Category: Geekdom

Any Home Theater Wizards Out There?

I’m trying to help my parents out with some home theater stuff for the house they’re building (just about finished). I’m trying to find an all-in-one receiver that will play Blu-Ray (or DVD, but preferably BD), as the built-in entertainment center area only has room for one more component (as the DirecTV DVR takes up one of the two). Now that’s not a big deal, as there are hundreds of those types of things out there, but I need one a bit more powerful and specialized: I need one that uses bare-wire speaker connectors (as he has in-wall speaker wire and I’m not using something with proprietary connectors like most of them have) and ideally has dual-zone support (as he has speaker wire running to the kitchen, deck, and bedroom as well).

Does such a beast exist? I have a thread open over on AVS Forum, but I figured I’d ask here if anybody knew of such a beast. Dual-zone support isn’t as crucial, but it sure would be nice.

Update: Made it more clear that I need one of those home-theater-in-a-box type of setups that will play the DVDs as well as power the speakers. Realized I wasn’t as clear as I could be with that. I basically need one box that will do it all. I have an Onkyo TXSR508 so I know all about multi-zone stand-alone receivers, just didn’t have a clue if a HTiB setup was capable of doing this.

January 19, 2011

Reading Material (Lots of Android and Geek Stuff)

  • I’m starting to get more into my Android phone, learning all the fun stuff the operating system can do. I’m getting all sorts of useful information from Reddit’s Android subreddit as well as the usual places like XDA and PPC. I’m finding far too many apps and time killers here (and here and here). I’ve rooted the phone so I could remove the Sprint stock apps (good list of what you can get rid of here and here), back things up, ad block and install custom roms down the road (among other mods). I’m also looking into Tasker and all the cool stuff it can do. I’m considering bucking up and paying Roam Control as that will help in Sunriver where the coverage from from Verizon is better in some spots. When I get an extra few bucks, I’m really considering getting something like this for my car and then installing the Torque app to monitor, clear, and read codes in my car. I really should get a dashboard mount for this phone and find a good music player and synching process and just leave my iPod at home. Then I could have a constant video recorder for my phone while I’m on the road using DailyRoads.

    Seriously, though, I’m loving having an Android phone. Anybody else have any great tips or apps that I should look into?

    And in case you’re wondering how or why I got such an expensive phone: No, I couldn’t even remotely afford this phone. I received it when Best Buy completely munged up the repair on my previous phone and I was using a loaner phone for nearly three months. They (thankfully) did the right thing and gave me a new phone, since it was pretty obvious that the repair company had no intention on sending my old phone back to me any time soon. Since my previous phone was top-of-the-line when I got it and had much better features than most of the phones there, the Epic was really the only one that matched up.

  • Speaking of Android, Android vs. WP7 for developers, a case study.
  • And now for something completely different, everybody’s flipping out a bit about this whole Arizona shooting and whether there were political influences (the dude was cracked, plain and simple). Just the same, Sarah Palin denies everything thrown at her, though I did think both of these twitter posts hit the nail on the head.
  • If you shop on NewEgg.com (I do for a ton of computer parts), you might be interested in CamelEgg, which is a NewEgg price tracker to watch for price drops and alerts.
  • Making computer science fun for all ages, it’s Computer Science, Unplugged!
  • Read The F**king HIG is a great blog ranting about bad interfaces on Mac apps “from the Mac App Store, ‘designed’ by people who think they get interface design.”
  • Speaking of interface design, everybody who has a site with a shopping-cart process needs to read this.
  • While I still don’t see a ton of value in twitter (as the signal-to-noise ratio is about one-to-a-million), I love their response to the WikiLeaks subpeona and I only wish more companies watched out for their users like this.
  • A few locals are starting up conference here in Bend called Ruby on Ales, a two-day, single track conference inspired by Ruby, microbrews, and shredding. They have a Facebook page as well. Since I know squat about Ruby, it won’t do me much good, but I’m sure there are folks out there with an interest in this.

January 11, 2011

If Printers Could Talk

Anybody who’s ever done desktop tech support or had to deal with printers at all can understand this.

January 4, 2011

Reading Material

December 20, 2010

For The Music Majors…

An analysis of the melodies of Super Mario Bros.

December 12, 2010

The Internet Is A Bunch of Pipes

Seriously.

I want to talk about bandwidth, throughput, latency, and capacity, and how each of these items relates to one another.

Let me start all folksy with analogies. For simplicity’s sake, let’s consider a medium-sized city that serves water to all its residents through one central reservoir. The reservoir’s capacity represents the total pool of water it can deliver at one time to residents through pipes of varying sizes and at different distances.

It’s actually a great explanation on how network bandwidth, latency, capacity, throughput and such work for folks who wouldn’t otherwise understand.

November 10, 2010

Someone Implements xkcd #576, the eBay-buying Bot

xkcd #576 is about a eBay-shopping bot that buys random $1 items with free shipping every day — and somebody has implemented it. You can follow what the bot is buying on its twitter feed.

November 10, 2010

Download A Piece Of History

If you have an extra 900GB+ of free hard drive space sitting around, you can download the entire Geocities archive. I’m sure 90% of that is “Under Construction” GIFs and obnoxious MIDI files, but it’s still an important piece of Internet history (and there where a few useful reference sites here and there).

More commentary here and background of the project here.

November 9, 2010

Reading/Watching Material

First off: Cheap plug. I’m playing with the Central Oregon Symphony this weekend, and I’d encourage you to come out and see the show. The piano soloist we have coming to play with us is phenomenal, and it’ll be a great show. Concerts are free, click here for ticket info.

OK, enough of the plugging, let’s get down to business (videos are after the jump).

Videos after the jump…

(more…)

November 4, 2010

I Suck

I’ve been so busy at both work and the minute I leave the office lately that I rarely want to turn on my computer when I get home. I’d rather just plop myself on the couch after going all frickin’ day and watch some TV. Even though we canceled our cable last month (we’re poor), there’s still plenty to watch with Netflix, Hulu, and the network channels (and a Windows 7 HTPC to allow us to do it all easily).

Just the same, this blog hasn’t gotten nearly the personal attention it deserves. I suck. I certainly wouldn’t deserve a Best Of Central Oregon nomination (but wouldn’t argue with you if you were to submit this site for a nomination). While uber-blogger Jon will probably get the nod (deservedly), it’d just be nice to knock that egotistical jerk off his high horse.

(Note: Before the hate mail comes in, Jon and I go way back, and anybody who knows Jon or I know that neither of us have egos, especially Jon. I just like to poke fun at him, as he would do to me.)

Anyway, back to the link dump for the evening:

More tomorrow, as I have a bunch of videos to share…

October 27, 2010