m also keeping an eye on the Boxee Box, launching later this year. I’ve been using Boxee with my 60″ Sony HDTV in my man cave and if and when we replace the old analog TV in the living room, I’ll have some interesting choices to make. Between Google TV, Boxee and even litl working on a set top box, there will be some interesting choices to bring internet content to the TV. And with CNBC reporting this morning that 37% of adults 25-34 who subscribe to Neflix now use Netflix instead of cable and satellite service, DirecTV, Comcast and other satellite / cable providers are going to need to find a new business model. Fast.

Cutting the Cable, Part 3 (or Why Customer Service Matters)

I followed through and canceled my DirecTV service today. My MythTV / Boxee setup has been running great the last couple of weeks and I kept DirecTV through yesterday just as a backup as I hosted a Super Bowl party.

This all started due to extremely poor customer service from DirecTV. My high-def DVR was dying in November, specifically the hard drive, as I could hear it grinding from twelve feet away over the sound of my speakers and the buffering and audio / video playback was terrible.

I had to reboot my DVR every 2-3 days, and performance would be better, then degrade. Calling DirecTV, they made me jump through a number of hoops to diagnose it which resulted in it taking almost a month and three phone calls before they agreed to replace it. Now, I don’t own this HD-DVR receiver – I lease it from DirecTV. When I first signed up for DirecTV 11 years ago you had to buy your hardware, now you just lease it from them for $5 / month.

They finally agreed to replace it, but they were going to charge me a $20 shipping & handling fee. My wife runs a small business out of the house, and I know it doesn’t cost $20 to ship one of those, especially in bulk. To say I was livid that I had to pay to get a receiver repaired that they own is an understatement. Each time I called in, they also tried to “upgrade” me on the last receiver that I actually owned – so I’d have to pay them another lease fee. I always told I’d only upgrade if it was a DVR, not just a standard receiver, and they always declined. (I had been able to take advantage of this a couple years ago, so I know they can upgrade old receivers to a DVR).

I emailed and called their customer service to complain – and their response was: “Sorry, that’s our policy”.

So now they’ve lost a customer. I may have had their lowest tier of service, but I also bought the March Madness and NFL Sunday Ticket packages each year, so from a revenue per customer standpoint I was above average.

When I called to cancel, they offered me $20 per month off for the next twelve months and a free DVR upgrade. Too little, too late. When they asked why I was cancelling, I said poor customer service for my HD-DVR experience this past November. So the customer service rep processed my cancellation, and then let me know I’d be receiving a box with pre-paid shipping to send my HD-DVR back to them. Where exactly was this pre-paid box when I needed to get it repaired? (The state of Washington is suing DirecTV over hidden fees).

What gets me is the focus DirecTV, cable companies and cell phone companies have on customer acquisition rather than keeping existing customers happy. Even though I had already contacted them and complained they weren’t willing to do anything about it until I actually cancelled. In my opinion, they need to keep a balance between these two groups of customers. This wasn’t the first customer service incident I’ve had with them over the years, but enough was enough. Thanks to innovations like Boxee I can make up some (but not all) of the content I’ll be missing from going over-the-air only. A loyal customer will pay dividends – do you think I’ll be recommending DirecTV to friends in the future?

The Mutliplayblog today published the results of a survey measuring customer satisfaction levels in satellite, cable and telco TV subscriptions:

Low Perceived “Value for Money” among all Digital Pay TV customers

Virtually across the board—and irrespective of platform—respondents reported low satisfaction in the metric of `Value for Money.’ There was very little measurable difference by platform among respondents, and in all cases, fewer than 22% of respondents felt the service “exceeded” or “greatly exceeded” expectations of value for money.

This is among the most important findings of study, as it underlines the vulnerability of pay television in its current state. Indeed, in a report published in 2008, we found that over 50% of US digital pay television customers would be willing to scale back or completely drop their television service if household budgetary circumstances dictated.

I highly recommend reading the rest of the blog post, as these companies are at a tipping point. We’ve seen it in the music industry, the video industry is feeling it, and now pay TV services will be feeling the pressure as technological innovations will put their business models at risk. Will they embrace their customers and these new technologies or will they become extinct? First they need to look in the mirror and see if they’re keeping their existing customers happy before trying to sign up more. And I’ve already had a few people ask me about my setup and express interest in ditching pay TV…

Cutting the Cable, Part 2

A few weeks ago I blogged about buying the hardware to set up a MythTV PC to record off air high def TV and integrate it with Boxee.

