I have always like small cars. I can appreciate large cars but my personal preference is to buy small. My old car was also a small car. I enjoy not paying ridiculous amounts of money for insurance and road registration. I don’t use my car for anything but driving around, and rarely long distances, so large cars aren’t a necessary part of my lifestyle. I’m also relatively average height, so seating/roof height/footwells etc in small cars are rarely too small for me.

The Fiesta XR4 (or Fiesta ST as it is known in the UK) is special because it has a 2.0-litre engine from its big brother, the Ford Focus. Not only that but the engine has been tuned to provide more power (110Kw) and a better torque band (190Nm) which kicks in from around 3300RPM. The car also has sports suspension, a five-speed manual transmission, wide grippy tyres, a subtle bodykit and – if you are so inclined – racing stripes from the factory.

I first saw this car on an ancient episode of Top Gear – around 2005 or so – and was unimpressed to note the car wouldn’t be available in Australia until 2006. I researched it over and over and over until I had memorized every little detail about the car. I even took one for a test drive from a dealer. I was pretty much in love with this car (though not to the point that I actually made love to it). However, at the time I was still a uni student, and although I was working full time it was in a dead-end job. I could’ve technically afforded to buy it with all the on-road costs and a drive-away price around $28,000, but I would’ve had absolutely zero money to spend after that.

I watched the prices of them on the second-hand market over the next few years, all the while willing my current car to die so I would have an excuse to buy one. In the end, my old Nissan never really died. It is disabled but it’s not dead, but now it’s at a point where the cost to fix it would be worth more than the value of the car, so it makes financial sense. Plus Carly needs a car to drive to work in, and I just got a raise. So it was time.

I went searching and I was impressed when I saw this for sale:

As you can see it has stripes, though they aren’t ridiculous fat slug trails from front to back. It also has some nice white wheels. Aside from that this car had done about 48,000 kilometres and was going for a price I couldn’t refuse: $15,990. The only problem was that it was coming up to Christmas (the weekend before) and the car was in Sydney. I had organised the loan the week before so the cash was sitting in my bank account ready to go. I just had to organise the purchase. It was an experience in quick-thinking logistics to sortthe flight, accomodation, legal papers, etc etc.

I had my aunt and uncle living in Sydney inspect the car for me and they gave me the thumbs-up, so it was ‘all systems go’ on the plan. Carly and I flew down to Sydney on the Saturday afternoon (5PM flight) and were picked up by the seller in the car from the airport. We drove back to his house and did all the paperwork and exchanged the cash (he wanted cash to buy a replacement car the next day), went to his parents place to pick up the stock wheels and tyres, and everything was a done deal by around 8PM that evening. We waited on the road side while I waited on the phone for the insurance to be instated and away we went.

We stopped off at Carly’s sisters place in Mona Vale for a visit, then drove on to Newcastle. We arrived in Newcastle around 2AM and stayed the night, then took the inland route to Brisbane through Glen Ines etc. We arrived home at around 7.30PM that evening and were well-pleased with our accomplishments! The car performed brilliantly for the journey and never skipped a beat. Although the low-profile tyres and sports suspension sometimes proved to be uncomfortable over the old country roads, the journey was otherwise comfortable and stress-free.

I am now thinking about what extra bits and bobs I can buy for it. I am not sure if I want to modify anything; cars are a more huge money hole than any hobby I’ve had before. I am looking though at getting a cat-back exhaust, or perhaps a full system including extractors, as well as a cold air intake. That’ll be about it though for performance mods as I don’t want to put the car too far out of spec. for the purposes of keeping it drivable for the long term. Cosmetic mods I’m considering are replacing the LEDs on the dashboard from green to white, upgrading the stereo, and maybe replacing the exterior plastics with carbon-fibre look-alikes. Not because I like the look of carbon fibre, but because they’re darker in colour and enameled, so they should last longer.

