Matter, Energy, and Life of Michaela A. Castello.

Tag: home.theater

  • FreeNAS: Reverse Proxy, NextCloud, and Joplin

    This is a mega-project that has existed as various schemes scrawled in my notebook for quite some time, likely approaching the order of years. I have long wanted to put my storage to use replacing Dropbox as my source of between-device file syncing, and I’ve been cautious of note-taking apps ever since being forsaken first…

  • 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…

  • HTPC: XBMC on Ubuntu Minimal

    I wrote this article up a while back, and since then, I’ve switched to OpenELEC, which really is the way to go for an XBMC-only computer setup. However, in case it helps anybody, here’s what I was doing last fall. It can be tough when you’re trying to get something working under a specific set…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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.

  • 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…

  • Home Theater PC: XBMC on Zoe

    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,…