Monthly Archives: June 2012

On Holiday

Posted by Steve on June 27, 2012 No comments

Cheers mates!

Just a quick post to say that we are heading off to jolly ol’ England for a bit of a holiday! Many gadgets will be used and pictures will be taken. An interesting note, we are not planning on taking any laptops! This will be a little bit of an experiment. Sarah and I are only taking the iPads and our phones. I’ll stock up on Memory cards and clear off the iPad to use for storage for pictures, but yeah, no laptop.

We rented a flat in London and it is supposed to have Internet access. to spread this into WiFi I picked up a [amazon_link id=”B004T8FC66″ target=”_blank” container=”” container_class=”” ]ZuniConnect Travel Router[/amazon_link]. So far this thing is awesome. It will bridge the connection from a wired LAN to WiFi, or the reverse, Or echo an existing WiFi! This will work out great to share the connection with the iPads and phones. So far I have used it to extend my WiFi connection to a wired only machine and it worked great. More reports to come.

We have a huge list of things to see and fun to be had, including a day trip out to Stonehenge! Keep an eye on Twitter for some potential updates along the way!

HTPC of Doom!

Posted by Steve on June 15, 2012 1 comment

Ok, it wasn’t really of doom, but I liked the title. This last week I have spent a lot of time building my new media PC to be hooked up to my TV. I canceled cable, and my Tivo service and am now relying on online services and rentals. I just got tired of missing things when they aired, the DVR not catching them for some reason and then not being able to see things.

So I built an HTPC (Home Theater PC) to pull in my DVD’s, and play videos straight off the web. I was using my Xbox for this, but, while the Xbox has been coming out with more and more apps to cover everything, it’s still not perfect. So I balanced it out with the HTPC.

Sorry for the low-rez, I was excited

Thankfully, I am friends with an HTPC expert, my friend Louis. The one I built is based on the one he owns. He helped spec out the parts and guided me through the setup. See, I haven’t exactly built a desktop PC in around 8 years. Apparently, a lot has changed since then! All of the parts arrived on Monday afternoon. This was bad. See, I a the type that wants to open and play as soon as I get stuff. So that evening I dove in to start building.

Huge Mistake.

I was up till 1am before I finally got everything installed and running. WIndows was fully patched and ready to go. Then, Tuesday, Louis had me check the mode the Hard drives was running in. Turns out they were defaulted to IDE and needed to be in ACHI. Yeah, when I made the switch (even after following instructions to ensure it wouldn’t happen) the OS was wiped out. I had to do the software portion all over again.

Long story made short, I spent the last few evenings tweaking and configuring. I am now running the following:

[amazon_link id=”B004EBUXHQ” target=”_blank” ]Intel Core i5-2500K Sandy Bridge 3.3GHz (3.7GHz Turbo Boost)[/amazon_link]
[amazon_link id=”B002X578GE” target=”_blank” ]G.SKILL Ripjaws Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333[/amazon_link]
[amazon_link id=”B004Q81CKY” target=”_blank” ]OCZ Vertex 3 VTX3-25SAT3-120G 2.5″ 120GB SATA III MLC Internal Solid State Drive[/amazon_link] (SSD) (Boot Drive)
2 x [amazon_link id=”B0042SGDVG” target=”_blank” ]SAMSUNG EcoGreen F4 HD204UI 2TB SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5″ Internal Hard Drive[/amazon_link] (for 4TB Total)
[amazon_link id=”B0048D7AD0″ target=”_blank” ]SAPPHIRE Radeon HD 6850 1GB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.1 x16 HDCP Ready CrossFireX Support Video Card[/amazon_link]
[amazon_link id=”B005FE52X6″ target=”_blank” ]ASRock Z68 Extreme3 Gen3 LGA 1155 Intel Z68 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard[/amazon_link]
[amazon_link id=”B005HGPPG6″ target=”_blank” ]LIAN LI Black Aluminum PC-C60B ATX Media Center / HTPC Case[/amazon_link]

Needless to say, I may have gone a bit overboard on the hardware for something as simple as a Media Box. However, playing Civ-V on the 47” tv is pretty damn cool.

Downside, I am exhausted. Sleep soon!

Sometimes weird/cool things just happen!

Posted by Steve on June 4, 2012 No comments

This weekend was a pretty productive weekend. We had a great “Guy’s Night” where we introduced @NeuralClone to [amazon_link id=”B0051E9INK” target=”_blank” ]Highlander[/amazon_link], since he had never seen it. (I know, right?) After which we watched Iron Sky. You know, the Nazis on the moon movie. Seriously, go watch that. It’s one of the funniest movies I have seen.

Saturday the weather was amazing so I spent the time outside replacing the thermostat on my truck. This is a big accomplishment for me since I am still convinced that the engine in most cars runs on magical wishes and unicorn dreams. Now if I could just get a starter that works when I shout “ENGINUS COMBUSTUS!” So you can understand that doing any sort of work on a car is a big deal for me. Having finished up this feat of manliness, I decided to take Sarah out for dinner for a nice evening.

This is really where the weird/cool stuff happens.

We drove down to Old Town Manassas to go to a small restaurant called City Square Cafe. It’s a nice little place with outdoor seating. Dinner was good, the company was great. (But then, that’s why I keep her around right?) After dinner we thought we would try our hand at a few GeoCaches that were close by. It made for a good excuse to walk around and enjoy the evening.

No luck on those, by the way. It was dark and we just couldn’t find anything.

When we returned to the car we found this note on the windshield.
Now, you probably know this, but I wear my geek on my sleeve. The back of my MINI has the plate “WIZ-POD”, since my truck has “W1ZZER”, and I have lots of stickers of geeky things. This would have to be one of the first time I have ever been hit on due to my car being geeky.
Sarah and I had a good chuckle about the event and, while I thought it would be weird if I emailed her, Sarah took the initiative and sent off a note to say “Hi!” Clearly it takes a lot of Chutzpah to drop a note like that to meet someone so, you never know, she may be a cool person to know!