The products in today’s quicky review are the Zalman CNPS8700 LED low-profile all copper CPU cooler and the Zalman VF900-Cu VGA cooler. Both heat sinks are radial-finned heatsink coolers made for the quiet computing enthusiast. Or in our case :), the HTPC enthusiast. Zalman has been well known around these parts because of their CNPS7000 series of CPU coolers; lets see if they […]
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I recall the days when the government passed a bill back which forced the cable companies to play fair and allow for users to access the entire library of channels with the use of a Cable Card. The idea was simple: Cable Companies have a monopoly on regions and services for cable television, and were essentially forcing users to rent […]
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Well, it’s official. I now have a Mythtv frontend running under Windows. It’s not all peaches and cream though. Right now it’s just the frontend software running. I don’t have any plugins going, and the backend is running on my linux server. The frontend is now working well enough that I have it connected to the tv and the AV […]
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Welcome to another exciting episode of my life. When last you saw, our daring young hero (me) was struggling to get video drivers working under Linux that would actually allow video playback in Mythtv to run smoothly. We’re talking your run-of-the-mill, standard def content. After struggling with it for a week, I decided to move on to Virtualization so that […]
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Well, I told you that I would keep you all updated in with my new frontend build. So here’s the first report card. As you will recall, there were three goals I wanted to achieve with this setup: Run Mythtv (replace the old frontend) Store all (or most) of my DVDs on the HDD Virtualization So far, I’ve accomplished… pretty […]
Read moreAnyone who has been around this site for a while probably knows that I openly support Linux. The fact that I learn best by tinkering makes this OS a natural fit for me. Program doesn’t work as advertised? Bust out the code and see what damage can be done. What’s the worst that could happen?? Fortunately, this wild abandon is […]
Read moreThe perfect extender! Is there one to satisfy us all? I doubt it, but based on recent reviews, I think there is lot of potential to improve upon existing designs that are in the marketplace today. File Format There are a million and one different ways to encode a video. I have alot of respect for communities that slice and […]
Read moreI recently reported here that the motherboard that I have been using in my frontend system for the last year or two has been acting up on me. Well, after RMAing it for the third time over the same issue, I have decided that enough is enough and replaced it. The problem that I ran into was that the old […]
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You may have recently seen or heard about a new upcoming device from ZeeVee called the ZvBox. The idea behind it is simple–connect your computer to the box via VGA, and connect it directly to the coax TV cable from any room in your house. Then tune to the Zv channel and you will see a high resolution of your […]
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If you remember what happened last month, there was a rather large fiasco caused by NBC for Vista Media Center users, where nobody running the operating system was able to record American Gladiators. Both NBC & Microsoft were quick to comment that the message was caused due to an error, and was completely unintentional. Microsoft respects the copy-protection flags of […]
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