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If You’ll Permit a Bit of Self-Congratulation…
…I am rather proud of myself. Yesterday I spent a number of hours hacking on the computers comprising our home theater setup. When Rachel came home that night and wanted to watch TV, it “just worked.” Over the course of those hours I tweaked some motherboard settings to significantly reduce the fan noise (and hopefully…
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Graduate Productivity
For me, digital task management began with Microsoft Outlook somewhere in my “tween” years. By the time middle school came around, I was syncing it with a Windows Mobile PDA, awkwardly carrying it around wherever I could. Today, I find myself using Producteev to try and wrangle the myriad of to-do items that come with being a married…
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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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Necro-Boot
I have been trying to figure out why this new video card isn’t working with Zoe, so I necromanced Tess to serve as a test system. It’s fun pressing the power button by shorting contacts with a screwdriver.
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More Media Tracking
Ever since I started using Last.fm, I’ve been looking for similar services for other forms of media I intake. Goodreads was an excellent find, providing a lot of similar features geared toward books. It’s fun to integrate “what I’m doing” type lists into my website, but more than that the two services have generated some…
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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…
Matter, Energy, and Life of Michaela A. Castello.