Green is the grass. . .
. . . and dead is the lawn mower. The ignition cord broke late last summer, and Jeremy has been jury-rigging it ever since. You know, first he had to fiddle with it once a month, then every two weeks, then every time he mowed the lawn, and then today the cord broke off three times.
So it’s time for a new mower. (For the record, I’ve been offering Jeremy a new mower ever since the cord broke the first time, it’s been his choice to keep going!)
Apparently a mower is a mower is a mower, which makes for pretty simple shopping. I only spent about 1/2 hour on the research, even though a purchase over $100 usually warrants at least two hours in our house. And it looks like we can get a decent lawnmower, even in a month when we’re pinching pennies: a Craftsman push-mower with 21″ deck and a bag on the back. The name, deck width, and bag are all upgrades from what we had (no-name Home Depot), and we’re not paying a whole lot more than we did last time. That mower lasted 4 years with Jeremy’s belated TLC. I expect that this one will last at least that long.
And then it’s time to upgrade to that programmable robotic mower. . .
Saturday, 07/11/2009 - Written by Angela at 2:04 pm - 1 Comment - HomeWork, Our Little World, Toys & Gadgets - Permalink
Offsite data storage - any recommendations?
I’d rather start with a general direction than a time-consuming blind search!
As Jeremy has begun burning out all his tech-energy on his business, I’ve been getting more irritated with the tech-tasks that have been piling up at home. So I’m taking a few matters into my own hands: cleaning up the website and eventually recreating it, creating a site map, trying to get listed by Google (it crawls us but doesn’t list us), finding a new photo hosting platform, and last but most importantly:
Offsite storage.
Sunday, 02/22/2009 - Written by Angela at 12:23 pm - 3 Comments - In the Kitchen, Jeremyisms, Our Little World, Toys & Gadgets, WebWork - Permalink
I am the greatest hero who ever lived!
So said Jeremy as he stepped out of the desert dungeon in The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. I have to say, we’re having just as much fun with this one as we did with Mario Galaxy, only more so because this game is incredibly long. We just beat a monster by spinning around on a “spinner,” jumping back and forth between twisty tracks to hit him in the head.
We’ve played about 40 hours already, and Ganondorf was only just introduced. We’ve recovered the pieces of the Shadow Mask, earned the Master Sword, picked up a whole bunch of toys (although we haven’t found the bigger wallet yet which is driving us up the wall), and we’re just heading out to find the pieces of the Mirror of Twilight. Although we’ve finally started seeing the Triforce symbol here and there, it hasn’t been explained yet and we’re apparently nowhere near that part of the story. After 40 hours.
Amazing. I hope these people made a TON of money.
Saturday, 03/08/2008 - Written by Angela at 8:45 pm - 3 Comments - Our Little World, Toys & Gadgets - Permalink
It’s the little coolnesses
It’s the little coolnesses that make the new HTPC and peripherals so great. Jeremy is on the phone right now, and the DSL has not kicked me off the computer. He’s on the phone and I am online at the same time.
Coolness.
Saturday, 03/01/2008 - Written by Angela at 6:33 pm - No Comments - Our Little World, Toys & Gadgets - Permalink
Quirks.
Well, as you can probably imagine, our new HTPC has some quirks. Like, when Jeremy goes on a rampage and rips everything apart, then forgets to plug the satellite remote receiver back in… I can’t watch TV until he gets home and fixes it. This does not happen if you’re just using a signal box and a TV. This also doesn’t happen if you’re a techy. But when little old me is confronted by the Blue Screen of Death with a cryptic message scrawled in a beautiful high-def white letters, let’s just say that I simply ignored the whole thing. I did try to play some music, but Jeremy hasn’t “pointed” Media Center at the music folder on the NAS yet, so it only recognizes songs we’ve actually played so far. It is kind of cool that when you play a song, Media Center recognizes it as music and adds it to your music list. It even goes to look up the CD art and song names for you.
We’re going to be gone for part of the weekend, so I’m trying to get my week’s homework done early. However, in lieu of that tonight, I spent two hours straightening out our health insurance accounts from June 07 to the present. It isn’t good, folks. The company that was administering (as in, the company that was supposed to keep all this straight TO BEGIN WITH!!!) our HRA plan has a quirky way of cooking their books, and they messed up BIG, HUGE-time: it looks like we’re out of pocket about $300 or so, and perhaps some penalties for overspending on our FSA account. Yep. Somebody’s going on a rampage tomorrow, and it’s not Jeremy!
