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I am the guy with an NRA sticker on the back of my Prius. Some people say I’m conflicted, but I see no problem with frugality.

But I’m paying the “hybrid premium”, you say? Let’s examine that common objection to the Prius.

My daily commute is 90 miles round trip, about 20,000 miles a year just back and forth to work. My Prius has 125,000 miles on it, and I’ll probably trade it in sometime in the next two years. There are at least two ways to approach the cost of driving; one is to buy a more economical car, even if it doesn’t eke out the 51 miles per gallon I get with my Prius. The other is to calculate the total cost of ownership. So I sat down and did some calculations, with just the vehicle purchase price and gas cost in mind (both cars can be expected to have about the same cost of maintenance over 150,000 miles).

The 2012 Ford Focus looks to be a great economy car. It is expected to cost in the $18,000 range, and should get somewhere around 28 MPG. Great mileage. I calculated the total cost of driving 150,000 miles — my average mileage when I trade a car in — at a cost of $3.50 a gallon. The Focus would use 5,357 gallons of gas at a cost of $18,749. That makes the total cost, car purchase plus gasoline, at $36,749.

The 2011 Toyota Prius will be the same as this year’s model, and pricing is expected to be similar at $23,000. At 51 MPG I’m getting with my current Prius, it will burn 2,941 gallons of gas over its 150,000 mile life. Applying that $3.50 cost shows the Prius total gas cost to be $10,294. Add that to the purchase cost of the car, and the Prius costs $33,294 over its life.

The more expensive Prius ends up costing less … $3,455 less … than the less expensive Focus.

Americans don’t buy cars just with personal economics in mind; the ride, comfort, handling and status of a car all figure into the equation. So cost alone won’t be the determining factor.

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PlayOn is a “new media” company purporting to provide the means to stream on-line content from your PC to your living room XBox, PSP, Wii or media PC. For the most part, it works fine, most of the time, providing access to Hulu, CBS, and other online content providers.

The problem with PlayOn: their clumsy attempts to “monetize” the product. Right after buying a one-time “lifetime license”, they announced a “Premium Product” that would have a yearly subscription fee. Early adopters felt betrayed, and PlayOn reacted by announcing a “special price” for the first year of the subscription for those customers. At $4.95, it seemed like a reasonable compromise. Even though it still seemed like a broken promise, it was a $5 broken promise.

I clicked through to subscribe, and found the final insult. The annual fee, to increase to approximately $20 a year after the introductory rate, has to be purchased with a auto-renewal option on your credit card. This means in order to cancel the service you have to proactively remember your renewal date and act before the date arrives. I suspect PlayOn is banking — literally — on subscribers neglecting to be that proactive.

Sorry, PlayOn. You lost me.

I’m usually not that cynical, but I no longer trust this company. They have exhibited, at least, their ignorance of even mediocre customer service skills. Today I received a notice from them that I shouldn’t question, yet I find myself wondering if this is just the first of many events tto encourage premium subscriptions:

We recently had a technical hiccup that affected many of our PlayOn Basic users, where they couldn’t view content from many of the channels included in the Basic license, such as Hulu and Netflix. This was a bug on our part, and we sincerely apologize!

I’m not usually a member of fever swamps, tucking tin foil into my cap and watching out for black helicopters, but as I said, I don’t trust them. This probably was simply a software bug, but the nagging doubt is there.

I may continue to use the “basic” product that will, I’m sure, be more and more limited as the downward spiral of a once promising company has the life squeeze out of it by bad decisions.

xbmc, an open source “front end” for your Xbox and media center PCs, is the likely successor. An active user community is developing scripts to stream Hulu and other on-line content providers from within xbmc. Yes, Virginia, there is a place where the promise of free software is alive and well.

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While I love my iPod, I hate the iTunes software that “must be” used to synchronize my playlists.

MediaMonkey to the rescue. With hundreds of iPod refugees abandoning iTunes, the MediaMonkey community has several synch guides to help people make the transition. I wasn’t concerned about retaining play counts and ratings, so it was even more simple for me.

I had a unique need that I didn’t think could be automated. There are a couple of local radio shows I like to hear, and the national podcast versions cost money and don’t have the local weather, commentary and yes, even local advertisements that I want to hear. I found that I could record the live streaming shows to disk using RadioTime’s Red Button software. But copying them to my iPod was a manual affair.

