Monday, January 30, 2006

More Geekery

First off, let’s start with this screenie:

Yes, that’s 8GB of RAM, and yes it makes me all tingly in my private bits to see that. I know that in three years that’s going to be the minimum to run whatever operating system MSFT is pushing on the world and they’ll be selling 8GB sticks in the bargain bin at Wal-Mart, but right now it’s still pretty cool. Sadly, I’m going to have to give up some of it and spread it around when I set up the rest of the machines in the office. But it doth yea, verily rock for now.

And I’d like to take a moment to just say how much I hate computers in general. I know that computers are my gig and all, but they really do still suck. Easy things are hard and hard things are nigh unto impossible, it seems.

Last August after repurchasing another DVD because Ellis needed a hockey puck and “The Incredibles, Disc 1” was handy and round and fit the bill, I decided that the Deal Family Compound needed a media server. I’d rip all the kid’s DVDs to it and put everything round and shiny up into a closet, never to be touched by small humans ever again. We’d just have to buy real hockey pucks as the occasions arose. I surfed over to NewEgg and outfitted myself with everything I’d need to build myself a kick booty media server.

Despite my schizophrenia about MSFT, I ended up going with Windows XP Professional Media Center Edition 2005. (And yeah, that’s a product name that just ROLLS off the tongue). I tried VERY hard to get MythTV to work. There’s a distro of knoppix with mythtv included, but it hated my on-board ethernet. Wouldn’t see the onboard adapter, even if I explicitly did some sort of manual compile thing-y. More research followed and I downloaded all FOUR CDs of RedHat Fedora Core 3, installed mythTV, but I couldn’t get the capture card to play nice. Went to CompUSA (hate them, too!) and bought an el-cheap-o linksys card and got knoppix and mythTV working, but there was something still not exactly perfect. Can’t remember what it was, I guess I’ve successfully purged that memory. MythTV is cool and shows a lot of promise, but it wasn’t ready for prime time as of last August.

So I plunked down another chunk of money for MCE 2005 and got everything working pretty well. Though I have to say, not including a DVD decoder in the OS and making the user purchase a decoder? Not classy. But all our precious Grover and Elmo and Teletubbies movies were squirreled away on the 800 GB RAID and things were going pretty well.

Except for the overheating issue. Turns out that when a case manufacturer says, “You can fit four 3.5” drives and one 5.25” drive” (your DVD drive, let’s assume), in our super ginchy, neat-o Home Theater PC case, they really do mean that. You can’t just stack up three drives, park one underneath the DVD drive and stash one in there kind of loosey-goosey (a total of five 3.5” devices if you are keeping count and last time I checked that’s more than four) and have everything behave properly. We’d be watching a movie or TV and the machine would just STOP, dead as a doornail. I’d reboot and the RAID would be in a sorry state, not being able to find a drive and if Windows could boot at all, it would be complaining about missing devices, my bad haircut, global warming and the astonishingly high price of a barrel of oil on the spot market. Not good.

So a couple of weeks ago, I tore the whole thing apart, made sure everyone in there had proper air supply and re-installed Windows XP Professional Media Center Edition 2005. Again, LOVE that name, guys! Though, by this time I’d lost my certificate of authenticity and had to resort to nefarious means to dig out my serial number from my old C: drive. Ugh. The pain and the horror of a Windows install knows no bounds.

So there it sits, whirring away in my living room like a small demi-god with asthma. Sad thing is, that just like the 8GB of RAM in my PowerMac G5 at work, it’s going to be passé in a few years. Everyone will have a media server of some sort (probably not one with asthma though!) and you won’t even be able to buy 800 GB drives anymore.

But I’m still waiting for my damn flying car! Where in the H-E-double-hockey-sticks are all the flying cars?

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Holy Crap! Look at all this STUFF down here. It's awesome!

 

Really, I'm glad you made it down here. Almost no one ever comes down here. I'm like in a freaking dungeon down here. I get lonely. But not you. YOU made it all the way to the end of the page. For this I think I've a little crush on you. I don't know, is "love" to strong a word to use in this situation? Well, if it's not "love," then it's very strong "like." I'm totally in like with you for coming down here. You are awesome. Please love me back! I know, I know, I shouldn't be all needy, it's not attractive at all, but you don't know how it is to be stuck down here. Who scrolls all the way to the end of a page anymore these days? Anyway, thanks for shedding some light down here in the depths. I appreciate it. Shoot me an email and I'll send you a dollar, OK?

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