It’s a Windows-based PC that’s touchscreen and mounted into a wall.  Here’s a link to the article/instructions.  (http://www.studio-lights.com/blog/iphone-inspired-kitchen-touchscreen-computer.htm)

For what he’s done, he’s spent about $1,700 to do it.  I think it can be done for a heck of a lot cheaper.  He built the computer that powers this system for $1,200, the monitor was $500.  It’s using a new i5 series processor, good amount of memory, etc.  It’s a little much for what this computer does. 

I think it can be done (hardware-wise) for about $500. 

The screen can be picked up second-hand for roughly $150 on eBay.  The computer, I’d recommend just using a nettop box (like the Acer Aspire Revo R3610) – which is $330.  Ideally, I’d pick-up an extra 2gb of RAM, for another $45. 

A nettop PC would be ideal because most of them are “VESA-mount” – i.e. they can be mounted behind a monitor.  In this instance, you could mount it onto the cabinet wall (so you don’t lose cabinet space). 

It’s not something I’d really do, but it’s still a pretty neat idea. 

I commend the guy that came up with the idea (and thank him for sharing it).  It’s not something that I’d have ever really thought of.  I’d probably have just dropped a few hundred on an iPad and done it that way, lol.

There’s a ton of great other software out there which can do a heck of a lot more, though. 

Initially, the Acer Aspire Revo’s setup doesn’t have the best specs when it comes to computing power.  It’s compounded by the fact that Acer installs so much bloatware that performance is bogged down even more.  That’s what initially led me to install XBMC-Live. 

After doing some reading around on the ‘net (I recommend www.pauljroberts.com for some extra reading),  I decided to make some changes.  The Revo comes with a 160gb, 5400 RPM hard drive and 2gb of memory.  I picked up some extra memory (not a cheap proposition) and took the 120gb 7200 RPM drive out of my dead laptop.  Talk about a performance upgrade!  Using some of the suggestions on Paul’s site, I decided to reinstall Windows 7.  Believe it or not, you can grab any sort of Windows 7 Home Premium disk (available via torrent) and use the key printed on the side of the Revo to install it.  (Granted, you have to make a bootable USB key from it, but no big.)

Anyways, running Windows 7 now is much better (still not on par with a newer desktop or laptop).  Unfortunately, at first, Windows Media Center (even with every codec installed) doesn’t seem to run my videos all that hotly.  I’ve tried VLC (which usually can play everything) and other players.  No dice.  Finally, I’ve tried running a Windows-based version of XBMC.  Success! 

But the real reason I’ve switched back to Windows was so that I could run Hulu.  There’s some good content if you’re willing to suffer through the advertisements.  And Hulu desktop is pretty good.  As I write this, I’ve been streaming Season 1 of Lost all day.  Don’t know what will happen once I get to Season 6 (it’s not on Hulu or ABC.com). 

Would this setup have worked with the original hard drive?  More than likely.  The memory, I think, is non-negotiable, but the hard drive isn’t a necessity.  I still wonder if the Revo’s little brother (the 1600) would have sufficed for this, especially since the WiFi isn’t really good for streaming the movies.  But the dual-core nature of the R3610 is definitely a boon.  As Tim Taylor used to say “more power!”

I make no bones that watching Lance Armstrong (and the rest of US Postal) is what lead me to pick up cycling in the first place.  I watched that 2004 TdF while I was in transition between jobs.  The stage where Landis and Azcevedo set such a brutal pace and the time trial up Alpe d’Huez were the memorable points of that tour.  It made me sad to think just a few years later that Landis was caught doping. 

For awhile, I liked to believe that he was right.  But when his B-sample came back positive, that sealed the deal for me.  I scoffed with other riders at the amount of time, effort, and most importantly, money, that he pumped into his defense. 

Fast forward to the start of the Tour of California this year, when Landis made his claims of systematic and routine doping practices within US Postal.  Lance’s camp fired back with a series of emails between himself and Floyd that paints Floyd in an even more negative light. 

So – question #1: Why wait until then with these claims? 

Floyd had “returned” to cycling the previous year, still maintaining his innocence.  Hell, even up until the ToC, he claimed innocence.  Look at other riders who have served suspensions.  Very rarely did they combat their positive B-sample as vigorously as Floyd.  Most of the time, they issued a public apology.  Even Ivan Basso, who won the Giro d’Italia this year (which happened in the same month as the ToC) has admitted his wrong-doings. 

Question #2: Why have so many former riders for US Postal tested positive after their time with USPS?