Another cool toy which I am thinking about getting is a Bluetooth ODB plugin. It connects to the diagnostic computer interface of the car and then you can pair it to your phone. With the aid of an app (Android or iOS), you can get real-time readouts of all the critical system parameters. Considering this requires zero modifications and costs around a hundred bucks, although it’s probably useless it’s still pretty freakin’ cool.

I enjoy using small and light laptops because I believe this type of machine properly fits the purpose of a laptop. Anything larger than 14 inches diagonal screen size and the corresponding laptop body will no longer fit on the average lap. The term ‘desktop replacements’ seems like an oxymoron to me; what’s the point of a laptop that lives 90% of its life on a desk, tethered to power because the battery only lasts two hours?

Anyway, enough proselytizing. This post is about my new laptop which I have become enamored with, to say the least.

As you can see the shape of the system bears a striking resemblance to that of the MacBook Air. However, the main difference is that the Apple offering is less industrial-looking. The Air has a matte finish to its brushed aluminium lid whereas the Zenbook has a more polished look.

Inside the colour is more ‘gunmetal grey’ (one of my favorite colours) than the more silver-looking aluminium of Apple products.

The laptop weighs just over a kilogram and measures just 18 millimetres at its thickest point. Connectivity consists of a USB2, a USB3, SD/MMC card slot, headphone/microphone in/out, micro-HDMI and mini-VGA. The top of the range version sports an Intel Core i7 2677M, 4Gb DDR3, 256Gb SSD, 802.11a/b/g/n and Bluetooth 3.0. Battery life as tested by Engadget is approximately 8 hours with WiFi enabled.

I have installed Windows 7 Home Premium on mine and it is very nice to use. I intend upon replacing my Lenovo T410 work-provided laptop with my Zenbook. Fortunately my employer is very big on the current trend of ‘Bring Your Own Device’ whereby most of the corporate software stack can be accessed through Citrix XenApp. In terms of functionality it’s basically X window forwarding except it works on all operating systems (sidenote: checking my e-mail in Microsoft Outlook on my Google Android handset is probably one of the most ‘haha, this is so dumb but cool’ technology exercises I have recently undertaken).

At first I tried to use Ubuntu 11.10 on this system. It worked OK but wasn’t suitable for use as a full-time work laptop replacement because of the various issues leading me to doubt the reliability of the system as a whole. As mentioned there are a few issues with Ubuntu 11.10 currently:

• Can’t easily suspend/hibernate: requires tweaking with a custom powerdown script which I can’t get working, although reportedly it does work fine.
• Bluetooth support not available until kernel 3.2.
• Some models have a ‘Sentelic’ touchpad, which is not supported by any drivers at present for multi-touch etc. Other models have an ‘Elantech’ touchpad which is fully supported. You can’t tell which you’re buying until you open it up. I have a ‘Sentelic’ model.
• Currently power consumption on all Sandy Bridge CPUs is poor with kernel 3.0.x and 3.1.x; reportedly fixed in 3.2.x though currently there are workarounds which make the system somewhat unstable.

Unfortunately the lack of Bluetooth and poor touchpad support is a killer. In the office it’s not such a big deal but while I am out on site and needing to connect a USB-to-serial adapter to access the console of networking devices, I can choose to either have a mouse plugged in or my phone or the provided USB-to-Ethernet adapter. When working away from the office on unfamiliar network equipment, it’s typically essential to have at least a console and ethernet or console and mouse.

The performance of the system is very good. This is the first computer I have owned with a solid state drive and I am impressed. I have seen other computers with them but never really used them for an extended period of time to really appreciate how fast an SSD can do things. Now whenever I am using any other computer it seems like I am waiting for far too long for anything to happen.

With Windows the battery life is pretty good. Windows usually reports about 7 hours of life from a full charge, though I have never used the laptop continuously for that long on battery, I have seen a solid five hours out of it with two overnights periods of sleep. This may not be optimal, because I have installed Windows from scratch I can’t install most of the Asus utilities, including the “Instant-On” utility which I presume provides some power saving mechanism.

