Mac Mini

I previously wrote about my adventures in setting up a Mac Mini to be a Home Theater PC (HTPC). Part of the Mini's duties, as a HTPC, are to periodically wake up and check various RSS feeds for updates. Unfortunately some of the feeds have a large number of updates daily and checking them once per day means missing updates that have scrolled out of their RSS feed. To insure I did not miss an update I began thinking about how to check each RSS feed multiple times a day while still allowing the Mini to sleep (for the most part) while not actively in use.

A few months ago I was looking at my DirecTV bill. I have it set to auto-pay and, I have to admit, this makes me really lazy about checking it. This is why I was surprised to note that the bill was for $65. A quick look through prior bills showed that they too were all in the $65 neighborhood (sometimes as high as $75 if we'd ordered a pay-per-view movie or two).

"$800 dollars a year?! Holy crap! That's as much as I pay for auto insurance! And that doesn't even count the electricity to keep the TiVo running 24/7*! For what?!"