6 Reasons the new AppleTV is a Floppy Turd
Posted by eric in Apple, Multimedia, Opinion on September 1, 2010
New AppleTV
I’m not an Apple insider nor have I actually used the new AppleTV which was revealed today by Steve Jobs. What I am though is an avid user of multimedia devices on my Home Theater. My current toy of choice is the spectacular Western Digital TV Live!, which literally plays everything*.
So I was a bit excited today to hear that Apple was rolling out a new model of their somewhat lame duck that is AppleTV. What they delivered was a big, fat, floppy turd on the chest of everyone at the conference. I was let down during the demonstration and even more let down after actually reading the technical specifications posted to Apple’s site.
And on that note, I present my Six Reasons why the new AppleTV is a Floppy Turd.
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What a Difference a New Chipset Makes
Posted by eric in Hardware, Networking, Reviews on January 17, 2010
My system for the last few years has been a Dell Dimension 9200. I’ve done a few upgrades to it that were non-Dell standard but for the most part it has been completely stable and without issue. That was until recently… when I installed a new nVidia GTX 295 video card. I had thought outside of the SLI on a single card that I wouldn’t experience any issues. My mistake.
Soon after installing the GTX 295 I started experiencing strange issues. 3D Performance was in the pits, video playback had issues and even sound while playing a game was choppy and stuttered. I was at a loss for what could have been happening because I had the latest drivers from nVidia and did a fresh install of Windows 7 x64 Enterprise Edition.
Then I remembered last time I had the symptom of stuttering sound…
Review — Borderlands SUCKS and so does everyone on the Internet!
I was excited to try out Borderlands after reading a lot of the reviews on many gaming sites. Needless to say after about ten hours of playing this bore-fest it was on its way back to GameFly.
Perhaps my expectations for it were too high, expecting things like plot and decent graphics…. you know things games aren’t expected to deliver (apparently).
My qualms with Borderlands are simple…
ApocBot — Delay in Releasing Source Code
Posted by eric in Miscellaneous on January 10, 2010
Hey Everyone!
Just a quick update on the source code release for ApocBot! 
I had nothing short of a complete meltdown over my holiday vacation while upgrading my PC. I won’t get into the details on why power supply manufacturers are evil for having modular cables that are keyed the same but are differently pinned (thus frying my hard drives), but needless to say it could be a blog post all on its own!
That being said, I’m back online now and getting back to finishing the code for release. I’ll post it here in a week or so once I get my VMs all set back up and finalize testing. Sorry for the delay
Cheers!
Review — Western Digital TV Live HD Media Player
Posted by eric in Audiophile, Hardware, Miscellaneous, Multimedia, Reviews on January 10, 2010
I recently started creating backups of my home Blu-Ray library without any method to play these backups on my home theater. My media playback device of choice, the XBox 360, is unable to play any video files that are within an MKV container. I had played around with MP4 containers as an alternative but the Windows Networking component of the XBox 360 limited the file sizes to the FAT32 limit of 4GB, which is too small to host an entire 1080p movie and I was unwilling to split the backup into multiple files.
The available alternatives out there didn’t seem technically feasible as most D-Link and Linksys offerings are merely Windows Media Center Extenders with “support for MPEG-4/ASP” (read: DivX) but no support for MPEG-4/AVC or MPEG-4/VC1. The option of setting up another HTPC for my home theater wouldn’t be financially viable because at a base price of about $399 I might as well invest in a Blu-Ray burner to watch my backups.
Enter the Western Digital TV Live HD Media Player…
The Reason Cellular Providers Will Drop Open Platforms
For quite a while now I’ve been ranting to anyone who will listen about why I feel cellular providers are crazy for allowing open platforms on their network. I was shocked when, seemingly without trepidation, providers like T-Mobile and Sprint opened their networks to phones from HTC and Samsung running Google’s Open Source operating system, Android.
What’s the big deal you ask? Well, from where I’m standing it would seem that historically cellular providers wanted to maintain a good bit of control over devices on their networks. Some providers limiting functionality to BlackBerry and Windows Mobile devices depending on your level of service, while others such as Verizon installed their own Java based software platform on every phone.
Enter Android.
ApocBot — I feel I owe everyone an update!
Posted by eric in C# Programming, Gaming, Internet on December 10, 2009
Well, it seems my little post on my MTGO trading bot as generated some interest, so I felt I should at least give an update on the status.
- Basic Trade functionality is completed
- Trade x for y (i.e. 4 Uncommons for 1 Rare)
- Buy/Sell x for x (i.e. 6 Rares for 1 Ticket or 1 Ticket for 6 Rares)
- Smart Bot functionality is 70% Completed
Currently ApocBot is able to correctly identify cards that are selected during a trade and quote the stored price for the cards. So far, so good!
Want some more info? 
Coming Soon — Magic The Gathering Online Smart Bot!
Posted by eric in C# Programming, Gaming, General Software, Opinion on September 14, 2009
I thought I’d take the opportunity to update my blog here to talk about what I’ve been working on lately, as it would appear that my free projects of WWWinamp and the Discogs API are no longer updated
I’ve been working on my first retail product and I’m really excited about it!
Review: Intel SS4200-E NAS
Posted by eric in Hardware, Networking, Opinion, Reviews on September 12, 2009
Well, it finally happened. The D-Link DNS-323 NAS that I’ve been using for the past two years with a 750GB RAID1 finally filled up 
The DNS-323 has been a great NAS! I had my doubts at first with a D-Link product, since in the past their networking products that I’ve used haven’t been quality. So my issue was, how do I upgrade from a RAID1 on a two-drive NAS to a new fault tolerant system that has at LEAST 1.5TB of storage. I mean, if you’re going to upgrade you need to make it count, so doubling the capacity of my current NAS was the primary goal.
I did some research and with NewEgg running a sale on the hardware, I settled on the Intel SS4200-E NAS. On the spec sheet, this NAS met my requirements because it supported up to four drives, RAID5 and RAID10! Technical reviews I found of the device put it at the top of the chart when it comes to RAID5 performance.
Upgrading my HTPC — It’s Alive!
Posted by eric in Hardware, Internet, Miscellaneous, Multimedia, Reviews on August 24, 2009
A couple months ago I posted a blog entry about my plans to upgrade my Home Theater PC (HTPC) using the new Zotac IONITX
Intel Atom based motherboard. As a point of reference, I’m upgrading my HTPC from an underpowered, but pretty sweet at the time VIA EPIA-M 600M. My reason for using the 6000 at the time was I wanted a fanless setup to the HTPC would be as silent as possible.
The case I’ve been using is a Morex 3677B case, which is fairly small but still allows enough room for a 2.5″ Hard Drive and a Slim Laptop CD/DVD drive.
A couple gotchas I ran into while upgrading from the VIA board to the new Intel Atom based board:
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