This one bugs me.  Hamilton, Landis, Heras are the big guns here.  All of them top riders while with US Postal, faithful lieutenants to Lance.  Yet, put them on other teams (CSC, Phonak, Liberty-Seguros respectively), they provided positive doping tests. 

What’s more, Levi Leipheimer has been implicated in a book by his former Gerolsteiner manager of blood doping (Levi rode for USPS early on, switched, then “came back”). 

The evidence is overwhelming against some sort of practice at US Postal based on this criteria. 

Question #3: What happens if there was some sort of program discovered?

Reality – I doubt much in terms of concrete problems.  RadioShack might pull sponsorship, TRS might not get invited to the big races – but it’s all speculative at this point.  Holding a license guarantees them entry to a race.  So they’d have to lose their license, which is a possibility, but you’re talking about them pulling a license that isn’t necessarily for “current” transgressions against the team. 

Perhaps the biggest issue is the loss of face for Armstrong, Bruyneel, and any others involved.  I doubt that the ASO would go against the precedent of stripping a former winner without a positive test  (Riis’ 1996 Tour as an example).  But suddenly, there’s an asterisk from 1999 to 2005. 

But I still wonder what Landis gets out of this.  He’s likely deeply in debt, no one is willing to sign him. 

I have to also question the almost “witch hunt” atmosphere that Novitzky is pursuing this with.  Sure, it’s all fine and good to be thorough, but he’s cutting deals for testimony?  That just reeks of witch hunt  (or red scare, take your pick). 

In the end, without physical proof of transgressions, it’s a case of “he said, she said”.  The facts are that Lance has been tested like a zillion times.  He probably has more blood in the test centers than his own body anymore.  During the 2009 Tour (his 2nd comeback year), he was tested 11 times.  Out of 23 days.  Let’s not forget the pre and post-race samples taken as well. 

I’m not sure that any case has been decided in the negative without physical proof.  It would be a miscarriage of justice if it was. 

But regardless, where I believe in my heart that Lance is clear, there’s still just this little question in the back of my mind: “What if he isn’t?”

It’s put the main bosses here into a bit of a panic.  Roles are sure to be tossed around.  My boss, however, hasn’t exactly approached me with any news yet.  Which leads me to believe that behind closed doors, he’s playing the “me first” card.

With the impending upheaval that this is bound to bring, it’s high time I stepped up my search.  I’ve been a bit on the quiet side, looking for the “perfect” opportunity, but I think now it’s time to expand a bit and consider a few things that I might not have wanted to otherwise.  True, it didn’t help when I found out that even though I have a 3,0 in-major, just because my overall is slightly below that, they won’t grant my Master’s, I slowed down, trying to re-assess my options.

Looks like I might be the last one standing when the dust settles.  With two out, it’s likely that the 3rd staff member might be leaving too.  The two newer admin assistants, one of whom isn’t working out that well, might be out.  The other one – most of this is over her head.  Not good.

While some might say it’ll be fun to watch the carnage unfold, I don’t think so.  Everyone already expects me to be the “IT guru” – I don’t need to be the “training guru” either.  I dislike simple questions where people could take two minutes and learn it for themselves.  That’s how I learned.  No one took me by the hand and said “this is how to do it”.

I still maintain that if you’re going to be a reader, go for e-Ink as opposed to LCD (such as the iPad and the upcoming clones).  There are actually some studies out there that suggest that reading an LCD screen before bed can actually screw with your sleep.  Not to mention that e-Ink is a ton easier to read in the sunlight than LCD.

I digress.  I came across an article posted a few months back by CNet that reviews the Kindle and Nook side by side.  Pretty fair review – http://reviews.cnet.com/2722-3508_7-537.html

It’s worth noting that Kindle recently released a firmware update that moves us in a step towards addressing the major gripe of Kindle owners since day 1 – folders.  They’re called “Collections”, and while not 100% like the folders on the Sony, still pretty darn cool.  You can also pan and zoom on PDF’s, plus some other social features.

The original intent was to run Wireless (Draft-N) standard to stream my movies from my server in the office (which is less than 10 ft away).  That didn’t go so hot.  For whatever reason, despite the strong signal strength and high data transfer rates, my media files didn’t play worth a damn.  Well, the 1080 ones at least.  The 720 seemed to do ok.  I’m at a loss, because I’ve seen that people have been able to wirelessly stream HD content without the buffering every 10 seconds.  I’d be tempted to believe it was a failing of the Samba protocol, but it works fine over wired ethernet.  I’m stumped.  I gave up and did the “elegant” solution of running CAT-5 out to the living room.