The hardware arrived and I’ve been working on on the setup off and on over the last few weeks. Some random thoughts:

  • The HD Homerun tuner is pretty cool. Fedora has the HD Homerun configuration tool in their repos. Installing that through PackageKit and yum made it easy to test out that it was working and had a good signal.
  • I had to install MyTV 3 times before I could get it to work. On a vanilla Fedora 12 install and then adding MythTV from the repos, only one tuner of the HD Homerun would work. Trying Mythdora, my MythTV front ends on my desktop PC and my laptop wouldn’t connect. Also there was a nasty bug in Mythdora’s kernel that wouldn’t let me mount a NFS share. Using Mythbuntu everything just worked.
  • Schedules Direct is a pretty cool service. I remember hearing about the story a couple years ago when it all went down, but when Zap2It started charging users for the scheduling data, a group of MythTV users started Schedules Direct and licensed the data. $20 / year is more than reasonable to pay to get all the scheduling data.

  • I love the fact that I can browse to the IP address of the MythTV PC from any computer and see the scheduling data and record a show. It took a few minutes to find the setting to only record new episodes, but it’s there! Obligatory screenshot:

    mythtv-schedule

    • The first recordings I made were the second night of the 24 season premiere and an episode of How I Met Your Mother. A one hour recording is about 6 GB.
    • I only have a 100GB hard drive in the MythTV backend, so I mounted my NAS via NFS . I would then in Boxee use the File Browser and surf to my tv recording directory. One downside to this method is that MythTV records the file, such as last week’s 24 as 1091_2010011819000mpg. The File Browser also displays a PNG file so it’s easy to tell what show is what, but it’s not intuitive at all.
    • There are plugins for XBMC, such as MythSExx and MythicalLibrarian that will rename your TV recordings into a S01E01 format and create a symlink for you to make it easier to browse your recordings. I couldn’t get the former script to run, but I didn’t spend a lot of time troubleshooting either.

And then yesterday while idling in #boxee on Freenode IRC, user SpaceBass mentioned that MythTV support was working for him in the Boxee Beta. There are a number of threads in the Boxee forums that the “mythtv://” protocol doesn’t work – but it appears to be working now.

In the Boxee settings, add a manual souce, and make it: myth://IPADDRESS where IPADDRESS is the IP address of your Myth backend and give the source a name – I used “DVR”.

Now use the File Browser in Boxee and when you first choose it you’ll have a list of your sources:

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Select DVR and you’ll be presented with “All Recordings”, “Guide”, “Live Channels”, “Movies” and “TV Shows”:

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Note: Guide doesn’t work for me.

If you choose “All Recordings” you’ll see everything that MythTV has recorded:

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(TV Shows and Movies will just show the MythTV recordings based on those filters). I haven’t looked into using MythTV’s built-in commercial skip as Boxee has a 30 second skip that just works too. I also like that Boxee remembers to resume where I left off watching if I stop playback.

To watch Live TV streaming from your Myth backend to Boxee, choose Live TV from the menu I mentioned above. You’ll be presented with a list of TV channels by station ID, not number:

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And here’s a screenshot of the NHL game on NBC in HD earlier this afternoon:

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There are two bugs I’m experiencing that I need to spend some time with:

  • When playing back a recording or starting a live TV stream, it will sometimes start as if it’s being fast-forwarded, including the audio. Hitting pause and then unpausing fixes it.
  • I think this may be related to signal strength as I’m seeing it on NBC and CBS, but not Fox, but I’m seeing jagged edges around an object, such as a person, when it’s moving quickly. If it’s a fairly static image, there are no jagged edges. But even someone quickly sitting down will have the distortion. But I don’t see this problem when accessing the recording from a Myth frontend on another computer, so it needs more investigating.
  • My other theory is it could have something to do with saving the content on the NAS and not on a hard drive in the Myth backend, so I bought a larger hard drive to throw in there too. I’d also rather have it on a hard drive than the NAS just to save wear and tear.

