Did you notice they remade Skins for american audiences, and it's a scene for scene copy. If american's are so stupid that their own tv exec's think they wouldn't be able to understand it, I would have thought more would need changing than just the accents, slang, locations and character's names. Unless that's it. Maybe american's just can't understand english at all, or tolerate the rest of the world actually existing or maybe they just don't get foreign slang. It could be that the unfamiliar scares them. That could explain the whole USA vs the world thing that's been going on for ages now.

I really loved the original Skins series (uk), and look forward to the next season, 5. After watching the pilot, even though it's a copy of the uk one, I'm hoping with longer seasons they can create original content which is actually good. If they just merge the first 2 seasons of Skins into one season though, I don't think that'll work very well. One thing that did annoy me was the bleeping out of swear words. I'm still amazed that a few words offend so many stupid americans yet all the violence you could ever want is proudly portrayed as entertainment. It's also obvious that bleeping out a few words doesn't prevent kids from learning them and using them as every second word in a sentence.

Another amusing point, like the uk version there are webisodes up on the web site. Unlike the UK it tried to insist I'm not allowed to watch it, despite downloading the video data onto my machine. That's stupid for at least 2 reasons: 1) client side deny is bound to be busted one way or another so don't bother. 2) as soon as the flash player app loads start pre-loading the stream before denying based on IP address? I guess 2 wouldn't be an issue if they got 1 right, but the bit that (historically) annoys me is we pay for quota here, so by forcing something down to my browser you're costing me money, and then denying me the right to play it is just inviting me to copy the stream resource out of the page and play it myself. Though that's more a historic thing now, since we have so much quota it's getting complicated to use it all without just wasting it on rubbish.

I've said it to a few people already and tonight I noticed it again. Many of the new shows are simply recycling old story lines from similar shows that came before them.

Tonight's example; Modern Family 2x11 "Slow Down Your Neighbors". Two story lines were recycled from Malcolm in the Middle.

Specifically:

1) Claire having issues with a speeding motorist in the neighborhood - similar to MitM 2x02 "Halloween Approximately" where Hal builds an illegal speed bump in the street to slow down the speeding motorist in the blue car. In both cases the family reported it to the police who didn't do anything.

2) Gloria not knowing how to ride a bike and getting taught by a son (in this case, not her son, but it was more comical as the son teaching her was younger than her own). In this case Luke teaches her the hard way by scaring her away with a super soaker. Similar to MitM 7x17 "Hals Dentist" where Reese finds out Lois never learned how to ride a bike and teaches her the hard way, by crashing into her so she knows how to fall.

Off the top of my head I can't find any previous examples from The Middle, Modern Family or Better with you. In future I will take more careful notes. I'm sure there was something in Modern Family 2x05 "Unplugged" which was recycled (apart from the obvious Seinfeld 4x11 The Contest link), but short of re-watching it I'm not sure; it was a great episode.

In many ways all three of these shows are doomed to reuse various subplots as aspects of them all are shared in time old classics. Or much more specifically; The Middle shares the same family setting as MitM.

I guess this leads nicely into a long overdue TV update. Following on from previous traditions.

Shows I've finished watching (for now);

Treme - I guess I expected it to be more like The Wire. By itself it's probably ok, but it felt like it wasn't going anywhere and in many ways highlights the futility and pointlessness of existence contrasted against strong community bonds under tension during a time of crisis. So far only the first season has aired.

Curb Your Enthusiasm - To start with it was hard to get into, but then it just flowed like water. Maybe not as good as Seinfeld, but still up there with that style of comedy.

Misfits - A show from E4 in the UK. You could liken it to a comedy take on randomly assigned super powers, not at all like Heroes (ugh). I like UK comedy. Season 2 just finished.

Show that are still airing and I'm watching;

Modern Family - was recommended on a news.com.au article and it's funny, second season, still watching.

The Middle - new take on MitM really. I like it, though I don't think it's not likely to last as long however. Currently second season.

Better With You - Similar in style to the above two, again more recycled ideas. Not sure if I'll continue with this one. Currently first season.

Blue Mountain State - not sure why I kept watching, second season now. Might stop. Brain failing.

Stargate Universe is now another loser on this list, canceled midway through season 2, they'll finish off the season and that will be it. Honestly I'm not surprised (from a critic esq perspective) but I am disappointed because I really liked the show.

We had another whole season of Dexter and Chuck in there too, and now Top Gear is back for season 16. Just noticed that episode 2 of Pioneer One is out. Also just noticed I spent part of tonight blogging rather than watching tv.

Bring it on !