As compared to my last laptop; well, this one doesn’t compare. It is simply better in every way. Even the integrated graphics are better than the old nVidia graphics chip in my Dell. I experimented by playing Grand Theft Auto III on this laptop and it ran quite well.

The price I paid worked out to be around $1760 from a local retailer. They included a free Bluetooth mouse for some reason which I was quite happy with. Unfortunately for me and my insistence on buying the best version of this laptop I possibly could, paying that price meant I missed on on buying the next model down for around $660 cheaper – an i5 / 128Gb SSD model, which can be had on special at JB HiFi. It’s worth it though. With 256Gb I don’t really have to think about what I put on my system. I just know it’ll all fit.

You can see in the above picture the three main groupings of plants.

What I did was this:

1. Untie the lead (?) wire keeping the plant stems together at the bottom;
2. Sort the plant stems according to height, and then halve the tallest ones, taking care not to cut away new roots. These are generally easy to identify as pale white strands which protrude from joints in the plant stems;
3. I then removed any leaves which appeared to be dead or dying (easily identified by their lack of colour), and removed any leaves (whether dead or new) near the bottom of the plant; any leaves buried would only burden the plant as they contribute nothing toward photosynthesis;
4. Re-group the new plant cuttings with 2-3 stems per group, and replant, taking care to ensure the roots were covered by the substrate

So, this is what my tank looks like now:

As you can see, there are now plants all across the tank horizontally. Until they grow and thicken the coverage, there is still not a lot of places to hide for my rasboras, so they will continue to hide at the back under the filter until I can provide them some more places to hide. I have read that the more places fish have to hide, the more likely they are to come out, as they know a safe place is not far away.

I will hopefully soon aquire some drift wood and river rocks to put in the tank. I’ll have to do some ‘research’ (looking at other peoples’ established tanks) to get a feel for tank layouts that not only look nice but also provide plenty of areas for the fish to enjoy.

The hardest part of setting up this fish tank has so far been my lack of patience. Most other personal projects that I work on only happen at the speed I can complete them or at the speed of my computer – this fish tank, however, requires I wait for mother nature (helped along in some respects) to do her thing. Hopefully I will learn to be patient! I will have to, or I risk wasting my time, and money, and worst of all, I risk killing my fish!

So far so good, however.

Nothing much has changed; with the addition of fish, I have added a heater, and a bit of a blingy air stone.

The fish are doing fine. I can’t wait to get more! Though, I’ll have to actually wait a week or so to add any more.

One thing I’m quite annoyed about is that the tank looked clean before I set it up, but now that it’s full of water etc, I can see really very obvious previous high-water marks all through it, it’s gross.

Today I purchased:

• Aqua One 2x24W “T8″ fluorescent lighting ($140, the most expensive part so far)
• Seachem biological stabliser; to combat “new tank syndrome”
• General purpose plant fertiliser/nutrients
• Three plants, of which I forget the names

I’m going to leave the tank sit for a week. I’m going to go to the fish shop today and buy… something. Although I purchased a biological stabliser to reduce the effects of new tank syndrome (tl;dr version: new tank syndrome is the lack of “good” bacteria in the tank which helps to cycle waste products from plants and fish to reusable products by the plants); I really should wait a while before introducing any fish to the tank. Though, if I buy a test kit from the fish shop and everything comes up good, I may as well go ahead and buy myself some fish today. Provided the water has cleared up, anyway.

As I’m in the middle of moving house, the tank is actually at my new place, so I will have to check with my new housemates if they’re able to feed any fish I buy.

1. Left-click the icon and select ‘Preferences’; click the checkbox next to ‘Start applet on session login’ and close the dialogue.
2. Next, left-click the icon and select ‘Configure local sound server’; click the ‘Network Server’ tab and check the boxes next to ‘Enable network access to local sound devices’ and then ‘Don’t require authentication’. This allows applications to stream audio data direct to PulseAudio instead of through PulseAudio’s implementation of the ALSA API. This is necessary for all applications that support talking directly to PulseAudio.

