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...

Comparing Penjuins, Apples and Windows doesn't work.

So today I was reading a NY Times story posted on Digg about Ubuntu, an interesting article but containing some of the usual FUD about Linux. While commenting about this on Digg I found myself in a familiar argument, an argument that I have seen often but that does not hold water in my opinion. It goes a little something like this...

I won't use Linux because I had hardware issues the last time I tried and I never have any on my Mac.

You see the issue I have with this is that you cannot compare your experience with you Mac to your experience of installing some favor of Linux on some randomly configured PC. The people that put forward this argument always fail to admit that their Mac is a closed system that does not allow them to install any old piece of hardware. If they were to be fair they should compare the experiences of the Hackentosh community to that of Linux, they would then at least be in the same ball park.

The second aspect of their argument that I have an issue with is this, neither Apple or Windows have really been in the position that Linux is. Linux as an OS needs people to adopt it now so that hardware vendors will improve their support, something that has started happening thanks to Dell and AMD.

In reality if you want to compare Apples to Linux you should be comparing a Dell or System76 PC with a Mac.

Crunch Bang Linux Desktop

Crunch Bang Linux Desktop
Originally uploaded by kiwiboyus

Here's a screen shot of my current #! Crunch Bang Linux desktop. I love how clean looking Openbox is with just Conky and Gwibber running.

Love this design.

I just stumbled across this blog while looking for a good Kiwi icon to use as my avatar, I maybe a Pakeha but I really like this design. It's the islander in me, just like my need to live near the ocean, it's a Kiwi thing. Oh and I found my icon.

Love love love The Dark Knight

I saw it twice at the movies, one of the few worth $9+. We bought the DVD and sat on it for 2 weeks, waiting for the Xmas/New Year break to watch it again... and it was SO worth the break. Christopher Nolan captured what I have always loved about the Batman with this movie, he's a true hero in every sense of the word without seeking any of the glory. In a way he is like Sam from LOTR (an Xmas tradition of ours is to watch all 3 extended LOTR movies), he is an under dog true to the cause regardless of any recognition. The Dark Knight is just one of those movies I will never get sick of watching, even though I know whats going to happen next.

I can't wait until the next one.

The Wind makes a great PS1

For the last few weeks I have been experimenting with emulators on my MSI Wind. The first was Project64 which plays Nintendo 64 games and works well. Then this week we finally got rid of our spare old monster of a TV, I had been using it to play my PS1 and PS2 instead of having yet another box in our TV cabinet. This gave me a new challenge of hooking up my Playstations to my PC monitor or finding another way to play my games. After messing around with a TV that didn't want to play ball I decided to look for an emulator to run my games. I found the mother load of emulators at www.emulator-zone.com, ePSXe had the top rating and I now know why. You have to do a little searching for a PS1 Bios (in the usual places), but once located and after the setting wizard I was playing MediEvil on my over clocked Wind.

Happy days!

Now all I need to do is make ISOs out of all my PS1 games. Sadly emulating PS2 is a different animal so I'll just have to drag it downstairs when I want to play.

Ubuntu 8.10 and Suspend

I have been running the beta of Ubuntu 8.10 - Intrepid Ibex for almost 2 weeks now on my Wind and have been really happy with it. Last night around 7:30 PM I put my Wind into suspend and forgot about it (normally I shut it down over night). This morning to my surprise, 12 hours later, I hit the power button and my Wind booted right to the login screen for Intrepid. I entered my password and expected to see a warning message about my battery being low but to my surprise I still had 3.5 hours battery life remaining.

Simply awesome!

Watch them Bios updates.

So when I read that MSI had released a new Bios for the Wind I was pretty excited. On top of allocating more RAM to the integrated video the fabled Turbo feature was back. So I flashed my Bios and all looked good until I noticed my wireless connection had become super flaky. I had replaced the stock wifi card with a dell 1490 because it works with Windows, Linux and OS X, so I thought maybe that was the issue. There is an extra stand off on the mother board that a lot of people said should be removed because it causes issues, so I finally got up the courage to take the pliers to it and no improvement. Finally tonight I decided to roll the Bios back to 1.06 and I'm back to a nice speedy Internet experience.

So the leason learned here is don't be so quick to install the newest thing.

By the way I love my wife, she bought me both my Ibanez guitar and MSI Wind. She's the bestest!

MSIWindosx86 Desktop

MSIWindosx86 Desktop
Originally uploaded by kiwiboyus

XP DeskTop

XP DeskTop
Originally uploaded by kiwiboyus

Ubuntu 8.10 desktop

Ubuntu 8.10 desktop
Originally uploaded by kiwiboyus

Ever Changing Wind.

So I've had my Wind for a few months now, and last night I think I completed it's evolution by installing the latest Bios 1.09

Back when I first read about the MSI Wind there were three things that got my attention

• a 10 inch screen
• an 80 GB Sata HD
• the ability to over or under clock the CPU on demand

Well the Wind started shipping and the first thing people noticed was the over clocking feature was missing. MSI had removed it from the Bios and there was no word about it ever coming back. Like a lot of others I decided to buy a Wind anyway and I haven't had any regrets, so far I have:

• added another stick of Ram giving me a total of 2 GB
• installed a Dell 1490 Wifi card which works in Ubuntu, XP and OS X
• applied a custom skin from skinit.com
• installed a 320 GB Western Digital Scorpio
  
• installed Ubuntu 8.10 w/netbook remix, XP home and OS X 10.5
• updated the Bios to 1.09 w/over clocking set to 15%

Now I can sit back and enjoy my triple booting goodness... at least until I hear of another great mod for my Wind.

Skined MSI Wind

Skined MSI Wind
Originally uploaded by kiwiboyus

Here is my MSI Wind with the Radiohead skin I made on www.skinit.com
I love how subtle the colours are on the black of the Wind.

Music studio.jpg

Music studio.jpg
Originally uploaded by kiwiboyus

Pretty messy looking right now.