Abort, Rephrase, Ignore?

We’ve had a bit of a change in circumstance, such that we expect to be able to buy our own house in the next six months or so. We could, in theory, even do it in a few weeks, but this is important enough to be worth doing carefully.

We’re gradually settling on Sunbury and Werribee as the places we need to be looking first. Both are ~40 minutes by train from the Melbourne CBD, and both have houses and villa units with 2-3 bedrooms within our range reasonably near the station and other facilities.

Sunbury seems to be winning at the moment, as we spent a fair bit of time researching it for rental options a few months ago and there are a lot of two-bedroom villas in the ~$200k area, and a reasonable number of 3-bedroom places if we’re willing to walk up to 1.5km to get to town. There are also 3+ bedroom houses closer in around ~$300k, which is something we could consider moving up to in five to ten years once there’s enough equity in the first property.

But we haven’t visited either yet and it’ll be a while before we’re ready to do more than simply research options. Werribee may well make something of a comeback.

Anything closer in is pretty much unaffordable if you don’t drive, and the eastern-fringe suburbs where we could afford to buy near a station are an hour or more by train. Almost all the new development areas have no real public transport, if you’re lucky you get one bus route that stops at 3PM. Caroline Springs is a prime example: it could be a pretty reasonable place to live if only it had viable public transport!

But a place like Werribee or Sunbury seems to have much of what you need within a few kilometres, so the worst-case scenario is the occasional short-ish taxi ride so long as you get somewhere close enough to shops, station, and school.

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The single most useful additional feature any real-estate listings site could add, in my opinion, would be compulsory “distance to x” data. We’d want x to be things like railway stations, tram stops, and supermarkets, but I can see that other people might want freeways and schools.

The problem as always isn’t with technical implementation, it’s with getting agents to find and then enter that sort of data. It’s not difficult to figure out — given an address and knowledge of the area you can get the distance out of Google Maps pretty quickly — but we’re talking here about people who often can’t be bothered even including more than one photo of a property.

Those agents who do include some information in the text typically put it in terms of “minutes”. Which usually means “by car”. So “close to shops, schools and station” can be anything up to five kilometres away. At least having it expressed in distance rather than trip-length would be unambiguous and useful to everyone.

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Our cheap DivX-capable DVD player is starting to misbehave so I’ve been looking around at suitable replacements. The “obvious” direct replacements to my mind are the Pioneer DV600AV-S (~AU$200) and the Denon DVD1730 (~AU$350). Neither of these are as cheap as one could go, but we use our DVD player a lot so a little extra for something better than the minimum is worth our while.

But it’s left me thinking about bigger and better options. We get a lot of rental DVDs, and they’re often scratched in ways that make them unsuitable for a regular player but just fine (if a bit slow) to rip. At the moment I’m ripping everything we get and converting to DVD5 written to DVD-RW. When we’re done I erase the disc and re-use it.

Skipping the physical media bit is appealing, and thus something like a Mac Mini (AU$850) is an interesting idea. Unfortunately our TV only does component/svideo/composite inputs so we’d be reduced to svideo in that instance, and my experience trying to get OS X to display properly to a widescreen over svideo has not been great so I’m extremely hesitant to pay so much money.

That leaves other homebrew HTPC options, and I’m not sure I have the time or energy to do that justice yet again, even if I do have pretty much all the parts.

Standalone network players don’t look great. There are some from Netgear and D-Link, but they don’t have optical drives or a local hard disk. There’s the latest incarnation of the old Zensonic Z500 (”Zevia”, rebranding for no apparent reason) but I’m dubious about their software quality. The Beyonwiz unit looks pretty nifty, until you get to the fine print (you can’t use the DVD player if it’s recording to the internal disk, WTF?).

Then I read that the next XBox 360 update will include DivX support. Hm. ~AU$750 for the “elite” model with the 120GB disk. There have been a few games released lately that have made us give a new console some thought (Rock Band and Mass Effect, basically). If, and it’s a big “if”, the DivX support turns out to be pretty solid then it’s going to be a very tempting option. The one big gotcha I see right now is that they are explicitly saying they will not support subtitle streams or files, but we could probably live with that and just burn the subs into the video — most DivX files we play are ones we’ve made ourselves anyway.

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