My XBMC build.

The Case 1
Originally uploaded by kiwiboyus

After upgrading our TV it was time to upgrade the XBMC we have been running for the last couple of years as well. I had bought a refurbished Xbox from Target's website of all places for about $50.00, then hardware modded it to run XBMC.

Due to the inputs available on our new TV it made more sense to upgrade the XBMC to a PC build running Linux, the question was how much would I have to spend? I did a quick inventory of my PCs and spare parts and figured out that i might only need to buy a case and CPU Fan, the rest I already had.

So here is what I used:

Case: In Win BL631.300BL Case
Motherboard: ASRock N68PV-GS
CPU: AMD Athlon 3800+
Video Card: Nvida 8400 GS
1.5 GB RAM
1TB Toshiba SATA HD

I followed the main guide for installing a minimal Ubuntu 9.10 system with XBMC running on top of it and haven't been disappointed. Here are pictures of the PC, I'll add some of it up and running on our TV at some point. All up I only spent about $150.00 including shipping and taxes.

Good cheese & crackers + Santa Barbara weather @ the Park with my Wife = Perfect Sunday afternoon!

I read about the new Blogger templates this morning and decided to give them a go. I like it so far, need to play with it a little more though.

Just set up my Nokia E71x for blogging :) Let's see how it works.

I can see clearly now.

So today was a pretty good day, work took away my 3 old 19 inch monitors and replaced them with two 24 inch wide screen monitors :)

Picking a name

It's not an easy thing to do picking a name, there are so many more aspects to it than just the way it sounds. You want it to "fit"... to convey the idea of the thing being named and at the same time appeal to the person speaking it.

.....must not over think this.

Long time coming.

It's been a long time since I posted anything here but I have a little project brewing so I think I'll document it here. I've been doing tech support for almost 8 years now and I've decided it might be a good idea to document what I've learned and maybe what other have learned also...