I’m almost done – if I had to guess, I’m about a week away from telling DirecTV to pound sand. I’ll poke at the distortion issue some more and install that hard drive when it arrives but this has been a pretty cool project to work on so far.

Cutting the cable

I’m an entertainment junkie. I own hundreds of music CD’s, books, movies and am an early adopter of Blu-Ray. My usual routine once my two youngest children are in bed at 8 pm is to plop down on my couch, put my notebook on my lap and use that while watching my pretty 60″ TV.

I’ve received my TV content from DirecTV for the last ten years since we built this house – primarily because I’m a huge (American) football fan, and my team, the Green Bay Packers, are out of market where I live and DirecTV has a monopoly on the NFL package to be able to watch my team.

I’ve been happy with the television service (even though it’s the most compressed of all high-def signals) but their customer service is atrocious. About once a year I have a run-in with them that gets my blood boiling, but the other 364 days of the year I don’t have to think about them – it just works.

Almost a year ago I got a great deal on a Mac Mini and bought it to try out Boxee. I’ve ripped my music and movie collection to my NAS and Boxee gave me the ability to stream that straight to my TV plus their collection of Internet content I could stream as well, such as The Daily Show, Hulu and more. My best friend uses Plex, and both Plex & Boxee are based on the XBMC upstream code which does an awesome job of playing back any file you throw at it.

I’ve loved Boxee – the user experience has only gotten better from the Alpha to the Beta that launched today (the screenshots don’t do it justice). I’ve thought about, but never very seriously, getting rid of DirecTV and going Internet only. With Netflix streaming (both in Boxee and on my Xbox 360), Hulu and other apps available in Boxee, there’s a lot of content I can get if I’m willing to be patient for DVD releases of my favorite shows that I can’t watch in real time.

And then in early November, my DirecTV high-def DVR started to die. And it was a painful experience having to call in to their tech support once a week, rebooting my box every few days until they finally agreed to swap it out a month later (I pay $5 / month to lease the box from them – I don’t even own it!) I was pretty frustrated with the entire process, and this is a long enough story as it is, so I won’t go in to all the details, but when I received my bill in early December and found out they charged me $20 to replace the box, I was livid. They never bothered to inform me of the charge or asked for permission in charging me, and you may think “It’s only $20!” – but when I called to ask them to refund it, they refused – so I asked them to refund my $100 monthly charge for November as my box didn’t work and I didn’t feel that I received the service I paid for and they still refused, I started to think about all these options.

After a long conversation with my wife on the advantages and disadvantages of not having cable or satellite (she doesn’t watch TV anyway) I’ve decided to cut the cord. I’m lucky enough to have a nice HDTV antenna on my roof right next to the satellite dish and all the coax terminates at one spot in the basement, so re-wiring won’t be tough.

We spend just under a $100 month on DirecTV (cheapest package, 3 boxes for 3 TVs, DVR service and HD service). I figure with a small investment in buying some new hardware it will pay itself back in 3 months (considering I had already bought the Mac Mini a year ago):

  • HD Homerun: Dual tuner off-air HD tuner with a network jack that any PC in the house can connect to for watching or recording live TV: $150
  • HD amplifier & terminators: $35
  • Digital converter boxes for the other 2 TVs in the house to get off-air: $20 each off Ebay
  • Elgato EyeTV PVR software for Mac: $80 (maybe, see below)

The one kink in my plan is I realized that if I buy the EyeTV to record TV on to the Mac Mini it can only record one show at a time, even though I have a dual-tuner HD Homerun. There are a few shows like NBC Thursday night comedies and Fringe on Fox that I like that air at the same time, so that’s a challenge. One of the major reasons I bought the HD Homerun is the fact that’s dual tuner but also that it has a network jack and works on Linux. One option is to install MythTV on an older computer and use that. MythTV has native support for the HD Homerun and I can mount my NAS via NFS and just point Boxee at it, though there are some questions whether Boxee and XBMC can read the .nuv files that MythTV records in.

It’s a pretty cool time seeing these convergence devices come to life. The Internet is evolving to add video content, whether it’s TV shows like Hulu or movies & DVD on Netflix. CES is happening this week and seeing the Boxee Box, Popbox and Iomega set top boxes only support this point. There are still some challenges – I’m going to have to give up watching my favorite football team, live sports on ESPN, and waiting to watch some of my TV shows until they release on DVD, but I think it’s worth trying.