So I moved some PC's around the house to solve various problems, and managed to get xbmc working sweet on the ASRock ION 330 box. Even 1080p playback with digital audio pass through working, all on the existing Fedora install.

Then I proceeded to make a cut down installer, with the goal of at least putting a smaller disk in the machine, if not running it from a flash drive. Sure I could use a live distro for it, but I'd like to run a few other small apps on it and not have the overhead of distro jumping. Also, if it's binary compatible with my desktop other options open up too. No, I don't think compiler cache on an atom is a good idea.

So I booted up a minimal install (via kickstart) of fedora, with a few select packages added including xbmc (and thus the external repositories) with the massive assumption that the dependencies are setup right. Well normally it's ok, but in this case I ended up with a gdm with no fonts and xbmc segfaulting on load. I'm not even sure if any fonts were present on the box at all, and adding some specific font packages didn't make the boxes go away, though I was just guessing. Eventually to cut a long story short, I did a yum groupinstall gnome-desktop and saved a copy of the packages it was going to install (just in case) and that resulted in both gdm working right, and xbmc working.

Not liking that solution I methodically went through the list removing packages until I found the ones that broke it, urw-fonts for gdm and pulseaudio-module-x11 for xbmc's segfault in libGl.so. PulseAudio caught me by surprise, because to get pass through audio working initially I'd removed ALL pulseaudio-* packages. Xbmc uses alsa for audio which can do digital audio pass through.

Since then I figured, why mess around with gdm and so on, just replace gdm with xbmc and you're done. So off I go on a quest of upstart knowledge which to date I've not had to deal with because everything just works.

What can I say. I'm totally amazed how this got into any distro let alone fedora. There is no single source of complete documentation at all. There's a getting started guide which is ok, but nothing beyond that. The wiki's pages are a boiler plate joke and appear all out of date. The source package had a diagram in it for event state transitions, which was nice to see, but there was no other useful documentation in there at all. Even more amazing was the lack of safe way to disable a service; either rename it's .conf file or alter it's start stop methods to add keyword never (of course there's no list of keywords documented anywhere I could find). Holy frozen shit on a stick. Fedora's site even listed documentation as a requirement, which was marked as fixed, but didn't link to it, nor could I find it. Either way, I managed to make a service (if you could call it that) which could start and stop xbmc on instruction from initctl. But I couldn't get it to start at the end of the boot process, even using the same triggers as gdm was using (with gdm disabled of course). Even worse, while playing with these start/stop event triggers I managed to get into the situation where reboot didn't work until you did it a second time (via ssh – as the local console was shutdown by that stage). So I bashed on and on battling it, not really making any progress, tried various ways of doing it, moved to a sysv style script which I got working much faster (and correctly starting at the end of the boot process) however xbmc was not able to output any audio at all.

To cut another very long frustrating story short, I went back to gdm with auto login, and it's auto login delay seems to not be able to be set to zero. I was playing with using slim instead which could do that, but still couldn't get audio.

Honestly I'm not sure what's going on there, it doesn't make any sense, but my time is worth more to me so for now that will do. Though I might make a list of various combination's to try if time allows.

So in cutting yet another story short - as this post is now well overdue - I've produced a fedora 14 kickstart installer that is quite minimal, blows the whole disk away and installs xbmc. On bootup it auto logs in and even grabs my xbmc configuration during the install - so on it's first boot up, it boots up into xbmc with working auto mounted NFS shares and digital audio out. Win. With a bit of polish and some changed password hashes I'll upload it to share.

This post was going to be about something totally different but also broken. Maybe soon.

Caution: This whole post is filler.

I realise I should blog more often, each with less length, maybe sticking to one or two topics rather than a whole update of everything.

So to get the ball rolling a bit more, here's a cough quick tv update (no spoilers):

Stargate Universe - back for season 2. The way season 1 started I was sure it was going to get canned, but alas the second half of the season picked up and it got renewed. So far only 2 episodes have aired and at least stuff has happened.

Weeds - why did I not wait until the end of the season before starting to watch? With the awesome way season 5 ended, new found respect for Shane (pounds chest) and more on the fly developments bound to occur, I foolishly started watching and watched the first 7 episodes in one sitting. Of course there weren't any more out at the time. Still one of my all time favourite shows.

Modern Family - initially I wasn't convinced about the success of this show, I was put onto it by a news article listing a heap of high rating US shows being picked up by a local free-to-air network. So I watched it, and honestly enjoyed it. It's comical and the confession style “interview with the camera” side bars are entertaining. Now in it's second season I will continue to watch.