We’re tossing around the idea of billing Upstate Administrative Services for my time. This isn’t the first time I’ve fixed their mistakes… it’s just the first time it’s going to cost me. Or is it? I can yell REALLY loud. Ask anybody how loud Lucy was at Durgee Junior High in 1994.
And that was 14 years ago. I’m bigger now. =)
Monday, 01/21/2008 - Written by Angela at 10:25 pm - 1 Comment - Diabetes, Our Little World, Toys & Gadgets - Permalink
Looking back
Jeremy’s in the process of ripping all of our CDs onto our terabyte (not in the Wordpress dictionary, folks!!) of backup storage, and I’m strolling down memory lane. I have SO MANY CDs I had completely forgotten about, including so many with solos of my own that we have an Angela folder. We’ll upload some of those onto the website later, but in the meantime I’m sharing some of my old favorites with my husband. The song of the moment?
Corner of the Sky. I remember lying on my stomach on the couch in the music room, shortly after we had inherited our very first new-to-us CD player from my Uncle Brien, pausing-and-playing so that I could write down the words to this song and learn it.
I haven’t smiled this big in a long time.
I haven’t thought about dreams like that in a long time either.
Okay, those are tears.
Tuesday, 01/15/2008 - Written by Angela at 10:00 pm - 1 Comment - Musical Moments, Our Little World, Toys & Gadgets - Permalink
Technology the way it should be.
So by now you all know that Jeremy’s computer is up and running, and speaking as a non-techy, I say it is a beautiful and marvelous thing.
I firmly believe that gadgets and gizmos are made to serve me, not the other way around. I don’t even answer a phone (land line or otherwise) unless I feel like it, and I NEVER go running for one. After all, isn’t that what voicemail is for? If I have to spend more than ten minutes learning a gadget, I quit and let Jeremy handle it. He’s learned that any new equipment that takes more than two steps to operate dooms him to an equipment-lifetime of “JEREMY! It doesn’t work! I need you to fix it!!” As befits my laziness, I never go and find him to say this. It’s always yelled from whatever chair I happen to be sitting in, as loudly as need be to reach his weary ears.
Now that you know how I feel about this stuff, you can better grasp what I mean when I say that this computer is beautiful. It’s been fully operational since yesterday, and I can already watch (,pause, and fastforward!!) live TV, watch DVDs, surf the web, and channel surf with a TV show on full-screen. This is only the surface of it. Within a short while or two, every CD, DVD, and photo in our library will be contained in the NAS (network attached storage) and fully accessible. As we go along we’ll add NAS access from my laptop, and when we stumble across sales, we’ll add stations with monitors and mini-keyboards in other areas of the house. At some point Jeremy is even going to set me up with a barcode scanning system for my kitchen, so that I’ll always know what I actually have in the house.
AWESOMENESS!!! This is the way technology should be.
Live long…
I am sitting on my couch, typing away on my nicely-sized HTPC keyboard, which is sending a signal to the little USB receiver, which is plugged into a USB extension cable, which is plugged into my beautiful, fully functional new Home Theater PC!
That’s right, my friends! After nearly a month of ordering parts, waiting for shipping, testing, waiting for more shipping, testing, waiting for MORE shipping, I have successfully built my second computer. And this one is a honker of a beast too, as far as I’m concerned.
Last you knew, I was waiting on an 8-pin extender for my power supply. Well, I ordered it on Monday, Dec. 31st from PC Connection, next day air shipping, in order to avoid dropping out of Newegg’s return policy before I had the chance to fully test all my equipment. $3 part, $14 in shipping, and I had it scheduled for Wednesday delivery. Wednesday came, no cable. Thursday I called to find out what was up. My package was to be drop-shipped from one of their vendors, which had sent the dumb thing DHL…who tends to botch things up more often than anyone would think conceivable. So, I was told it should arrive by Friday. This still gave me time to test everything on the weekend, and resulted in a bonus of free shipping! Yay for me!
The cable did arrive Friday, and of course I went to town. Oh wait I forgot. On New Year’s Day, I actually removed the power supply from it’s home and let it sit on the back edge and the middle bracket, still grounded to the case, but able to reach the 8-pin supply line to the motherboard. Booted up nicely, (see pictures here), and I was able to partition the hard drive, install Windows (Linux will come later), and update all drivers necessary. Let me tell you, seeing that boot screen was a HUGE relief.
