I wanted to show the Mentos-Diet Coke video on my TV and was happy to discover there is now an XBMC script for browsing and playing Google Video.

As well as the aforementioned Mentos video, my kids and I had a great time watching soccer highlights and nature videos. Vastly more entertaining than anything we would have found on cable.

I’ve been trying Carbonite online backup. [Update: Buyer beware: A number of users in the comments section below report difficulty restoring their data and in contacting customer service. ]

It’s an appealing value proposition attractively priced– $5/month for “unlimited” backup of all of the documents on your PC, or $50 for a year if you pepay.

So far so good; it’s been very easy to set up and immensely reassuring to have automatic offsite backup.

With a price that low there are naturally a couple caveats to the “unlimited” backup offer.

The terms of use have clauses to prevent “abuse” which could either be very concerning or a non-issue depending on how aggressively they are enforced. “YOU WILL BE IN VIOLATION OF THIS POLICY IF, WITHIN ANY MONTH, YOUR USAGE GREATLY EXCEEDS MORE THAN THE AVERAGE LEVEL OF MONTHLY USAGE OF CARBONITE’S PAID SUBSCRIPTION CUSTOMERS GENERALLY.” The definition of “greatly exceeds” is entirely up to Carbonite. If enforced overly aggressively, someone who simply takes lots of digital photos could easily exceed the average monthly level.

The other caveat is that Carbonite, by design, does not make it easy to restore particular files to a PC other than the original one. You can easily restore particular files to the host PC, but for other PCs you can only easily restore the entire backup. Carbonite wants to be in the backup business, not the file synchronization business, which could lead to much greater ongoing bandwidth usage for a particular user.

If the Carbonite team is listening, I have two suggestions:

* I would happily pay an additonal fee based on bandwidth used to be able to access particular documents remotely on an on-demand basis.

* It would be very useful to be able to see and search the list of folders and filenames that have been backed up through the web site interface. This would provide additional reassurance that the backup has in fact worked.

Update: The comments below from Mike Abrams have some interesting info on how Carbonite handles users with large backup sets. If the size of your backup is more than 50GB, the backup rate is throttled down to 500MB per day. It will complete eventually, but very slowly.