My zone on the web!
Sorry it’s been a while since I posted. It’s been a pretty busy time for me. I hope to start posting more on the site soon! 
I just bought a Sprint Evo 4G to replace my old Samsung Moment, what a phone. This thing does pretty much everything! More to come!!!!!
My grandmother passed away at age 89 on March 28, 2010. It’s been a hard past few days. The visitation and funeral was held in Galion, OH. We finally returned back home today.
So I’ve had my netbook now for a couple months. It’s the Walmart special for $228, it’s identical to the Acer Aspire netbooks. Nice thing is it’s the upgraded model with a 250gb hard drive, 10.1″ screen and newer chipset. The processor is an Intel Atom N270 1.6GHz that is hyperthreaded, video chipset is an Intel GMA, it comes with 1GB memory. It also has 3 usb ports, a built in Webcam (I have black tape over mine in pic above) and SD card reader.
I have a really nice desktop computer that I use for everything else but I wanted something super portable without breaking the bank. I decided to give the eMachines netbook a try. I figured it wouldn’t be good for much but man was I wrong.
I immediately upgraded the memory to 2GB ($60) since I decided to put it through some rigorous testing. I wiped Windows 7 off of it and installed Ubuntu 9.10 32-bit. It does pretty much everything my big computer does with no issue. The only downfall is high definition video. Since the netbook doesn’t have a hd decoder you can’t play hd videos.
I decided to figure out a way to play hd videos. Broadcom makes an add-on CrystalHD decoder card (mini PCI-E card) that ships with high end HP netbooks. I bought it from eBay for a mere $22. It installs internally in the the free mini PCI-E slot on the bottom. I was able to get it working with Ubuntu however since the drivers are still alpha quality they don’t work well yet. I installed Windows and the drivers work great with Media Player Classic Home Cinema (an svn build). More to come on the CrystalHD later! Keep a look out for another post on this.
I have successfully run two virtual machines on it (like it’s made for that) with no issue on Ubuntu 9.10 with VMware Player. I tried using TrueCrypt to encrypt the system partition. Once the drive is encrypted it won’t boot up, forcing you to use the rescue cd to decrypt it so it will boot up again. Appears to be a bios issue, more on this later.
So now I finally have Windows XP Pro 32-bit and Ubuntu 9.10 32-bit installed as a dual boot. 30GB partition for Windows XP, 250MB (for /boot) and 10GB (for /) partitions for Ubuntu 9.10. The remaining partition is for data and is formatted NTFS and both OSes use it. Keep in mind this setup is temporary until the CrystalHD drivers mature and work better with Ubuntu which then it will be Ubuntu only.
One thing I will note is battery life isn’t that great. It will run about 2 to 2 1/2 hours on one charge since it only has a 3-cell battery. I did purchase an extended battery online that is a 9-cell and it runs about 7 to 9 hours on it.
Here is a picture of my extended battery.
For the money $228 in my opinion it should have cost more. It runs like a champ and has yet to let me down. I take it pretty much everywhere I go and the mobility of it is incredible. It would be much more painful doing this with a regular laptop. I am very happy with my purchase!
Finally a prepaid data card that gives you everything you would get with a contract plan? Amazing! Virgin Mobile now offers 5GB of data transfer for $60 a month, the same price you would pay on a contract plan. Their service uses the high speed Sprint 3G network just like their phones do. If you have ever had a 3G data card with AT&T you have no doubt had extremely slow speeds since AT&T is not 3G in all areas. Thankfully with Sprint and their all digital network you get 3G everywhere you go.
The modem is a Novatel MC760 that plugs into a usb port, the same one that Sprint uses (U760). It also has a microSD slot that turns it into a thumb drive as well. It is fully 3G capable and I have been averaging speeds of 1 to 1.5MB.
I don’t like the idea of being stuck in a contract, especially with a data card. What if my needs change and I don’t need it for a few months. Since it’s prepaid I just don’t renew my monthly payment. If I had a contract I would have to pay anyway rather I needed it or not.