Next, you’ll want to open the Volume Control from the tray icon menu and select your output device on the Configuration tab. PulseAudio should have enumerated all of the available combinations on your system, so choose the option you want. If you’re using optical output to your A/V receiver or television, choose digital, SPDIF or IEC958.

Setting up mpd for use with PulseAudio is straightforward. Open your /etc/mpd.conf file and comment out all the configuration related to alsa, then scroll down a bit and you should see a commented-out section related to PulseAudio. Make your config look like the below, and restart mpd.

# An example of an ALSA output:
#
#audio_output {
# type "alsa"
# name "My ALSA Device"
# device "hw:0,1" # optional
# format "44100:16:2" # optional
# mixer_device "default" # optional
# mixer_control "PCM" # optional
# mixer_index "0" # optional
#}
audio_output {
type "pulse"
name "My Pulse Output"
# server "remote_server" # optional
# sink "remote_server_sink" # optional
}

Next, you’ll need to setup MythTV. This is pretty straightforward, all I did was go through the General settings to the audio options menu and set the following options:

Update! MythTV trunk supports PulseAudio, so all you need to do is select ‘PulseAudio:default’ as the audio output device.

• Output:ALSA:plughw:0,1 (0,1 being the card id, device id key, obtainable through the command ‘aplay -l’; you may have something different in your setup but you can freely edit this text field for the correct device)
• Passthrough output device: Default
• Max audio channels: Stereo
• Upmix: passive
• Enable AC3 to SPDIF passthrough: no (force AC3 decoding by MythTV if your receiver can’t do it)
• Enable DTS to SPDIF passthrough: yes (pass Dolby/DTS to your receiver, for DVDs)

And that’s it! All done. You should now have mpd and MythTV routable through PulseAudio which allows you to make use of the excellent projectM audio visualisation suite (basically an implementation of Milkdrop in OpenGL for Linux). Excellent for parties!

A note: This does actually output PCM 44.1Khz correctly. I was previously routing my audio through HDMI cable to the television, then from the television to the receiver. The TV was outputing a 48Khz signal; direct from the computer via optical, it’s a sweet 44.1Khz. Nice!

1. Media Centre Musings: Part 1 – The Theory
2. Media Centre Musings: Part 2 – The Plan
3. Media Centre Musings: Part 3 – Third Time’s the Charm
4. Media Centre Musings: Part 4 – Starting Implementation
5. Media Centre Musings: Part 5 – Putting it all Together

Probably the most epic assembly of consumer electronics I’ve experienced, and still not quite finished.

After I picked up the television and the PS3 on Sunday last week, I went out and bought most of the components for my HTPC on Monday. I unfortunately couldn’t assemble it that day because every local PC store had conveniently run out of stock on the case I wanted, so I had to wait for that to be sent to me. It arrived on Wednesday, and I assembled the HTPC, which was pretty straightforward because building PCs is my thing.

The Antec Micro Fusion 350 is, as with all other Antec cases, a very solidly put together affair with all of the things you’d expect and Antec case to have. Even though its name denotes it as being the smaller in Fusion class of HTPC cases, it suffers no functionality or convenience loss, even incorporating Antec’s dual chamber design.

In the above picture you can see pretty much everything: 96×16 LCD just visible on the front, 750Gb Western Digital ‘Green Power’ SATA disk in the foreground inside its own chamber, GeForce 9400GT graphics card and 2x2Gb Corsair TwinX memory in the mid-ground, and the CPU cooler and exhaust fans of the motherboard chamber in the background.

I installed the 9.10RC of Mythbuntu onto the server and was totally lost. I have never used MythTV before, so I really had no idea what I was doing. Thankfully it comes with a lot of sane defaults and most of the functionality worked with minimal setup. I copied all of my media from an external backup disk into the appropriate directories and then started configuring the remote and the LCD.

As mentioned, I’ve no experience with any of this, so I was starting from scratch in all regards. After I spent nearly a half day mucking around with the remote and the LCD, following guides designed for Mythbuntu 9.04, I had aquired enough knowledge to realise that my setup was actually fully functional but was not working because I had selected the wrong presets.

