Noah got digital cable. He wanted to get the Outdoor Life Network, which requires getting Adelphia‘s fancy-pants digital cable. I was (relatively) happy with our fifteen channels, but when a roommate wants to get hundreds of channels, well, why argue?
Anyhow, what’s interesting here is the cable box. It’s incredible. It’s the Scientific-Atlanta Explorer 3100. It has a smartcard slot, S Video, 2 USB slots, 2MB flash memory, 10MB of DRAM, and god-knows-what-else under the hood. I’ve read that it has a 54 MIPS Sun MicroSparc RISC processor, IP filtering, DES decryption and a wicked-fast upstream data transmission system.
I figure there’s some way to get inside this thing. And when I do, I’m going to use that flash memory and DRAM to get Linux on there. If I add a USB hard drive, I’ll bet that I can use the MPEG encoder to store the data on the hard drive. Poof — instant Tivo.
But not right now. Third Rock from the Sun is on.