The data card/modem costs $100 up front but you gain the flexibility of prepaid. You control your spending, your contract doesn’t! If you are looking to purchase one Best Buy and Radio Shack both carry it if you don’t feel like waiting to get it!
It works out of the box on Windows with a few quirks, it works great in Linux too (tested on Ubuntu 9.10) but you need to manually tweak it a bit. I will be posting more info on using it with Windows and Linux in the next few days.
Some of you may not know what a Home Theatre PC is. Basically a HTPC for short is a PC that is dedicated for your TV. There are many ways to create a HTPC, the cheapest of course using generic parts with hardware hd decoders running Linux. I have setup three HTPCs all of which worked great. It took me about 6 months to get the bugs worked out of them. I can say they can be very nice once you get the kinks worked out.
Do they play Blurays? No. Well not easily, see Blurays are encrypted and require special codes to decrypt them. It’s not as simple as just popping it in and playing. To play a Bluray you have to decrypt it to your hard drive and then it can be played. This takes a lot of time and is pretty much useless. In the future I am sure this will change but right now it sucks.
So why a HTPC? You can play downloaded HD Video, stream video from YouTube, play music, look at photos, etc. The possibilities are basically endless. The best part is you can throw a big hard drive in your computer and stream to as many HTPCs as you want through your home network.
How much? It depends on what type of HTPC you want. Do you want the ability to decode HD Video with no lag or skipped frames? If yes you will need a hardware hd decoder which costs more. Do you want to burn cds/dvds on it? If so that costs more. I really depends on what you want it to do. I will say though for about $200 it would be possible to build a decent HTPC that would decode lossless HD Video.
Does this replace the need for a Bluray Player? No! If you are planning on staying legal you should obviously purchase a Bluray Player. It will make your life less complicated reducing the need to decrypt and play Blurays which can take as long as a few hours. The film studios work hard to produce movies and therefore why would you want to steal movies? It’s illegal to download copyright movies and not only that you lose quality in the video. Copied Bluray movies are normally transcoded to a smaller size which loses quality of the video. Signup for Netflix and rent Blurays through the mail!
If you are interested in learning more about HTPC I would suggest looking at Xbox Media Center. It doesn’t require an XBox, just a Linux or Windows PC. Although I would highly recommend using it on Linux. In addition I would recommend using a NVidia GeForce video card that supports hd decoding (aka PureVideo HD). Xbox Media Center was developed originally for hacked XBoxes (not XBox 360). It started as Xbox Media Player.
I have been thinking about the different ways you can play downloaded HD Video on your TV. So far I have been using hybrid Home Theatre PCs to accomplish this. Just recently I decided why not purchase another XBox 360 for the bedroom. Now we have two XBox 360’s that are capable of playing HD Video. The only limitation with XBox 360 is that you cannot exceed a 4GB file due to the FAT32 filesystem. In addition I tried formatting my external HDD as HFS+ which worked and would allow greater than a 4GB file but the XBox still wouldn’t play it. It seems there is a limitation with XBox that doesn’t allow any files over 4GB unless they are in Windows Media format.
I would like your vote!
Loading ...I just purchased another server from Linode. They offer virtual private servers that are amazing! I decided to run my new sites on a bigger server. Now my sites and friends sites are hosted on a faster server. The previous server was a Linode 360 with only 360mb of memory. The new one is a Linode 540 with 540mb of memory, 24gb of disk space and 300gb of transfer at only $29.95 a month. It’s running Linux of course (duh!!!), Ubuntu 9.10 64-bit to be exact!
Okay so it’s been a while since I have actually updated my site. I decided to change it into a blog. I think this will make it much easier to keep my site up to date and manage. The days of having static websites that don’t change much are a thing of the past. In todays world we have Facebook, Twitter, etc. so I figured it’s time for me to adapt as well. I hope you guys like my blog!