theHTPC.net

My tape drive came.  Yes, it was a PowerVault 100T.  No, it was not the DAT72 - it was the DAT40.  My 36/72GB tapes are worthless and I had to get a 5-pack of Quantum 20/40GB tapes for $32 and change off of Amazon.  The drive does work (it took my cleaning tape, at least), was only a bit dusty and is in pretty good shape otherwise.  I saw refurb units just like this going for $300 on some sites.  I got it for about $35.  Now all I need to do is wait for my tapes to arrive.  I’ll probably see if we have any old ones at work, just to make sure the thing does work.

I got a request to put up my instructions for getting the guide listings working with the HDHomeRun.  They’re on the SiliconDust site, but they’re a little vague.  If I get time at work tomorrow, I’ll put up something a little easier to follow.  Stay tuned.

Well, on a whim, I decided to give this a try on my desktop system that runs Vista Ultimate.  Since I don’t use Media Center except for testing on there, I didn’t figure it would hurt much.  By now, most everyone that is interested knows what it does and adds, so there’s not much more I can say.  I will say that if you have an HDHomeRun, it is a complete pain in the ass to get the TV portion set back up if you normally pull a good number of unencrypted channels via cable.  I typically get around 30 and after going through the scan only three were found.  I had to manually rename and edit the listing on all the others.  In a way, it was a good thing because there were always a couple of stations that didn’t match any listing and I was able to figure out what broadcast they really were, but I don’t really want to have to go through that again.  Comcast comes Saturday morning (8-10am) and when they activate my cable for the digital starter package, I’m going to be getting a lot more than what I’m getting now, so I’m trying to solidify a way to copy the EPG settings from one TV Pack-enabled box to another.  I’m still researching what plugins it breaks before I install it on anything else though.  I think MediaControl is the only one that I’ve found so far, but it may have an updated version…I don’t know yet.  If anyone needs instructions on how to manually set up HDHomeRun channel listings with TV Pack, comment on it and I’ll post what I did.  I’d do it now, but I don’t feel like it :)

My tape drive was supposed to arrive yesterday, but it didn’t.  After looking, I realized it’s coming from Texas, so I can see why it was delayed (hurricane).  It is supposed to arrive today though.  I really hope it works (as-is purchase off e-Bay).  The guy has fantastic feedback, so I’m thinking it will.  Tape drives are pretty durable (even though Dell tape drives typically suck).

The pool guy came yesterday too.  It went well and the estimates looked pretty good and were within what we expected.  There are some things that we didn’t expect, but no deal-breakers.  I just hope we can get it in for next summer.

Sometimes, there doesn’t need to be anything special to post about - like now.

I found that I won’t need a new cooler for my rebuilt quad system.  I ended up taking the board out of the case and rotating the heatsink 90° so that the fan was blowing upwards - out the 140mm exhaust mounted in the top of the case.  I also noticed that the mounting screws in the base were placed away from the cores when mounted this way.  That pretty much tells me that the unit I’m using isn’t capable of universal mounting for 775 sockets.  My temps dropped >30°C at idle and are at >60°C under full load while encoding with x264.  One core went as high as 89°C before this change.  I’m happy since I don’t have to waste another $40 on another heatsink.

I hope Fry’s has another combo special on their Celeron 430 tomorrow/this weekend.  I’m really wanting to grab one so that I can swap out CPUs on my unRAID server with it.  It just doesn’t need dual cores - it doesn’t even support them yet.  Even if it did support them, I doubt it would benefit me anyway since I don’t do anything but file serving with it.  I want to use the E1200 in it to replace that aging Pentium-M I’m using as a WSUS server.  I have the P5B-MX and 2GB DDR2 standing by collecting dust now.  I also want to go with x64 2003 Server this time.  I’ve never really used any 64-bit OS at home before and this would be a good time for it.

If I can get that $50 combo, I can use the leftover ECS 945P board it comes with to replace my son’s craptacular GeForce 7-series board.  It would be OK if it didn’t have only a single-channel memory controller.  I eventually want to get another E1200 or Celeron 430 for it as well.  The D805 in it is just a dog.

On the Media Center front, the OpenMediaLibrary team released the first public beta of their OML video library plugin.  I installed it on my test box and took a look and it’s very nice.  I can’t really use it, however, since it doesn’t support individual XML files (which I recently switched to), nor does it work well with layered directory structures.  I’m sure it could be set up to do so, but no way am I starting over - yet again!  Besides, MyMovies is going to have their first introductory MCML version out in the next couple of weeks or three.  I’m still updating that database so that I can use it again if it astounds me.  I’m feeling lazy today, so check my other posts for relative links to OML and whatnot.

