I'm Hooked!

BY: PRATYATOSA DASA

Feb 29, USA (SUN) — [Revised] For the sake of my own Krishna consciousness, I set up a transcendental cable TV station in my (rent free) apartment. I have 3 TVs. The big color TV in the living room/bedroom came with the apartment. I also have a 5" B&W set in the kitchen/storage room that I got on clearance at Wal-Mart several years ago for $20. The 3rd one is a 12" B&W set that I picked it up at a St. Vincent de Paul Thrift Store last week for only $8! It works great! I've got that one in the bathroom.

What's the program source? It's an old XP desktop with an add-on PCI video card with TV (S-video) out. The programming is provided by 2 free programs: the sound by Winamp and the picture by Google Photos Screensaver. However, I haven't been able to get the latest version of Winamp (5.52) to work reliably. It works at first, but then the next time that the computer boots up, it gets a fatal error. Therefore, I've made an older version of Winamp available for downloading. This version seems to be working just fine.

When the computer first boots up, Winamp automatically loads. It then chooses "at random" among 1843 lectures/conversations by Srila Prabhupada. A couple of minutes later, the screen saver starts. It displays a different picture every 5 seconds, choosing "at random" from among 19,494 pictures of Srila Prabhupada! Both the audio recordings and the pictures are copyrighted by the BBTI and are being used with permission." (All CauselessMercy.com web pages containing Srila Prabhupada's ebooks or links to his MP3's will have copyright notices shortly.)

The programming is very interesting because I never know what picture is coming next or which lecture/conversation is going to play next. Quite often, the picture being displayed is one that I've never seen before.

The Google Photos Screensaver is great. Every picture fills the entire screen, and the transitions are fast and smooth. I just wish that there was a way to create a Srila Prabhupada screen saver of the same high quality that would work on old Windows 98SE or ME computers. If you know of such a program, please let me know (pratyatosa@gmail.com).

Besides the TVs and the computer, I needed to purchase an RF modulator (US$16.84 from Wal-Mart). This device is sold as a way to connect DVD players to older TVs that don't have separate audio and video inputs. I also needed various lengths of cable and a couple of splitters, but since my apartment came with free cable TV, I was able to get them for free from the local cable TV company.

I must admit, I'm hooked!

I am thinking that a nice enhancement to the programming would be to include synchronized transcriptions for the MP3s that have it available (See the 3 examples on CauselessMercy.com), and the transcendental slide show for those that don't. This would take some doing, but I'm pretty sure that the whole thing could be accomplished using Internet Explorer 6 or 7, XAMPP , PHP, HTML, and JavaScript.

Your servant, Pratyatosa Dasa