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A Lack of Craft
Good intentions are no match for poor workmanship.
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Pi-Hole Setup
My original Raspberry Pi has languished in my computer toolbox for years, waiting to be assigned a purpose. That purpose was found when it became a Pi-hole.
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HTPC Build 2020
I have been building home theater computer setups for quite some time. In the era of streaming services having an HTPC it is not as useful as it once was, and equivalent devices can be purchased “assembly not required” such as the Apple TV 4K or Vero 4K+. For me, building computers is something I…
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Another HTPC Build
I spent the first couple of evenings this week putting together a new home theater PC for J, our friend, classmate, and neighbor. I wanted to give her enough power to smoothly play 1080p content on her TV, while leaving some headroom for upgrades down the line (and space for extra internal HDDs). All the…
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Home Theater PC: XBMC on Zoe
My new computer setup has an older machine, Zoe, serving media to my TV. Before this, I used TVersity to stream content from my desktop to my XBox, a solution that worked decently well for standard definition content. Unfortunately, the Xbox 360 doesn’t like a lot of the popular containers for HD video, like .mkv,…
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Storage Management
Building a new computer has given me another opportunity to reevaluate how I arrange files on my various hard drives. Significant changes to my system this time around include my decision to give up RAID and my inclusion of a 60 GB solid state drive. The challenge is to decide how to manage my various…
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Meet Summer and Zoe
Even though I’ve been building computers since somewhere around Windows 95, Tess was my first torrid affair. In 2005’s nether summer between high school and college, Jason and I researched components, ordered them from Newegg, and built cutting-edge sister machines. Between her hardware and my Windows customizations, Tess was the hottest computer in Erickson West, if…
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Router Wrangling
My new apartment has a cable hookup in the living room, but Tess (my desktop computer) is on the other side in the office. I had a similar problem at the old place, and solved it by bridging two wireless routers. I end up being able to physically connect Tess and the 360 to the…
Matter, Energy, and Life of Michaela A. Castello.