Well, I just got back from visiting MicroCenter to return the dead WD hard drive, only to find that the email I received from them was incorrect…this weekend is tax-free weekend in Georgia!  I returned that dead HD and the CM PSU that I bought and replaced them both.  I got another, identical drive and also traded up (?) for a BFG 650W PSU.  Now, the BFG is not a powerhouse and is considered very ordinary.  However, I’m not expecting much - only more than I currently have.  It should fit that bill fine.  Plus, it has a lifetime warranty.  I only had to spend an extra $26 to get that PSU.  Not great considering it can be found for much less with rebates, but I don’t really want to wait on a rebate.

Tomorrow I will be ordering my board and memory, so it should make it in by Thursday of next week - just in time for the weekend.  Hopefully, I’ll get a chance to put it all together.

Uninstalling KB950126 appears to have resolved my screensaver quirkiness explained in yesterday’s post.  The system had also come up, but for some odd reason it did not connect to the network.  Another reboot solved that issue.

I also decided to install Vista Ultimate on my primary PC yesterday.  I had to do a reinstall anyway considering a rootkit somehow found its way on my system.  I had removed this thing a coupe of times before in the past, but I couldn’t get rid of this release.  It was the same one based on srosa.sys/hidr.exe/wintems.exe, but it had replicated much more than I had seen before.

I’m much more receptive to Vista this time around and so far it’s been a welcomed change.  I’m a little more familiar with it since I’ve been running my HTPCs on it for more than a year.  It also seems to support the common applications I use this go ’round.  We’ll see if it stays…

It’s been a very hectic last couple of weeks, but I’m not dead and neither is this site.

At work, I was smacked down with an upcoming Exchange 2003 migration and Blackberry Enterprise Server implementation, so, needless to say, I was covered up there. Most of what I write up here is done during the free minutes I have at work and I had none for about a week straight. The past week has been busy being on vacation. I took a week off to welcome home the newest addition to my family - baby Zachary!

Zach was born May 14th and was 9.0lb and 22in. long.  We got to take him home Friday evening and I’ve never seen a baby sleep so good.  We were both worried about how he would do since his older brother Joseph still has some issues at night, but we couldn’t ask for a better sleeper.

In other news, I’ve been giving the new Open Media Library (OML) plugin for Vista Media Center some attention lately.  It’s not really even in pre-alpha stages yet, but if you know your way around compiling source and doing some light hacking with SVN builds, then you can take a look at it…it might even work for you!

Thus far, I got it compiled, installed, MyMovies XML imported and all my movies and coverart to show up.  However, the links to my video files don’t seem to be working for some reason.  It looks very nice though.  Here’s a sneak-peek at the default layout.

Pretty sweet, eh?  As I mentioned, this is very early in the development stages and is not ready for use.  I just couldn’t control my curiosity and the guys on their development forum seem to be very appreciative of anyone that can get it installed and offer feedback.   If you’re so inclined, I’d suggest you do the same.  It’s going to be a very nice plugin and appears to be one of the most active despite the small team size.  Good luck OML guys!

Well, that’s about all I have for the moment.  I’m sure there’s a few other things I’ve done, but I’ll save them for later…I’ve got work to do.

If you have an extra $1600 just lying around that you don’t know what to do with, maybe you could use a new…keyboard!

It’s fairly related to site topics, so I just had to post this up.  You can read Kurt Denke’s (Blue Jeans Cable) reply to Monster’s claims here.  I love when this happens.

I took Friday off from work to give myself a 3-day weekend since the painters finally finished with the inside of our house.  The garage and back deck still need finishing, but were able to move back in, at least.

I pretty much got all rooms back into the condition they were prior, minus the den.  I’m still waiting for someone to stop by that can help me hang my plasma back on the wall.  Until then, the home theater equipment will have to wait also since the entertainment center is too far from the wall (again, waiting on the plasma to be hung).

We went to RoomsToGoKids yesterday and picked out a bedroom set for our son.  He’s getting a new room and I’ll be setting it up this week for a new Ethernet drop and some rear speaker mounts for the Sony, which isn’t using the surrounds at the moment.

I still haven’t ordered my X10 devices as I’m waiting for payment on my Amazon card to go through.  I did get to upgrade to unRAID 4.3beta 6, however.  You can get it here.  I had no issues with the upgrade and it seems to work fine.  There are a few new additions, along with bug fixes.  Looks like I missed several previous beta versions, but I hadn’t been in my own home for a week and a half and very busy.

Otherwise, I’m pretty tired and sore from the past few days, but I only have more work to look forward to.  My grandparents are coming for a visit on the weekend of the 18th, so there’s still plenty left that I want done to the house before they arrive.  The worst being the front yard…the landscaping looks like hell.  I’ll be raking out the old leaves so that I can get some new pine straw down.  Hopefully it’ll dry out enough so that my blower/mulcher can suck some of it up.  We’ll see since I may start on it this evening after work.  There’s also two walls that need touching up since Joseph decided the freshly painted walls needed to be drawn on.  Sigh.

Anyway, I’ll be taking out some pictures soon so that I can document the transformation our house underwent due to the new paint job.  I’m very pleased!