So, Friday I installed the X-Fi Platinum from my old computer, requiring a quick trip to Creative’s website to download drivers for Vista. The TV tuner came last, because I needed to hook that to DirecTV, which meant everything else had to be finished. Tuner installation went incredibly smoothly, and before I could say “Holy stinkin stink, my computer is working” I had set up Windows Media Center to work with the fancy Media Center Remote and the IR blaster (which controls the DirecTV box), and I was watching, pausing, and recording TV like a madman. The thing was working! Hallelujah.
Of course, I still have the inevitiable kinks to work out. Windows Media Center was surprisingly acceptable as piece of software, and does everything we need it to do. However, it seems to default to using Windows Media Player for DVDs, which doesn’t upscale DVD’s as well as some other programs like TheaterTek or even PowerDVD. So I need to install ffdshow or something similar to improve video quality a bit. Also, Creative still has not come up with a soundfont bank manager for Vista, which may prove to be a difficult problem to resolve. It is critical that I do, because I need to be able to load the correct soundfonts for writing music. I do NOT want to have to use the other partition for Windows XP, simply for music-creation. I may just begin using an entirely new type of music creation program though, like Fruity Loops, which seems to be a solid, mulitfeatured, inexpensive option.
The D-Link DSL modem and Wireless N Gigabit router are up and running, providing a noticable improvement even in surfing speeds. The only piece of the puzzle that is not set up is the D-Link DNS-323 network attached storage, which should arrive Monday. I’ll throw in my dual 500GB hard drives, and then dump every piece of media we own into it. That’ll be quite a project, but most of the music is encoded already. The DVD’s will take some time.
The last thing I want to talk about is what this thing can do with video games, because after all, that’s what really matters when it comes to power, right? I downloaded Crysis last night, which for you non-gamers, is for the most part the be-all-and-end-all of power-hungry video games. Set at 720p, my new beast cranked out nearly fluid gaming with all details maxed out! Granted it got slightly choppy with anti-aliasing (which smooths jagged edges) turned on, but hey, with only one graphics card in there, who can complain? So, even with no overclocking, this thing will easily play any game I throw at it. And for any serious techies out there, even running Crysis at those settings, my CPU temp stayed below 32 degrees Celsius, which should hopefully translate to a long and fruitful life.
And so, to all my friends out there, and to my new HTPC: Live long and prosper!
It is time.
Pre-PS: This is the blog I started on Christmas, finally posted for your viewing pleasure!
Merry, merry Christmas to all!
It must be months since I last posted. But now is the time, for one very happy reason: It’s Christmas, and along with celebrating the birth of our Lord Jesus, we are also celebrating the imminent birth of our new Home Theater PC!
I’ve been waiting all year for the chance to order all the necessary parts and put it together. I’ve spent hours poring over reviews, tech forums, and good ole Tom’s Hardware Comparison Charts to lay out the master plan, and now, that plan is in full swing. My painstaking decisions are as follows:
- Processor: Core 2 Duo e6850 @ 3.0GHz, lots of future overclocking potential.
- CPU cooler: Noctua NH-U12F silent heatsink / fan, Arctic Silver thermal compound
- Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-P35-DS4 revision 2.1 (P35 chipset) Penryn capable
- Memory: GeIL DDR2 1066 4GB (2 X 2GB)
- Hard Drive: Seagate Barracuda 500GB SATA 300Gb/sec, 32MB cache 7200RPM
- Optical Drive: LG Blu-Ray / HD-DVD / DVD+/-RW Combo Drive
- Video card: Gigabyte Geforce 8800GT 512MB RAM, stock speed
- Soundcard: Creative X-Fi PLatinum (already owned)
- Speakers: Logitech Z-5500 THX Certified 505 Watt 5.1 Surround Speakers
- Video Capture: Hauppauge WinTV HVR-1800 PCI-Express HD / Analog tuner
- Case: Silverstone LC20M Black case
- Operating Systems: Vista 32-bit Home Premium and Ubuntu Linux with MythTV
- Keyboard/Mouse: Scorpius P20 2.4GHz Wireless Keyboard with Joystick mouse
- Power Supply: Silverstone ST50EF-Plus 500W 120mm silent fan
- Case fans: 5 Apevia low-noise 80mm case fans
- External storage: D-Link 323 2-bay SATA network attached storage with 2 Western Digital 500GB 7200RPM hard drives in standard configuration.
- Network: D-Link Xtreme Gigabit Wireless N router, D-Link 2302 ADSL modem.
