A little bit about my home network wiring
Since I bought my house last year, I’ve been adding alot of new wiring. I put up a bit of info on the wiring job here.
New software, same blogishness
I switched my blog/news updates software over to wordpress. Hopefully I can leave comments active - I got tired of spammers on the old software and disabled them completely after a while.
HD-DVD players are still handy
I picked up a Toshiba HD-A3. For the money it’s now the best standard def DVD scaler around. Mine came with a pair of free HD discs and a rebate for five more. Hopefully the rebate is still honored. If not, I’ll live since they were titles that I mostly have anyway.
The HD-A3 required a firmware update to play the discs that came in the box. Note: set the ip address stuff up, then turn it off and back on. Then the network feature will work.
I’m happy with the picture - startup time is a bit slow, but if I’m starting from scratch my screen takes that long to lower anyway.
HD - finally worth the effort?
Now that HD content has gotten pretty decent on DirecTV (I use HD+DVRs - HR20s in my case) I’m starting to reconsider my stance on stardard def DVDs. I think I’m going to pick up a Toshiba HD-A3 from Amazon fairly soon. I’ll have a better idea once I compare some upscaled SD DVDs with some actual HD DVD content. I’m still not about to replace much that I own, but I am interested in getting HD versions of stuff like the latest Blade Runner.
Prepping for the new PJ
I’m waiting for my new projector to show up. Since my HT is down ’til the end of the week, I finally took some time to work on my HTPC. It’s a linux box running Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon. My original IR receiver vanished, so I built a new one and just screwed it up inside the edge of my equipment shelf. (recessed into my garage wall).
After some annoying documentation searching I managed to get LIRC configured and set up for a spare TiVo remote. Then I installed Freevo from packages, disabled the built in TV program and setup libdvdcss, etc.
Now I can play media without using a freaking VNC session. Later this month I’m going to add a Logitech Harmony remote and a hardware DVD player to the mix and really get things streamlined.
I’m either going with an Oppo or a Toshiba HD-DVD. The Toshiba’s are cheap now, come with freebie movies and have nearly the same upscaling performance of the Oppo. I’ll probably move my HDMI connection to the DVD player since I can guarantee the source quality and use component for my Satellite given how much the quality varies. Once I upgrade my receiver, I’ll just it to switch HDMI inputs.
Becoming a wine geek
I’ve started down the path of wine geekery. I’ve been enjoying wine for some time, but this year I decided that it’s time to get to know my wine. It’s an odd passion/hobby that combines geography, chemistry, quirks of nature and an excuse to hang out with my beautiful wife or just good friends.
Even if you don’t have an actual cellar, check out cellartracker.com. It’s free, you can track wine you’ve had, want to buy, wish you had or what you’ve been drinking. It has reviews of various wines, making it easy to decide what you’d like to try next.
hardened WRT54gs writeup
After nearly of year of downtime, my espresso machine is finally back up. It took me quite a while to figure out what was wrong. Mainly, I just didn’t want to consider that the heat exchanger had failed inside the boiler. Once I determined that it was probably the boiler, it took me several months of trying on and off to locate a replacement.
It turns out that most of the specialty espresso shops only care to carry the parts that they list - or to service people who bought their machines from them. I was very dissapointed with several shops who’d previously seemed reliable. I have to highly reccomend 1st-line equipment. They hooked me up with a used boiler - and offered to order a new one, but let me know that they take a couple of months to show up from Italy.
Deal, I’ve been busy.
Between the house, hack-a-day, defcon 15 and work, it’s been nuts. I finally started to recover some of my workshop space from all the stuff that we stored when we were moving. This is a little visualization of some of it. A new containment/cooling system for the mill, inset cabinet to hold my home theater gear from the living room, small network cabinet for my patch bay and switch, and electronics work space.
Tonight I’m hoping to get the inset cabinet built for my ht gear. We’re looking forward to getting the wires out of sight and recovering the floor space.