The content companies are going to have to evolve. They’re going to need better customer service and better ways to allow consumers access to content. (And I’m willing to put up with the movie studios stupid rental window on Netflix if it means more streaming content). My hardware arrived today and now I’m off to start installing all this stuff….

eBook Readers & the Publishing Industry

I’ve been wanting an eReader for a while. When the Kindle first launched, I was in awe. I quickly sat down and calculated the number of books I buy in a year and compared that against the cost of a Kindle and the savings of buying an e-book for $10 vs. the hardcover price. Let’s just say there wasn’t much of a savings. I finally got to touch a Kindle at GUADEC this summer, and my mind was made up that I had to have an eReader in the near future.

I love tech gadgets and am an early adopter. I also love content and media, and own hundreds (if not over a thousand now) music CDs, hundreds of movies (including Blu-Ray that I bought over 2 years ago), and tons of books. My bookshelves are full to bursting in my office, and I have boxes of books stored in my closet without room to display them.

I’ve waited patiently debating an eReader. I travel once or twice a month for work, and having an eReader would definitely save space. This week, my flight was delayed hours on Tuesday, and then canceled later that night. I had finished the book I had brought an hour after getting to the airport, and then bought another one swearing in my head the whole how I wished I had a an eReader.

The good news is that when Barnes & Noble announced the nook last month that I pre-ordered one. As much as I love Amazon (I buy almost everything there now – movies, music, books and electronics) I found the nook more aesthetically pleasing as well as it was running Android, and the formats they’re using seem a bit more open than the Kindle. (My nook is supposed to ship tomorrow, still crossing my fingers with all the delays they’ve had for the last week or two!)

But now comes word that the publishing industry doesn’t get it and is fears change and the changing financial models. It’s rumored that Amazon loses $2 per eBook bought, and now we are hearing the publishers want to delay new releases 4 months after the hardcover comes out but before the paperback comes out. When will content companies figure out that not giving consumers what they want is bad for business?

There are authors (Iain Banks, Chuck Palahniuk, Neal Stephenson, Neil Gaiman) that I will always buy the physical copy. I want to continue to build on my collections and there is a tactile difference in having a physical book. But I will buy many more books once I have my nook. I’ve already been adding to wishlist on bn.com for the moment my nook arrives. I have dozens of posts tagged “books” in my RSS reader that I want to buy. The fact that they’re slightly cheaper as an eBook and no shipping is nice, but having immediate wireless delivery right to my eReader is even better.

So the publishers are worried that Amazon (and to a lesser degree Barnes & Noble) have set a pricing ceiling of $9.99 per book. We’ve been through this argument before – the record industries felt Apple had set a similar ceiling that songs were only worth $0.99 and now we’ve seen new releases and popular tracks increase to $1.29 this year. And that’s ok. I worked in the retail industry for 15 years and have been through anti-trust training a couple of times. The publishers can set their price and the retailer can sell it for whatever they want.

If the publishers are so worried, why are they not raising the cost of the books? If Amazon is losing $2 per book, that means the cost to Amazon is $12. If the publishers raise it to $15, it will make the retailers re-consider whether losing more money is acceptable. While the publisher can’t dictate the actual retail price sold, they do have options. And lowering the cost after it’s been released a while happens all the time across all retail categories. There is no reason that months after the release the cost comes down and the retailer can re-price, at say, $9.99. This is seen all the time in the movie space, though rarely in music. Now that we are starting to have competition in the eReader space there are all kinds of tricks the publishers can do to partner with the retailer to save the retailer money on the back end as well, including marketing development funds, sell through credits and more.

But for the publishers to flatly state “We won’t release an eBook for 4 months” won’t make consumers happy. Nor, in my opinion, will it make consumers buy a hardcover once they’ve invested $200-$400 in an eReader. I’ve learned this lesson – I rarely buy a movie on new release day for $20-$30 when I subscribe to Netflix and know if I wait 3-6 months I can probably get it for $10-$15 on sale (I just got Watchmen on Blu-Ray for $10 last week!).