So, now the remote works, but it is a little clumsy in my mind. What buttons from the devices’ original remote do not exist on the Logitech remote are mapped via the softmenu keys which allows you to scroll through a list of functions and then choose what you want to do. The only criticism of the remote itself that I have is that it is very long and slender and the buttons are very hard to push. This means you nearly always need two hands to operate it because you can’t quite reach end-to-end and maintain a good enough grip to support the remote while pushing down the buttons at the extreme ends of the device at the same time. I will have to let loose the newbies to see if they can navigate the system without my assistance, and also to gather from them ideas on how to improve the control scheme. As of yet I have not implemented any direct control of the television from the PC and everything relies solely on the Logitech Harmony remote.

There’s little to say about the speakers and the receiver at this stage – the setup of both was very straightforward, although I did have a problem with the subwoofer not working initially. I took it back to Harvey Norman and they tested it on their demonstation system, where it worked perfectly fine. Confused, I assumed it must have been the cable, or worse, the subwoofer output of the receiver. Thankfully, the helpful sales guy at Harvey Norman gave me the high-quality cable from their demo system and told me to take it with me. “If it works with this cable,” he said as he handed it to me, “you can keep it. Just let me know.” It worked with the new cable.

There’s only been two things so far which my plan failed to account for: the S/PDIF output of the HTPC, and where to place the rear surround speakers. The latter was swimming in the back of my mind at various stages but I never put any solid thought into it. I solved the problem yesterday by going out and buying some universal satellite speaker stands which feel like they’re made from wrought iron. Thankfully though they are just perfect for mounting my speakers; the stands themselves are hollow so the speaker wiring can pass through to the bottom and leave the base unseen. As for the audio on the HTPC problem; the motherboard doesn’t have an onboard connector, only internal jumper pins. Currently I am passing the S/PDIF audio from the internal motherboard connector to the graphics card and through the HDMI cable to the television which then outputs it via optical cable to the receiver. However, in order to listen to music through the HTPC this requires the television to be turned on. Really not a great option considering the television draws about 265 watts of power when on. So I’ve ordered an S/PDIF dongle with both co-axial and optical connectors which should hopefully arrive soon, as when the XBox 360 gets here it’ll need the optical input on the receiver currently in use by the television.

This post is huge already. I think I will write up some reviews of all the components over the next few weeks to save novellising what I already have.

Here’s my working area during setup, the final setup, and the obligatory shot of me playing Team Fortress 2 on the setup. Not seen are the rear satellites just out of shot under the foreground.

1. Media Centre Musings: Part 1 – The Theory
2. Media Centre Musings: Part 2 – The Plan
3. Media Centre Musings: Part 3 – Third Time’s the Charm
4. Media Centre Musings: Part 4 – Starting Implementation
5. Media Centre Musings: Part 5 – Putting it all Together

So, I’ve spent the money buying all the things I previously talked about.

First, a small rant – you may skip past this to the “what did I actually buy?” section of the post if you prefer:

I thought things were working out OK; and they will in the end, but I have come accross some caveats of operation through either my own ignorance or mistake or through clever non-mentions of information by the sales person at Harvey Norman.

The caveat I’m most interested in is this: as we all know, HDMI carries video and audio data compatible with DVI and PCM. So, alongside all the kerfuffle and marketing about how great HDMI is, I naturally assumed that the advancement and simplification of the home theatre system had come to a point where you could mostly plug everything into each other using only HDMI cables and not have to worry about anything else.

Well, I was wrong. My receiver (which I’ll talk about in more detail later on) has three HDMI inputs, and its manual proudly states it is “HDMI switching capable”; naturally I assumed I could simply plug my PS3, XBox360 and HTPC directly into the HDMI inputs with no other cables and have the receiver decode audio out to the surround speakers and pass the video onto the television. Seems pretty straight-forward, right? Not so!

