Tag: media center

Home network upgrades

On By Asian EdIn Computers and Internet, Hardware4 Comments

After a recent conversation with a certain Austrian Otaku about Home Theater stuffs, I decided it was about time to do an update of what I’m using at home. Since my last overview, I’ve made a couple changes and upgrades through the house. Some have already been talked about (like the TV upgrade) but others haven’t. Here we go…

The biggest change of late has been that I’ve finally retired Belldandy from service. After nearly 7 years of duties ranging from gaming machine to media PC to home server, it was time for her to be sent to greener pastures. The day I parted with her was pretty emotional, though I know someone will put her to good use.

In her place, I welcome Tsukasa into my home network as the bedroom HTPC. Sporting the same case used by Konata, her beginnings were conceived when I bought an Athlon x2 7750BE from someone at the office for $20.

IMG_3416

After pairing the CPU with a Gigabyte GA-MA785GM-US2H motherboard, 2GB of RAM, and a Lite-on Blu-ray reader, she was ready to go into service serving up movies, music, and high definition content.

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Odds, ends, and upgrades

On By Asian EdIn Hardware, Life in general12 Comments

The past few months have been pretty eventful, though nothing in terms of figure acquisitions. I am, however, expecting a couple things in the near future, including a set of Summer Uniform Lucky Star Figma (Kagami, Tsukasa, and Miyuki), Yoko Real Image ver., and a bunch of BDs and DVDs from RightStuf’s 12+ Days of Christmas sale.

Black Friday also came and went, and while I didn’t actually go out, I did score a couple interesting items. The first of which came in the week before Thanksgiving…

TV

Yes, that is a brand new DLP television in my living room. Just how big is it and how much did I pay? Keep reading…

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Home media setup

On By Asian EdIn Computers and Internet, Hardware8 Comments

Every so often, I’m asked about how I have my home entertainment center set up. Usually, I grab the nearest whiteboard and marker and then diagram it out, because it can be somewhat difficult to explain just by speaking… I think, however, I should be able to jot it down in text with the aid of some pictures!

First of all, meet Kagami, the hub of my home network…

Kagami, the WHS

Some of you may be wondering “What? That’s it? That doesn’t look like anything special…” and on appearance alone, you would be correct. Kagami is the only off-the-shelf desktop computer I own (and in fact the first one I’ve owned in many many years) and is a Dell PowerEdge SC440. The base machine cost me about $250 to purchase from Dell without an OS and I’ve pretty much left her stock. There are, however, a few major additions, namely in the area of storage. At present, Kagami carries 4 hard drives: 2 750GB Samsung Spinpoint F1s and 2 1.5TB Seagate Barracudas. Judging by the manufacturers’ capacity figures, she carries 4.25TB worth of storage space (the “real” number is actually around 4.1TB, using computer interpretation of the number of bytes in a kilobyte).

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