Perhaps if I transferred the movies to the onboard hard drive, it would be a different story.  When transferring anything from either of my Windows setups over the wire, they’re averaging 13MBps, which is much slower than the Wireless-N rate that it said I was getting.   I’m considering the possibility of re-visiting the on-board NIC of my server, as that might only be 10/100 (and not gigabit like my desktop).  I’m sure there’s tweaking that I could do between Linux and Windows, but it seems to accomplish the original intent in its current iteration.

Two more issues have cropped up.  I wouldn’t really call them issues, though.  More nitpicky things that anything else, I suppose.  The first is that the blu-ray rips I’ve tested out have been encoded without chapter support.  It’s a nitpicky thing, as I’ve seen a couple that do have that embedded.  It doesn’t take much, which leads me to the inexorable conclusion that the community is lazy.  It’s manageable, but navigating a movie with just fast forward and rewind is time-consuming.  It’s like going back to the days of VHS.  (You can run these movies through a media player on the PC and use the mouse on the scroll bar, so I guess that’s why.)

So that leads me to the next conundrum.  Two, actually.  Requiring further hardware upgrades.  The first is that I’m quickly running out of space.  So that necessitates adding a hard drive.  I’m looking at either a 1TB disk or a 2TB disk.  Each has their own advantages.  Unfortunately, I think that I’m limited for space at the present time.  I’ll need to check, and make a decision from there.  I have a 320 and a 250GB in my server already, so my preference would be to just add an additional drive.  If I have to drop one and add, that means I have to go with the 2TB.  I’d really prefer, with this amount of data, to do two 1TB drives.  We shall see.

The second is that I need a Blu-Ray drive, just to transcode correctly (include chapters, etc.)  The drives really haven’t come down much in price, as it’s still a good $75-100 for a decent drive.  The cheapest burners come in at $130.  It almost makes sense to get the burner.  But, I can’t really see buying a BD burner, as media is still expensive ($3-4 per disk, a few as low at $2).  Single and Dual Layer DVD’s are pretty cheap for a fair amount of data backup.

For the additional money I’ve invested in this thing, I could have built a barebones system and hooked it into my existing stereo without issue.  Considering that I have no problems running Linux flavors (and would if I didn’t have so much invested in terms of MS-only software), the final verdict is that the Revo wasn’t quite the cost savings I’d hoped it to be.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s a viable platform, but between the stereo updgrade in March and the Revo this month, that’s a lot of money that went out for hardware that still needs additional investment.

Lesson learned, I suppose.  In fairness, I’m pretty sure I needed a stereo system upgrade anyways, but I think, in hindsight, that I should have done more research and found a better way to spend $850.

Little did I know along the way that they’d start killing off my media codecs one by one. The biggest blow was the loss of the XVid codec. I like it because it’s high quality, high compression (i.e. small file sizes). I can’t play them any more. And it’s restricted to Windows Media Player extensions (WMV). No AVI, no QuickTime (mov). I spent all this money on a platform that’s turned into a fairly basic blu-ray theater now. (In it’s defense, the internet connectivity is still pretty cool).

Following a post from lifehacker.com (Check this link out) a few weeks back, I started to seriously look at building an HTPC again.  I opted to purchase it’s big brother (The Acer REVO R3610) so I could get the wireless card, faster processor, and more memory.  

These little nettops aren’t that bad.  Once I got rid of the bloatware/crapware, Win7 actually was relatively snappy.  Still slower than either my desktop or laptop.

I’ve been through a few different installs (I didn’t want to keep Win7 on there as it’s a resource hog to begin with).  Mainly I’ve been running different iterations of Ubuntu (a very popular flavor of Linux).  XMBC, detailed in the lifehacker post, runs a minimal install of Ubuntu to run.  I’ve primarily tried 10.04 LTS, 10.04 Netbook Remix, and 9.04.  Netbook remix by far is the fastest, but still not the greatest trying to run it as a media center.

Regardless, getting the on-board wifi to work has been an exercise in patience.  At first, because of how my router was setup, the card, once I got the OS to recognize it, wouldn’t scan for my network.  I must have reinstalled half a dozen times.  Once I got that figured out, it actually hasn’t been that bad.