Apparently the receiver I’ve purchased is capable of HDMI pass-through, but this is wholly and soully what it does. It passes it through without looking at it, at all. If I want to get my receiver to decode the audio from anything I plug in via HDMI (because this is the whole fucking point of the receiver and the surround speakers!) I have to connect both a HDMI for video and co-axial or optical audio cable from the device into the receiver.

Thankfully my receiver has three such inputs which will account for all of my devices and I can live happily ever after with the purchase of some additional cables. But fuck me! Is it just me, or is that ridiculous?

What did I actually buy?

In the end, my purchase planning worked. I ended up with everything I planned to buy at around the cost I was expecting to pay. Some things were cheaper than I expected but that was made up for by having to buy additional cabling.

• Television: Sharp LC46D77X, as planned.
• Games: I ended up buying a PS3 instead of a standalone BluRay player. I could have paid about $350-$400 for a standard player, or, what I did do in the end was pay $450 for a PS3 Slim 120Gb. I swore a few years ago never to buy anything Sony again, but what can I say? I really want to play GT5 when it comes out. I’ll also have an XBox 360 in a few weeks after my redemption with Sharp is processed. I’ve gone from owning no consoles to owning two-thirds of all the latest consoles. Great!
• Home Theatre Speakers: Onkyo TX-SR307 and JBL 5.1 “Simply Cinema” SCS-200.5 speakers. More on this later.
• HTPC: I went with the Pentium option. It was cheaper, after all.

How did I go from Yamaha to Onkyo and JBL? Well, that’s pretty much luck. I left hospital on Sunday, helped my dad with his new home theatre setup, and then headed to Harvey Norman to check out the sale that was ending that very day. Luckily for me, it was 30% off home theatre speakers. They had a few setups, none of which appeared to be particularly impressive (or if they were impressive, totally out of my price range) except two; the one I ended up buying and a Yamaha setup which was the model below what I wanted. The confusing part was the Yamaha setup with Klipsch speakers was $1500 versus the $1100 I paid for the Onkyo and JBLs – as I understand it, Onkyo and JBL are both better quality than Yamaha and Klipsch; the sales guy explained it was because the latter system had more overall power output. I am not terribly concerned with overall output as I live in a town house complex, so high volumes are a no-no anyway (as it stands, the total system output of my new system is something like 500 Watts, and previously a 125 Watt 5.1 computer speaker setup was sufficing). The marked price was $1200 but he dropped it to $1100 because he didn’t actually have them in stock on the day.

My current dilemma is trying to figure out the best way to connect them all together. Originally my plan with my new home theatre was to connect everything to everything else through the A/V receiver as explained above in my rant.

So I thought I could do all that with HDMI cables only. Apparently not: my A/V receiver will only pass-through HDMI directly without touching it. So any audio carried over HDMI will go straight to the TV stereo speakers and not to the surround sound where I want it.

OK, fine.

• First option: So, what I want to do is have all of the devices plug via HDMI into the A/V receiver and then have a seperate (S/PDIF, co-ax or optical) cable for the audio also plugging into the A/V receiver.
• Second option: Or, do I want to plug all of the HDMI cables straight into the television and only connect the audio cables from each device to the A/V receiver? Saves me buying another HDMI cable to go from A/V -> TV.
• Third option: OR! Do I want to plug all of the HDMI cables, carrying both audio and video, and ONLY the HDMI cables, into the TV, and then have a single audio cable from the TV’s optical audio out to the A/V receiver?

All three “should work”, but what’s the best way? I guess I’ll have to experiment when I actually get my receiver later in the week.

1. Media Centre Musings: Part 1 – The Theory
2. Media Centre Musings: Part 2 – The Plan
3. Media Centre Musings: Part 3 – Third Time’s the Charm
4. Media Centre Musings: Part 4 – Starting Implementation
5. Media Centre Musings: Part 5 – Putting it all Together

So, on the back of my previous posts, I have finally come to some kind of a conclusion regarding my plans for an HTPC and media centre solution.

