I just got two of these for myself.  Listed at $119.99 each, there is a combo deal where you will get $40 off a purchase of two.

I’m closing in on my hard disk space for several of the 500GB drives in one of my enclosures, so this will give me a little boost in the unRAID arena.  One will have to go towards the parity drive, but that will still allow me to upgrade two 500GB drives to one of these 1.5TB and the other with the old 1TB parity.

There doesn’t appear to be a limit, but you need to hurry if you’re in the market for some space.  Please use my affiliate link here to get to Newegg (and help support my site a little).  Just do a search there for Samsung Spinpoint 1.5TB and it will come right up.

These are low power drives, so they’re only 5400RPM, but they do have 32MB cache and will work just fine for a media server.  Considering they use 3 x 500GB platters, you probably won’t notice that they aren’t 7200RPM drives.

Considering WD’s Green 2TB drives come in well over $200 at most places, this is a real deal on one of the largest drives available…plus they don’t have any of the firmware issues the Seagate drives did.

Yep, yesterday kicked off the tax-free weekend for the state of GA.  No sales tax :)

I’m heading out to MicroCenter during lunch today to grab a small LCD monitor and some upgrade memory for an old laptop that is being converted to a desktop system for my wife.  The screen on it got smashed, but it works fine otherwise.  I’d love to pick up two or three 1.5TB drives also, but we’ll have to see how that pans out.

I realize I’ve pretty much abandoned this blog for the past week or two, but I’ve been pretty busy.  I’m still trying to find time to get around to reviewing the DVBLink software for the HD-PVR I received week.

I’ve been filling most of my time trying to learn some C#, so I’m pretty occupied there.  Things are just kind of slow, otherwise.  There seems to be a but of  lull in my small HTPC world, which doesn’t leave much to write about.  I’m sure I could find something, but if I have to start writing about things I’m not interested in, I’m really not going to see the point of doing this, period.

Anyway, if any of you have some really good resources (outside the more obvious ones) that you could recommend, I’d appreciate it.  Right now I’m going through James Foxall’s Sam’s Teach Yourself Visual C# 2008 in 24 hours and I’ll be following that up with Microsoft Press’ Visual C# 2008: Step By Step.  I’m pretty new to programming (PASCAL 15 years ago and some intermediate C++ and BASIC courses at uni) and completely new to .NET, but these books have been pretty good so far.

Hope to have some interesting new content soon, so keep a tab on me!

Taken from The Missing Remote after a comparison of several available video library plugins:

“There is no doubt that My Movies due to it’s Hosted HTML interface is behind on this area – we are aware of this.

Actually, to support our users best possible, My Movies serves as a meta-data provider for both Vista and Windows 7’s build in DVD/Movie library, but it also serves as a meta-data provider for Media Browser and others.

Our users is very welcomed to use the meta-data back end of My Movies along with a different front-end.

This might be as good as any place to mention the specific release plans.

My Movies 3, in MCML, for Windows Vista and Windows 7 will be released in a beta on September 1’st.

The final version will be available late October with Windows 7.

The beta will be feature wise ready on the features that My Movies 2 contains, while depending on the amount of issues, we might get other of the expected features in before the final 3.0 – otherwise these will be part of an update not long after.

Along with the first beta is planned an interview with Ian Dixon of TheDigitalLifestyle.com, which means that you will be able to hear details here. This interview is expected to be released along with the beta.

Ian Dixon have received some screenshots, which we can’t make public yet. The author of this article is welcomed to contact us to get these too, if someone needs confirmation of it’s existance.

Our main problem with this interface is that the bar have been raised quite a few times over the time it have been planned. But this time the dates are set specifically, and we have made the schedule so that we are absolutely sure this is it.

Regards,

Brian Binnerup
My Movies”

Hmm.  Well, I wish Brian the best, but I personally believe he’s missed the boat.  He may gain some ground now that Media Browser has announced they are going to start charging, but I personally find MyMovies too bloated.  The database backend is nice and all, but I just think it contains too much information and it impacts performance.

I know I’ll try it when it becomes available (I put no stock in this release date), but I have moved on.  Too much time was spent on WHS functionality when the masses wanted the MCML version out the door.

…that while getting all the clear-QAM channels I receive via my HDHomeRun is terrific, setting them up with TV Pack is a monumental pain in the ass.

That is all.