- TV: Envision 32″ LCD HDTV
Everything has been ordered and delivered (except the D-Link 323 NAS, which will be replacing a ZyXel NSA220 due to a lack of standard disk configuration on the ZyXel)
Essentially (for our non-techie readers) this computer is built to do EVERYTHING. My old one is 6 years old, and while still running strong, is too outdated to run any of the newer games or handle anything high definition. The new HTPC will play both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray discs, and upscale standard DVDs to near-HD quality. It will pause, record and playback digital and analog TV, including over-the-air HD broadcasts. It will play any game I throw at it for quite some time. The network attached storage will automatically backup critical files, and store all movies (including HD), music, and pictures centrally, accessible from anywhere in the house, and even the internet. All of our digital content, old and new, will be available and secure whenever we need it.
Last Saturday, the building began. The first step was installing the processor and cooler. The cooler, which is a honkin monster of a heatsink with an ultra-silent fan, had a backplate that had to be installed on the back of the motherboard, and was a bit of a project to get right. The RAM went in next, then I installed the standoffs in the case for the motherboard, then installed the board itself. Next the video card, hard drive, and optical drive, and finally, connected all the appropriate power and data cables. The time had come to flip the switch!
 |
There I was, filled with anticipation, ready for the glorious birth of my dream machine. I pressed the button….The shriek of a very unhappy power supply errupted from the bowels of my new machine. Panicked, I turned it off and collapsed into my chair, devastated. |
After discovering that it was indeed my power supply causing the commotion, (with much soothing talk and helpful clear thinking from my wife), I took a look inside, and found what looked like a melted white wire inside. It turns out this must be some kind of adhesive or something, because the replacement PSU I received also has this stuff in it. But we got lots of pictures, just in case, and you can find them in the HTPC ablum along with all the other pictures (link below). Anyway, I ended up having to bench the project for a week while we did the whole Christmas thing in New York, during which time I did have a lot of fun (see Angela’s Christmas post for details).
Today, I received my new PSU, and installed it…sort of. It turns out that my replacement order was for a short cable version of the PSU I originally purchased, which was almost totally fine, except that my 12V 8-pin ATX power cord was about 6 inches too short. That’s a fancy way of saying I still don’t have a HTPC. However, the good news is that the power supply does NOT sound like it got up on the wrong side of Newegg. In fact, it’s almost completely silent. So, my NEXT step is to order an extender for the 8-pin cord, and all should be well, hopefully.
Just to give everyone an idea of how computer-related stuff has been going for me of late, here’s the skinny:
- Received Scorpius wireless HTPC keyboard with a dead receiver. Had to have a replacement sent.
- Received Zyxel network attached storage. Discovered that despite reviews posted on Newegg, it does not offer standard disk configuration (two separately accessible disks, non-RAID). Must replace with D-Link 323.
- DSL modem would not connect out of the box, required a call to D-Link and Verizon to resolve.
- Desktop Netgear Wireless USB adapter absolutely refuses to find the D-Link Wireless N router. Not a big deal since ultimately the HTPC will not even use wireless but a gigabit wired connection, but the laptop finds it just fine.
- Power supply requires replacement, may have done damage to the rest of my components, and won’t know until I get extender to finish installing a working PSU.
- A simple wireless router installation for my mother-in-law went awry. The dumb thing spent two hours refusing to allow me to properly secure the network. Don’t know if it was a Vista problem or not, I didn’t have time to do the research. Finally got it working though.
- Laptop optical drive is acting up, may require replacement.
- Returned home on Wed. from New York, reinstalled my old power supply in my old desktop (I was going to use it to troubleshoot my PSU problems on the HTPC, but the two were incompatible). Turned on the old desktop after PSU installation, and discovered my rear case fan had decided it had had enough. Luckily I ordered 1 more case fan than I needed for the HTPC, so that was an easy fix.
So, of course, more will follow as the saga continues. I will be ordering the extender tomorrow, and hopefully have it by Tuesday, if all goes well. I need to be able to boot this thing before my return policy is up, or I may be in a load of poo. And just so we’re clear, poo stinks. Bad.
Pictures are here.
Have you seen this? Amazon.com: Kindle
Looks pretty darn cool to me. If I had the money to pay the price, I’d be all over it. Books on demand??! Right now if I want to get my hands on a sequel, I have three choices: pay for shipping, pay for fuel to go get it, or wait until I happen to be in a store that has it. All of these involve waiting.
Oh, and did I mention that I could fit by entire library into one device smaller (and thinner) than a paperback? Bye-bye mismatched bookcases! The only drawback would be the credit card bill….
It looked pretty easy to navigate. I think I’d rather wait until I could try one before I decide to buy though. The screen looks pretty small, and at the rate I read, pressing a button at the bottom of every page could be a big pain.