At this point, it’s difficult to read the future. These statements from the publishers could just be posturing as they dig in for negotiation with the retailers. But I’m not hopeful. There are plenty of lessons for content providers to learn from in the music battles of the last 10 years. And if there is one lesson they should employ, it’s to extend and embrace the new models rather than try to prop up a dying business model. Change is hard – and if consumers want to buy more books because they have an eReader, it’s in the publisher’s best interest to figure out how to do that, rather than making it harder for consumers to buy from them.

Family D&D

Wil Wheaton is blogging about something I’ve always wanted to do, which is to run a D&D campaign for his son. (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5).

I even went so far as a couple of years ago in buying the 3rd edition Players Handbook, DM Guide and Monster Manual, but I never did run a campaign.

Why not?

I suck as a DM.

I’m just not creative or flexible enough that when a player throws me for a curve to react. I’ve also struggled in being descriptive enough in bringing a world to life. Wil Wheaton touches on these and more in Part 5, Lessons Learned:

The more descriptive, the better. But didn’t I just say keep it simple? Yes, but these things aren’t mutually exclusive. While I can keep the story simple, I can still work hard to make the encounters more than moving figures around and rolling dice. For example, Nolan used a power to rip his maul through a pair of minions who were adjacent to him. He hit them both, but instead of just saying that, I told him, “your maul crashes through its head, streaming blood and gore behind it as the power of your swing carries into the other one. Their bodies fall to the ground with a wet thud.”

When the rogue rolled particularly well with a ranged attack, I told him, “your dagger whistles through the air toward your target, and catches it in the throat as it lunges toward you. Its eyes widen and glaze over as it falls down, dead.”

I also added smells, sounds, and anything else I could do to make the tower they were in really feel old and decaying. It helps that I’ve read more fantasy genre fiction than I’d like to admit.

Don’t be afraid to improvise. When it looked like the final encounter, which should have delivered the greatest challenge, was going to be a cakewalk, I just looked at some stat blocks and added a few more creatures to the encounter so it would feel more climactic. I knew I had the cleric back in the cell, and if things got really, really bad, he could figure out a way to race in and save the day (as a general rule, though, I don’t recommend doing things like this too frequently, or your players will figure it out and act accordingly.)

My son is 13 now. It’s time to get off my butt and see if I can’t figure out how to be a decent DM and get a session going.

Fringe

Fringe is my new favorite TV show of the season, with Life on Mars being a close second. Fringe, created by JJ Abrams of Alias, Lost and Cloverfield fame, is to me, the X-Files meets Lost. (Which probably explains why I love it so much).

Fringe is roughly half way through it’s first season, and most of the episodes have been standalone and self contained to introduce the new viewer to the characters and over arching storyline. Now it’s just starting to get good, as the over arching storyline is coming into focus, and we’re getting hints of what’s to come. And of course it left us for the next month on a big cliffhanger!

One of the many mysteries we’ve been introduced to, in addition to “The Pattern”, is a gentleman called “The Observer” whom we met in one episode. Now Fox has released on their YouTube channel clips of all the easter eggs of every episode on where The Observer is hidden, and I know I missed picking him out in most of them.

Fringe Television has edited all the clips together:

If you’re not watching Fringe, you should be. And how can you not love the fact they tell you before each commercial break when the show is coming back (60 or 90 seconds). Great for DVR users!

(Via Fringe Television)

Netflix

After a two year break, I signed up for Netflix again. Towards the end of my last subscription, I was paying $15 / month to hang on to two or three DVDs I never got around to watching. I’m the type of customer Netflix loves – really active, then a couple months of inactivity.

To curb my habit of buying Blu-Ray movies (they’re so pretty in HD!), I signed up again yesterday. And today comes news they are offering unlimited watching of movies online. Of course, it’s Windows only, so sucks to be me. Still not a good enough reason to use Windows though!

Blu-Ray goes for the knockout blow

The news is everywhere: Warner, the last remaining major studio to support both high def video formats in HD-DVD and Blu-Ray has announced that as of May they will support Blu-Ray exclusively.

Toshiba, owner of the HD-DVD patent? Suprised. And even better, Warner, unlike Universal when they went HD-DVD exclusive, didn’t take a dime.

Even though both formats are burdened with DRM, I have to say I love my Blu-Ray player – it’s amazing the difference in HD. I’m glad I made the right call. Thanks Warner!