New Media Center Setup

For the last 9 months I have been running a Gateway 901. I didn't buy it new (thank you craigslist.org), and have upgraded it to MCE 2005 and had a Maxtor 500gb drive in it. To up the number of tuners I added an ATI All-In-Wonder 2006 edition as well as a Hauppauge 500MCE dual tuner. Since MCE only supports 2 tuners out of the box, I followed this guide courtesy of The Green Button, a must if you are a Media Center Enthusiast. Finally I loaded it up with 1.5gb of PC2700 ram and let the recordings begin.

Unfortunately the Maxtor drive was not up to the task, and gave up the ghost after 8 months of service. I have since replaced it with a Hitachi Deskstar 500gb model. At first I was concerned that this drive would never be able to keep up as it had a lower cache, and noticeably stuttered several times the first several days during live TV playback. If it is recording 2 shows and you want to watch a third I have found that it is better to record that show and watch the recording rather than trying to watch it live. Other than that, the Hitachi has performed well and I am waiting on my RMA for the Maxtor. I think that the amount of TV my wife records is the reason for the Maxtor crapping out. At times we had upwards of 30 unwatched shows on the Media Center.

To combat disk failure, I am thinking of setting up a multi-spindle OpenSolaris iSCSI target. This is a little overboard for most homes, but gives me a chance to work more with iSCSI and help prevent unscheduled TV outages. If you haven't heard of ZFS, you owe it to yourself to watch this.

Tags: Media Center Gateway Thegreenbutton.org

New Drool Worthy Computer: Surface

The video says it way better than words

Gizmodo Making fun of audio books

Gizmodo ran a story about some audio books from the iTunes store not working, taking a long swipe at the users of such technology as lazy.

I for one utilize audio books, (not from iTunes) because I find myself on a computer 8-14 hours a day, so by the end of the day when I crave some intellectual stimulation my eyes aren't up to the task.

In college I knew several people that were able to complete their course work mainly with the help of audio books to help them overcome near debilitating dyslexia, and still others that suffer motion sickness and are completely unable to read in a moving vehicle.

Just because you have the time, and good physical health to read Mr. Matt Buchanan seems little reason to me to belittle others without your good fortune.

Technorati Filtering the Ticker?

Technorati relaunches yesterday then flinches as the deluge of naughtiness fills the ticker. As noted here by Binary Bonsai. I clicked and before the outage there where many a porn related topic filling the ticker, and I noted with a small amount of glee that it had to make some investor somewhere cringe.

Micheal noted on Techcrunch that there was a "Scheduled maintenance" I will note that the worst that I have seen since is Tranny.



That's my theory, anyone else got a better one?

Tags: Technorati Censorship Porn

Spam Myspace Profiles getting spammed

This profile on myspace wants to be my friend.


Ava

I decided to look at the profile before hitting the deny button, you never know I might know someone named Ava :).

For a sick bit of humor read the comments that she has gotten. I think that this profile started out legit, and was either hijacked or she is trying to make some of those dollars her slutty friends said could be made with myspace. If she shows up on Cam with her we will know that it was the latter.

I have noticed that one upside to Facebook is that no one that I don't know has ever contacted me. Period.

Google Reader update

Dear Google Reader Devs,

I love the work you guys have been doing lately, this reader is much better than that Bloglines reader I left behind a few months ago. That said I have a gripe. The inline email function that you added that is far superior to the old popup on has an unfortunate feature regression that needs to be addressed:


I cannot tab to the send button and hit space to send like the old email to function.


This is very unfortunate. In your free time if you could take care of that, this little love affair of ours will be right back on track.




Convictus

Tags: Google Reader Features Updates

Web Design is Funny

I was watching MochaCity's Rundown, and noticed that the promo pictures on the right where somewhat dismembered.

The other part is just a head.


Too funny, we tear apart photo's and stitch them back together with a table of all things.

Take a Look

A table background, a severed head, and dismembered body. Awesome, all in the name of good style. This is probably over his head(sic), but I wonder if B-ezy knows how the web dev's chopped him up?