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In: Home Theater
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I finally purchased a new piece of Home Theater Equipment!  I’m the proud owner of a new Sherbourn 7/2100a 200 watts x 7 channel amplifier.  This is the first step in replacing my 8-year old Onkyo receiver.  First the new amplifier, then the 2 new in-wall Sonance Cinema Ultra II SUR surround speakers to go from 5.1 to 7.1 surround, and then finally a new Anthem AVM-50 receiver to give built-in video processing and true 7.1 sound.  (Still don’t know when that one will be available.) I know, I just got something new, and I’m already talking about the next thing.  But it’s a system,Read More →

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In: Web
With: 7 Comments

I’m looking for wiki software for a project I’m resurrecting and I’m mystified by the overwhelming number of fragmented versions available, defunct or otherwise. My requirements are pretty simple: support my server (PHP4, mySQL, CGI), WYSIWYG editor, and free. Doesn’t sound too complicated does it? Well apparently it is. I’m still looking. Looking at this comparison, MediaWiki is the closest as it has alpha-level support. Twiki is another possibility, as is Wikka. MoinMoin 1.5 has WYSIWYG, but it requires PYTHON on the server, which won’t work for me. Basically, I’m overwhelmed and frustrated. I guess I’ll just have to try a few and see whichRead More →

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In: Home Theater
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I setup a TiVo series 2 today for a friend. There was no telephone jack near the TV, so the only real option was wireless ethernet. Unfortunately, the first activation call must be made via a telephone (or via a wired USB ethernet adapter using ,#401 as the dialing prefix). Finding a compatible wireless adapter was almost impossible because there are so many different hardware revisions, no one knows which adapter contains which chipset, even if you use the cheat sheet on Tivo.com. I got lucky and found an old revision of a Netgear adapter, the only one in the store. Luckily, this was anRead More →

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In: Home Theater
With: 2 Comments

I’ve been wanting to post a photo album on my website for a few years now. I finally got around to doing it. For now, there are just pictures of my 2 home theater projects. The pictures cover the projects from start-to-finish (well, almost finished, I’m not quite done with the latest). My first home theater was in my first house and was more of a media room because it was in a huge basement room with a bar and pool table. Nicole and I moved about a year and a half ago and went with a dedicated home theater for version 2.0. I stillRead More →

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In: Wordpress
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I have several WordPress plug-ins installed and working. Unfortunately, WordPress does not yet have a decent site to list, rank, vote on, and download plugins. Here are a few that I’m using: Archivist – displays older posts on the front page that would otherwise be lost in the archives Subscribe Me – adds news reader subscription links to the sidebar on the right WP-TinyMCE – WYSIWYG editor that works for both main posts and comments ChenPress – Another WYSIWYG editor. This one based on FCK editor. Does not work with comments as far as I can tell. I’m comparing it to WP-TinyMCE to figure outRead More →

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In: Web
With: 8 Comments

I’ve converted my blog from blogger.com format to WordPress. My initial thoughts are that WordPress is much more customizable and powerful. If you have have your own webhost and know how to ftp files to your server, floowing the installation instructions at wordpress.org will result in a much better blogging experience, especially if you like to tinker!Read More →

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In: Concerts
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Nicole and I went to see the Diesel Brothers last night at Wild Wing Cafe in Mt. Pleasant, NC. We were looking for something fun to do on a Wednesday night during our vacation, and these guys were just what we were looking for. We were pretty lucky, because there is not that much live music around Isle of Palms during the week, off-season. We were lucky to find such a talented duo. Lot’s of interesting covers and they have a CD of originals as well. Their talents go beyond playing well. They can play well while thoroughly intoxicated. True professionals of the late nightRead More →

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In: Automotive
With: 5 Comments

In preparation for an upcoming road trip, I purchased and installed at PhatNoise PhatBox in my 2004 Infiniti G35 Sedan. Initial impressions: holy crap, this thing is awesome! Why did I wait so long?!? Installation was extremely easy, just plug it into the satellite radio harness and it shows up as a CD changer, controlled directly from the factory head unit. To get it hooked-up and working in the car, total time was about 10 minutes (still need to screw it down though). I know iPods are extremely popular; here’s why I think the PhatNoise blows the iPod away. controlled by the factory head unitRead More →

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In: Home Theater
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After working on it for several weeks, I finally finished my guide for audiophile-quality extraction of music from CDs. To get the best possible audio quality, it is necessary to have bit-perfect extraction from the CD (with no unnecessary error correction trying to reconstruct misreads due to CD drive offset). Then, the perfectly-extracted audio should be compressed using a lossless format to maintain the original quality. The guide shows how to use setup and use some free programs to do this: EAC, FLAC, and AccurateRip. To be honest, I’m not positive I could identify the difference between a “regular” extraction and a bit-perfect extraction, andRead More →

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In: Tech
With: 5 Comments

I’ve built my new desktop computer / server and now have it up an running. It’s been 4 years since my last PC, so it was time for an upgrade. The biggest advantages of the new computer are a dual-core processor, a super-quiet case, and a RAID hard drive controller card that provides protection against drive failures and lets me add disks to the array to make one huge drive. Biggest advantage: all of my movies stored on my network, so that I can use the PC in my basement to browse and play movies. Just like TiVo, only with a better looking interface (WindowsRead More →