But MediaMonkey has a paid version with a feature I love: advanced autoplaylists. MediaMonkey’s advanced autoplaylist feature allowed me to specify the folder I save the radio shows in, and synchs the shows automatically to my iPod. It does a lot more, of course, but this feature was especially nice for my needs.

My music is now stored on my Windows Home Server and synchs well to my iPod using MediaMonkey. And the interface for MediaMonkey makes sense: you can highlight songs and press ENTER to get them playing in an ad-hoc playlist.

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I’m always amazed by the Apple Fan Boys, because any time I’m forced to deal with anything from Apple I end up wanting to tear my hair out. Great hardware, but their software is written by the devil.

In preparation for the new system that is coming, I’m trying to head off the pending disaster that is moving iTunes to a new computer. Horror stories abound about this process, and nearly every tutorial out there has been written by someone who has obviously not done it. But I wanted to start organizing now, and try to head off disaster.

I copied every music file to my MediaSmart Server’s “Music” network share. It is organized by Artist / Album in folders. After spending time doing that, I think a fresh install of iTunes will work fine.

But I read a tutorial, from an Apple fan of course, who said to just consolidate your library and then copy that folder over when the new system comes. Well, that sounds easy. But, as with all things Apple, not so much.

Consolidating your library in iTunes means that the program copies all your music files registered in the program from their original locations and puts them in the /My Music/Itunes/Itunes Music/ folder. That sounds nice! So clicking on “File * Library * Organize Library * Consolidate Files” started the process. Then it stopped. With the error message “Copying files failed. The filename was too long or invalid.” But without any indication which file it was, so you are completely in the dark.

Because you can’t rely on Apple to actually fix a problem, you search the various fan sites for a solution. You find this problem has been around since iTunes was introduced, so it must be a “feature” in Apple parlance. And the solutions are either extremely time consuming or ineffective. You could go through your library and select a few songs at a time, right click and select “Consolidate Tracks”. At least that way you know its in that selected group. So I tried that … but it only finds the first one as you narrow down to smaller and smaller groups of files. And iTunes’ non-standard way it treats highlighting and the arrow keys will drive you crazy. One enterprising programmer wrote a little javascript program to tell you that it can’t find the filenames that iTunes is choking on (a valiant effort, but to no good effect).

You can also wade through the XML file to try and find a path that isn’t to the iTunes folder, but that takes forever; every song has about a dozen lines of code in that XML file.

So for me, the solution will be to point a fresh installation of iTunes to my network share and “consolidate” from there, so it copies the files to the local drive. That is, if that will even work.

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We have had an interesting Christmas season at the Hagan household. A refrigerator died just before Thanksgiving, then our old 36″ CRT TV died two weeks later. So our Christmas presents were replacement appliances.

We set out to get a 52″ Samsung LCD TV, but our local Fry’s Electronics had a great sale on their new 55″ “LED” model, the Samsung UN55B7000 (it actually is a LCD model with LED a backlight). What a great set, but it wouldn’t fit in the entertainment niche with the shelves I had constructed. So out they came, and new woodwork is being put in place.

From the department of “One Thing Leads to Another”, the TV has “connectivity”, so we are hoping to get the grandkid’s pictures and home videos streaming to the family room rather than crowding everyone into the office upstairs. So I ran Cat5e ethernet, coax and telephone lines down to the entertainment niche by dropping from the attic, under the bedroom floor, then down to the first floor family room. Quite a process, but the connection is now much faster than with wireless.

I found a factory recertified HP MediaSmart EX485 Windows Home Server for $329 (now it looks like it is $349). I had been looking at the Acer easyStore model, but it is rarely under $400 now. HP has done a great job with this machine; it is backing up our various computers, running as a print server (an undocumented feature), and is able to stream media to the Samsung TV. But the included utilities on the TV are not very robust. For instance, I’m not able to pause, rewind or fast forward on my copies of digital movies now stored on the server. While they stream beautifully, once you start its all or nothing!

Because of that I’m going to add a Western Digital WD TV Live Network-ready HD Media Player to enable things like fast forward, rewind, pause, etc. The UI looks pretty slick on this, and I understand the box can be controlled by my Logitech Harmony 880 Remote.

It has been fun getting techy again, but “real life” will be back soon enough.