The Middle - also now in it's second season, this has returned for another go. I liked it, and still do. It's got a touch of what I liked about Malcolm in the Middle, with some fresh ideas and a new take on it. Some stories are nearly identical to various Malcolm's but with a twist due to the changed cast. I doubt its longevity, though I hope we get another season or 2 out of it.

Dexter - Honestly, the way the end of the last season was played I wouldn't have been totally bothered if the show ended there. It must be very hard for a writer to end a show nicely. There's always going to be unanswered questions and ideas that never went anywhere. I am however glad that Dexter is back for another season, now it's 5th. I really should read the books.

Community - also back for season 2, this community college campus set comedy has elements for everyone to like. Not 100 percent sure which elements I like and hate, but the dynamics between the characters continues to evolve as the story progresses. It's good to see Chevy Chase is still in comedy and doing a good job.

The Big Bang Theory - excellent as usual. Chuck Lorre does know how to make a good comedy. Some days the more I see of Sheldon’s behaviour the more I see myself. Spooky. Perhaps a Halloween costume in the making.

Two and a Half Men - back for season 8, holy cow. Having watched the whole show from the beginning it's amazing to see how many developments get referenced later on, and it’s clear that Charlie’s starting to slow down.

Chuck - back for season 4. Even after the Buy More was destroyed at the end of the last one too, whoops SPOILER. Casey's comic relief continues to amuse.

The Inbetweeners - the Brit's know how to make a decent comedy. This has to be the only show that makes me laugh so hard it hurts and not just once or twice. Nearly every episode is that good. Back for a third season, of 6 episodes though.

True Blood - not your twilight style vampire vs warewolves. The third season picked up from where the second left off. I'm glad I waited until all had aired before watching, and you just need the next and the next and the next.

Eureka - back, and awesome. More time travel related stuff going on, so you get to question what happened, if it happened and any character could be changed for good or bad.

Warehouse 13 - I only watched this when I heard it was going to have a cross over episode with Eureka, and fortunately there was only 13 episodes at the time. At first it was a bit odd, then the characters grow on you, and it becomes great. On the surface it seems like there’s endless potential for basically the same story over and over, which would be a bad thing, except there’s always new twists and ideas to mix in. The cross over episodes were mildly amusing, perhaps I expected more. Though it did highlight the vast contrast between the norms of two shows when approaching a similar problem. The retro steam punk stuff in the warehouse is also cool. You don't need to get as emotionally involved with this one, and most episodes are fairly self contained. It's got to be close to being on my list of all time favourites.

The IT Crowd - it feels like it's been ages since season 3 aired. I thought season 2 was a bit of a let down, but 3 brought back maybe what I liked about it and 4 continues on from there. Though now I think about it, I can't really remember anything that happened this season either.

Degrassi - now onto it's tenth season and it seems to have a slight format change. Wow ten seasons. Ok I only really started watching it around season 8, and the formula seems to be the same. Watching stuff like this makes me think that even I could write kids TV.

Better With You - a new show from ABC Family network, I saw the promo for it during Modern Family and gave it a go. So far it's very similar, just different characters and setting. Similar idea though, 3 couples, all related, comedy ensues. Not sure if it’ll get renewed, though I have been wrong countless times before.

Pioneer One - a made for p2p show. The idea behind this one is very awesome. Despite the obviously non studio budget, when I watched it I was totally absorbed by the idea. What if the Russians did land people on Mars in the 80's right before the collapse of the cold war... At the time I was going to donate them some cash, but unfortunately I had none due to Timor etc. Though they did manage to raise enough for the rest of the season to be filmed, I'll have to send them some money now.

Entourage - the season's already ended and this time it ended different to the norm. Always a laugh and it's good to see Ari back in the hot seat and more developments of Drama's career. Turtle provides most of the minor distraction plots this season with one of them breaking into the main story in a humorous way. Unfortunately for Vince though things seem to be not so rosy career wise.

Sons of Tucson - ahh a loser of the season. Honestly I liked this show, it was quirky enough, loveable characters and its outrageous background story would have left heaps of room for plot developments. Unfortunately the network thought otherwise, and killed it. A recent Family Guy episode even made a joke about it. It was produced by Justin Berfield (Reese from Malcolm in the Middle) who I have a lot of respect for after his excellent job on both Unhapply Ever After and Malcolm in the Middle.

Quick cartoon wrap up. Simpsons season 22, Family Guy season 9 now in HD, American Dad season 6 also now in HD, The Cleveland Show season 2. Futurama season 6 been and gone. At first it seemed different, but now it's back to normal and welcome in my house anytime. Oh and last but not least, South Park season 14. First cab off the rank is Cartman doing a parody of Talladega Nights.

See what I mean, this whole post was filler. Regular service might resume in a few days.