Archive for December, 2008
-
31 Dec 2008
It’s been several years since microATX motherboards became commonplace, kicking the Home Theater PC movement into high gear. While researching hardware to build a new desktop computer, I ran into an interesting question: Can it be an HTPC? The “HT” part of the quotient would require it to be able to connect to my television, which is currently in a different room than my desktop, and I want to be able to still sit down at the computer. I don’t want heavy VGA running from the machine down the hallway. So it seems like I’ve only got a couple of options:
- Run cables down the hallway, and hope M doesn’t notice. (Good luck).
- Wireless video. Half junk, half expensive vapor.
- A thin client like a Sun Ray on my desktop.
- Give up and pick either a new desktop, or an HTPC.
Right now, option 3 sounds the most promising. There are a handful of people who have talked about hooking high-end thin clients up to their TV to act as a home theater interface, but I’ve found no discussion of doing it the other way, as far as I can tell. I’ll be investigating this deeper over the next few weeks. But experimentation might be too expensive; I might just end up going for option 4.
Discuss (2) -
31 Dec 2008
"Believe it or not, that Wordpress 2.7 upgrade was pretty painless"
-
31 Dec 2008
"A foot of snow and zero-degree wind chills? Looks like a New Year at home with the wife."
-
30 Dec 2008
-
30 Dec 2008
-
30 Dec 2008
"The Boston library has finally decided that not emailing me when there's a book waiting for me is not effective."
-
30 Dec 2008
-
29 Dec 2008
"@mathowie That was a quick movie progression for Fiona. I would have taken it slower."
-
28 Dec 2008
"The wind is making the Patriots/Bills game sort of a joke."
-
26 Dec 2008(Part of) A Day in the Life of Gus
Time-lapse from 6:58am to 1:18pm. You can see me leaving in the second and third frames. I plan to do this again, but I'll only have a photo every 90 seconds, plus I'll turn off "photo preview" so the LCD doesn't turn on at all.
-
26 Dec 2008
"@bradsucks May I suggest something from Wikipedia? http://tinyurl.com/7rfau7"
-
26 Dec 2008
-
25 Dec 2008
-
23 Dec 2008
An alternative to the build-from-scratch is a Shuttle barebones kit, $299 from NewEgg for case, mobo, and power. -
23 Dec 2008
-
22 Dec 2008
"The first episode of Law and Order season 6 is completely awesome. Thanks, Brian!"
-
22 Dec 2008
Remarkably precise, from Ken Jennings himself.
-
22 Dec 2008
The Patriots beat the Cardinals 47-7, and the losers are the ones who clinched their division. The Pats need to win and need either the Ravens or (better yet) the Dolphins to lose next week in order to make the playoffs. Either way, when Brady was lying on the field ten minutes into week 1, I don't think anyone expected them to even do this well.
-
22 Dec 2008
For my birthday and Hannukah, my wife gave me what I asked for: permission to build a new desktop to replace my aged Athlon.
-
20 Dec 2008
"Searching the basement for something to identify the parking spot I just dug out. Ah, Southie."
-
20 Dec 2008
It’s been a week since I posted Film Addict. It got posted to kottke.org, Slashfilm, USAToday.com, and became a Twitter and Facebook meme on some level. At this point, it has received 100,000 pageviews, and it was filled out 37,000 times (peaking at a rate of over 1000 per hour, but at this point still about once a minute).
Lessons learned:
- If I use strict and warnings, I should keep an eye on the Apache error log. I generated 10GB of errors in the first 24 hours, filling up /var on my webhost, which resulted in 8 hours of downtime during the Slashfilm surge.
- Google Adsense now allows “personal” domains. I tried to sign up in 2004, when Weboggle was all the rage, and I was turned down because it lived under plutor.org. I’m not sure when the policy changed, but I applied this week and was approved on Thursday.
- Google ads don’t really make you much money. At this point, the ads on the Film Addict page have made me $2.90, but even if I had had them from day one, I’d only have made about $15.
- I sleep fine at night, even after creating something clearly intended to be meme-fodder.
- With enough data, you can get awesome bell curves. Histogram of number of movies seen:
It didn’t end up going much of anywhere on Digg or Reddit or Delicious. I’m not sure why, but I think part of it might have been the individual nature of the form. You could compare your list against your friends’, but there was no community interest. Another factor (especially on Delicious) was the unique id in every posted URL; there could never be enough posts of a single URL to get any momentum.
-
19 Dec 2008
"There would be 3x people here if there wasn't a hella snow storm."
-
19 Dec 2008
-
18 Dec 2008
"Imogen Heap: The perfect cure to Christmas music stuck in my brain"
-
18 Dec 2008
Another vital scientific discovery! I'm throwing out my hat today.
