Josh Highland’s Blog

I have blogged about it before, I have a HTPC (home theatre pc) running in my living room, hooked to my TV. I started off with MythTV, but settled on Window Media Center 2005.

When I first built the Media Center machine, I had basic cable, with no DVR, so I let the media center handle all of that. Now I have Verizon FIOS with HD, and one of their HD DVR Boxes, and I rarely use my media center pc, but its always nice to be able to flip the input over to it and watch youtube and browse the web. I also like the fact that I can download all sorts of movies and tv from the darkside of the web and watch them on the tv. That was a huge plus.

For a while now, the Media Center has been acting funny. I built it on a shoe string budget with some questionable parts I had laying around, so I didn’t expect it to live forever. The other day it stopped working all together.

Today I took it apart to see what the problem was. After some investigation, I found the cheap power supply was dead, and it took the mother board/processor with it. FAIL!

Well, here I am at a cross roads. Before it was a matter of software, now I need new hardware. What do you think I should build or buy?

The main things I’m looking for in a HTPC

• Ability to browse the web
• Watch Videos I download form the internet, mostly divX files
• Small form factor
• Doesn’t really look like a computer
• Blu-ray is a bonus

Should I build another Window xp MCE machine, Windows Vista Ultimate, mac Mini, apple TV, myth TV? I don’t even know where to start.

I’ll blog my research as I go. Lets see what you think I should do.

If you have been following my blog, you an read that my PC died, and for a moment, I installed OS X Leopard on it. Well, my new drive from western digital arrived, and I am back working in Vista now (I’m not sure if that is a good thing or not!).

Parallels makes it easy to run Windows inside of Mac, but I haven’t found a good way to run Mac inside of windows. Previously, I used a project called “LEO4ALL” to install Leopard on my PC. A little bit of Googeling around after I installed Vista, I found “LEO4VMWARE”

LEO4VMWARE is a pre-packaged and running distribution of OS X Leopard for the vmware, a virtual machine software. You can download the vmware payer here http://vmware.com/download/player.

Side Note: I’m going to be honest here, you are going to want to get vmware workstation, so you can tweak the performance settings. If you are looking at virtually putting OS X on your pc, you have enough smarts to download vmware desktop for free, and then find a serial number.

What this all means is all you have to do is download LEO4VMWARE and install vmware and you are off and running!

I have gotten it to work (not well, but it worked) on a pentium 4 3 ghz windows xp computer with 3 gigs of ram. On my intel core 2 duo, 3ghz, 4 gigs of ram running vista to work great! Check out the picture below.

Getting networking can be tricky, so read the posts on how to do it here

Downloads for LEO4VMWARE can be found by going here http://www.mediafire.com/?ggkr1obgrft, downloading the zip and looking at the links inside. I personally suggest buying a month of rapid share and downloading for there. LEO4VMWARE is about 3 gigs, and rapidshare offers amazing download speeds.

I am not a huge fan of windows, but it the operating system I have been running for the past 14 years (if you dont count college, or my current laptop… both were/are linux based). I have Windows Vista at home, and I have to use Windows XP at work.

Over the years, I have found programs that have worked for me. They have worked well, and helped me to get things done. I decided to make a list of the applications that I use on a rather regular basis. These are the things that I would for sure reinstall if my computer was to die tonight. Most of the software is free, and open source. As a result, many of the programs I am about to list also are available for Linux and Apple OSX. So here is the list of windows program that I love, in no particular order (expect Firefox, its at the top of the list)

Web Browsing:

• Firefox (http://www.mozilla.com)
  Sooooo much better then internet explorer SO USE IT!

File Searching:

• Agent Ransack (http://www.mythicsoft.com/agentransack)
  Soooo much better/faster then the built in windows file search

File Comparison:

• Compare It (http://www.grigsoft.com)
  Great tool for doing differences in files. helpful for programmers.

Text Editor:

• notepad++ (http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net)
  Simple and fast text editor

Sound Editing:

• audacity (http://audacity.sourceforge.net)
  no frills audio editing.

Windows Enhancements:

• taskbar shuffle ( http://www.freewebs.com/nerdcave/taskbarshuffle.htm)
  use this tool to reorder the running programs in the windows taskbar. super light weight

Instant Messaging:

• pidgin (http://www.pidgin.im)
• GoogleTalk (http://www.google.com/talk)

CD Burning:

• infraRecorder (http://infrarecorder.sourceforge.net)
  awesome open source/free cd burner. The only one I use now

Anti-virus:

• AVG 7.5 Free (http://free.grisoft.com/doc/downloads-products/us/frt/0?prd=aff)
  Norton can suck it

Spyware:

• adaware (http://www.lavasoft.de/support/download)
• spybot (http://www.safer-networking.org/en/download/index.html)

Image sharing/hosting:

• Flickr (http://www.flickr.com)
  the place I host my pics

• Flickr Uploadr (http://www.flickr.com/tools)
  how I upload my pics

• FlickrDown (http://greggman.com/pages/flickrdown.htm)
  how I leech my friends pics

VOIP:

• skype (http://www.skype.com)
  cool tool for talking to people

• prettymay (http://www.prettymay.net)
  answering machine for skype! record/download mp3 copies of things

P2P:

• soulseek (http://www.slsknet.org)
  awesome application for finding full albums of music

• utorrent (http://www.utorrent.com)
  my favorite torrent client, use with piratebay and isohunt FTW!

Backup:

• syncback (http://www.2brightsparks.com/syncback/sbse.html)
  an application that will copy your files to a removable hard drive on a scheduled basis. great tool.

• carbonite (http://www.carbonite.com)
  $50 a year for unlimited off site backup? you better believe i use this. you should also!

Blogging:

• Wordpress (http://www.wordpress.org)
  if you have your own server, use this! if not, wordpress.com is for you

Programming:

• Eclipse (http://www.eclipse.org)
  I love this IDE, I do all my development in it now. These plugins really help get things done.
  • cfeclipse (http://www.cfeclipse.org)
  • phpeclipse (http://phpeclipse.sourceforge.com)
  • subversive (subversion control) (http://www.eclipse.org/subversive)
  • esftp (sftp control) (http://www.antimatter-studios.co.uk/sites/chris/projects/esftp)

SSH:

• putty (http://www.putty.org)
  simple and sweet ssh client

RSS Reader:

• Feedreader (http://www.feedreader.com)
  one of the best desktop news readers I have used

FTP:

• Filezilla (http://filezilla-project.org)
  so much better then cuteftp

Key Logging:

• BFK (http://sourceforge.net/projects/bfk)
  this came in handy when the guy installing FIOS had to use my computer to “configure” the modem/router. pwned!

I love using firefox, and one of the reasons is the tabs. Opening things in tabs is great. I really like the fact that I can drag the tabs around to make things easier for myself. Since 1995 I have been wonderign my Microsoft hasn’t made it possible to reorganize the programs that running and minimized in the system taskbar. It cant be that hard to develop. It the little things that Apple gets that Microsoft doesn’t get.

Until Microsoft can figure out how to let me reorganize my taskbar, a small freeware application called “Taskbar Shuffle” is here to save the day.

Its free, its light weight, no ads, so spyware, it just works. Run in, and then start dragging and dropping things in the task bar. After a while I have found it hard to use a windows computer that doesn’t have it installed.

You should install it to day. http://www.freewebs.com/nerdcave/taskbarshuffle.htm