Colin’s Blog

so like I just realized I haven’t posted anything here in ages. Partly because I’m just pure lazy and also the fact that I’m now extremely hooked on twitter and would rather post little 145 character or less messages. Anyways not much to say again other then the fact that I’ve really been  getting into hip hop again lately. For awhile there i was nearly loosing interest in it and gradually turning towards electronic music or reggae. This was however when I was just listened to plain old rappers over instrumentals. Recently I have discovered that DJ Shadow and Cut Chemist did a mix project together called the Hard Sell which is a mix of nothing but old random 45 records. I really loved it and now am hooked on turntable music trying to find as much similar recordings as possible. In fact I discovered that Cut himself performed live recently in San Francisco at the dna lounge which broadcasts their shows online so I downloaded that and have been listening to it as well. I must say I love this raw style of hip and the whole beat digging culture which is exactly what real hip hop is about as well as what it was originally before the days of the emcee or rappers.

• went to pick-n-pull today(junkyard) to see if i couldnt find some new taillights, ranger emblems, and new actuator for my passenger door #
• didnt have much luck…found the actuator though and it was pita to get out … now hella tired and ready for sleep #

yeah thats right welcome to my new blog…well actualy its not new as I just decided it was time to upgrade and to start over from scratch as my backend database was getting pretty fouled up and outdated. That also means that for the meantime my site will be a bit hosed and missing things. Unfortunently I may have lost my old blog posts if I cant find a backup of some sort. As for everything else now broken I’ll be getting to them as I can find the time(hopefully in the upcoming weeks). Also I plan to continue to post blog updates into the future.

• I should be asleep by now. Thanks slot insomnia #
• Dog I think I just hosed my twitter profile thanks to twitterifics location feature #
• I also can’t type properly on the ipod touch atm it seems..ment to start the last tweet with doh! instead of dog #

I Just downloaded a really cool piece of software called Mars Edit 2. It allows me to post to my blog directly from software on my computer instead of having to login to word press and go through the admin panel all the time making it much easier to post blogs here
I’m hopeful to be using this to post more often in the future.

I just came up with an interesting thought after hearing that you can stream online video live with a nokia 95n and looking at the dock connector for the touch thinking it would be cool to be able to do on the touch/iphone.

It seems like if the touch/iphone ever got flash support in safari it wouldn’t be hard for someone to make a usb webcam accessory using the usb pins on the dock connector. Most likely it wouldn’t need anything special software wise because of osx. It makes wonder if somewhere down the road we could see webcam accessories for both the touch and iphone that is if apple allows this.

of course you wouldn’t really need one on the iphone unless you wanted a better cam that might be adjustable too.

I’m actually tempted to try this if the time comes were there is flash support available in safari. I would by some generic el-cheapo usb webcam i know that works with a mac out of the box. Then get a dock connector and splice the correct usb cables together too see if it recognizes the device as a camera. Course i would have to get it right I don’t want to fry a $400 ipod now do I lol.

I ordered a 16gb ipod touch last night and I am both excited and nervous about it. This will be my first ipod too btw as before I had always used creative’s stuff. I’m nervious however because I’m scared now that i bought it apple might turn around and update it a month or so with a 32gb version for the same price i payed now. Lets hope not Also hoping they do the SDK right and some jailbreaks the latest update so I can install the perian codec pack.

More to come later….

We had a major windstorm last night! Scenes like this were common all over the region.

this might be anouther option for an htpc. The amd processor is suposedly the best choice for that however all the motherboards that seem to be available have ati video built into them which doesnt work well in linux. Not good for me since I will be runing mythtv on ubuntu.

GIGABYTE GA-73PVM-S2H Micro ATX Intel Motherboard - $79.99

with an

Intel Dual-Core E2140 Allendale 1.6GHz 1MB L2 Cache LGA 775 Processor - $73.99

I have decided to build my own HTPC box running Mythtv on top of Linux. Most likely I will be either using the Mythbuntu distro or a custom install atop of Ubuntu or Debian.

To Give you an idea of what MythTV looks like here are a few screenshots:

My goal is to build a mythtv box for the least amount of money possible but still have the ability to do what I would like it. I’m looking for this to function as not only a DVR but also play videos as well as play music or stream online stations.

The following components are what I came up with:

Antec NSK2480 Black/Silver MicroATX Case 380W PSU - $99.99

GIGABYTE GA-MA69GM-S2H HDMI Micro ATX AMD Motherboard - $79.99

Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-1600 NSTC/ATSC/QAM/FM PCI Tuner - $99.99

AMD Athlon 64 X2 4000+ 2.1GHz 65W Retail Processor - $61.99

Kingston 512MB DDR2 PC2 6400 Desktop Memory - $13.99

Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 320GB 7200RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s HD - $84.99

LITE-ON Black 16X SATA DVD-ROM Drive - $17.99

I’m still not set on the hard drive size or amount of ram as I might decide to go bigger. So far the total cost for the box would be $458.89. Also I wondering if there are any qam based capture cards out there that support hardware MPEG4 or even better yet H.264 encoding because its far more efficient then MPEG2 that the Hauppauge does. This would allow for more recordings on the same amount of disk space. If since I’d rather use one of the two over MPEG2 I would have to have the main cpu go back and transcode the videos to H.264. This as you can image requires quite a bit of processing power.

That brings me to my next thought. I have discovered that they make motherboards that are even smaller then my MicroATX solution I already came up with and posibly cheaper. They call these ITX or mini-ITX.
Personally I would rather go this route as there are some other benefits to it besides size. They also use extremely low amount of power(thus the term green pc) usually around 65W or less, and run cool requiring less fans and generating less heat.

Below is an example of an ITX mainboard and case:

These things are tiny(think mac mini size). However they have a few downsides. First I’m having a hard time find are board that has a decent on board sound with spdif + analog output, HDMI/DVI with decent gpu, and a gigabit nic. There the the issue of cpu power as most arent as powerful as larger systems most likely ruling out the possibility of transcoding video to H.264 let alone MPEG4. I’m also wondering if they might struggle with MPEG2 HD content? there isn’t a lot of info out there on these new systems yet and how well they perform as a HTPC/DVR.

At any rate I’m not in any hurry and plan to do more research on this project of mine.