The problem previously was that I didn’t have a home theatre to plug any HTPC I built into. However, there are some deals going down at the moment that I am finding too hard to pass up. Not only that, but I feel as though I am overwhelmingly dependent upon my computer for entertainment, which is fine for me, but doesn’t accommodate my housemates and friends very well in a social context. Four things have conspired to make me consider this purchasing spree:

• Harvey Norman currently has a 23-month no repayment deal going
• Sharp are offering an XBox 360 Elite and four games with the purchase of their televisions
• My lounge is rarely used because I find I have nothing to do there
• With a HTPC, I will be able to push all of my computer geekery outside of the computer room onto other people! Muhahaha!

Me being me of course, I would not be satisfied by spending money unwisely. In my eyes, spending unwisely also includes spending “just enough” to get something “good enough” – if I’m going to outlay a large sum of money on something, I might as well make sure it does exactly what I need, how I want it to, even if that means outlaying an even larger sum than what I could “get away with”. As the old saying goes, if you aren’t going to do something properly, you might as well not do it at all.

The components I have chosen are:

• Television: Sharp LC46D77X; a standard-fare 46″ LCD television. I don’t know if having an RS-232 port is standard for LCDs, but this one has one, which is important to me because it will allow me to control the television through my HTPC.
• Games: By redemption (and payment of a small postage fee), from Sharp I will receive an XBox 360 Elite with four games. I would never spend money on an XBox or PS3 if I could get away with it, and in this case although I am indirectly supporting Microsoft, I figure Sharp has already bought the consoles and I am not actually contributing anything directly to Microsoft. In any case, a home theatre without a social gaming aspect isn’t much of a home theatre at all. In the end, I can just sell it if I don’t want it.
• BluRay: I have a few options here, but all I really want is something that reads the disc and throws the data out a HDMI cable to my A/V receiver. The cheapest option should suffice.
• Home Theatre Speakers: Yamaha YHT-692AU or similar. It has 4 HDMI inputs, 2 optical inputs, 2 co-axial audio inputs, component and standard RCA. Everything I’ll need.
• HTPC: Will cost about $800 and be based on an Intel platform; either a dual-core Pentium or Atom.

I have two options here. Basing the system on a mini-ITX Intel/nVidia ION platform will ensure very low power usage, but also ensure a very limited upgrade path. The system is designed with one purpose in mind, so the lack of an upgrade path may not be a problem. However, it isn’t much cheaper than basing the system on a standard ATX mainboard with a dual-core Pentium and discrete nVidia graphics card. It will have an upgrade path however as mentioned this may not be necessary, but the option existing is comforting.

The two systems I’ve mocked up are as follows:

Some notes: the hard disk is meant to replace the hard disk in my desktop system which is a Western Digital Green Power 750Gb. I bought the Green Power because it was cheaper without fully realizing the difference in performance between the two which is substantial. Also, I already have a USB HDTV dongle so I may only need to buy one extra in case watching one channel while recording another becomes a necessity.

So, as you can see I nearly have everything worked out. My plan is to have everything plug via HDMI and optical cable into the Yamaha receiver and make use of the excellent Logitech Harmony 525 multifunction remote to control everything. Although it probably won’t be necessary to do so with the remote, I will still be able to use an RS232 serial cable from the computer to control the television. I might end up setting that up just for coolness factor. Perhaps it will allow me to fine-tune control of the television.

So, these are my plans. Any thoughts, opinions, input?

That was a long sentence!

The Boys, from left to right: Brett, my dad, and myself

MC Bruce and I

MC Ash and I

Empress Wierd and I

We had a good run across Deception Bay and into Pumicestone passage; it was a little choppy on the way over, with a moderate breeze churning up the water. Dad’s boat handled it beautifully…

This is an old photo, but it illustrates my point

Whence we reached Pumicestone passage, we motored along a short while to the jetty at Bribie Island, whereupon dad dropped us off for a few minutes so we could buy some ice cream!

On the way back, Bruce had a go at captaining the bridge, and well enjoyed himself:

It was an excellent day!