The biggest issue that I’ve had is that the HDMI out to my TV doesn’t work with 5.1 audio correctly.  Come to find out, that’s my fault.  My TV’s onboard audio processor down-mixes “incorrectly”.  I can “hack” the Revo so it will work, but where’s the fun in having 5.1 audio tracks if you have to play them in stereo?

Let me back up a second and explain my setup here.  I have HDMI running from my cable box to the TV, then a digital (optical) cable running to my theater’s in port.  When I watch cable (and I rarely drop out of the HD-tier), I get HQ sound.  (Or so I thought until I really looked into it).  This was a fairly recent change (was Cable to theater optical audio until I got the Revo.)

So, the next step is to grab another digital audio cable (digital coax, looks like an RCA connector) and drop that from my cable box to the theater.  Then I’ll run the optical to the Revo.   Should get everything working then.  (Even though I’m going to need to hide the Revo somehow because the optical port is on the “front” of the unit.)  I haven’t tried this yet (the plan for when I get home tonight, after another quick reformat/configuration), but if it works, my review of this thing goes from “moderately like” to “love it”.

XBMC (www.xbmc.org) is a nice little setup.  It’s for one thing and one thing only – media.  With this on the Revo, I’ve been able to stream movies stored on my home server.  I’ve tried both 720 and 1080 rips.  I know there’s a boatload of plugins/programs to run, but I haven’t really gotten around to that yet.

My intention is to post another “setup” tutorial on here after awhile.  There’s too many steps I’ve gone through and the information I’ve found has been all over the place.  I’ve taken pieces meant for other hardware, other installation methods, etc.

To say that this round is a fiasco of epic proportions would be an understatement. Seems like everything hinges on Notre Dame this time around. But the fact that conferences are considering expanding to a 16-team league seems beyond laughable, if not downright ludicrous.

Who knows what this will all bring… we have to wait and see. But in the meantime, it provides for a good laugh because there’s no real news – all of it’s generated by message board loons and fanatical bloggers.

It’s Sony’s latest Bravia model – complete with wireless rear speakers (a must for me) and home wireless networking.  I got it Sunday afternoon, and after the requisite two hours of running all the cabling to my TV, Cable Box, etc, was working through the instruction manual (for once).  I got to the part about running a firmware update (Blu-Ray is constantly updating, apparently.  Nevermind the single standard to run a standard DVD.)  The system downloads the firmware from the internet, then starts into the process.  This needs a reboot (it’s a PC, in essence, right?)  Well, something screwed up and it was stuck cycling the update.   Here’s where the fun comes in.

I called Sony’s customer support.  I despise tech support.  With a passion.  Being in customer service, I understand that you need to respect the customer.  But for heaven’s sake, don’t apologize and give me the canned response of “it’s broke, you have to have it serviced.”  Give me a solution.  Give me an answer.

I was a bit short with the rep I spoke with.  I was polite, to a degree, and told him that I wasn’t angry or upset with him – but the situation.  I also informed him that I was calling looking for a viable solution that didn’t involve me pulling the unit back out of my entertainment center, packaging it back up, only have to get it returned to Best Buy or shipped to Sony and out for 2-3 weeks.  Does that sound like too much to ask for?  I spend several hundred dollars, I expect something to work with minimal fuss (especially when I’m following the directions.)  Anymore, it seems, that’s too much to ask for.   Like I said, it’s a single-task computer – you’d think there was a hard reset process or something.  Nope.

So, after the hour spent on the phone, I acquiesced, packaged up the unit, and managed to exchange it at Best Buy.  The new unit is installed, but I’m not doing an update until it’s officially posted on Sony’s site.

That should teach me to get the absolute latest model.  Officially, Sony hasn’t even released this model for sale (official release date of 3/31).  I know there’s a big firmware update coming 3Q to provide the 3d technology as well as truly allow me to network it with my PC’s.  When that gets released, I’ll be really happy.

Speaking of new technology, I saw a news tidbit that Amazon is adapting the Kindle App for the iPad.  It’s the best thing that both companies can do.  Apple can convert the Kindle users like me, as well as provide an additional source of revenues to the publishers.  I doubt it’s the unified standard that needs to happen, but it’s a step in the right direction.  I still won’t purchase an iPad (at least the first generation).  e-Ink technology is so much easier on the eyes than LCD.  Not to mention, when I want to do something from fanfic or the web, I can convert it much easier.  I’ve got issues transferring data to my iPhone, and I would imagine that the iPad is going to be in a similar boat.

Speaking of the gallery, it’s running on a WordPress plugin (tested a bunch of them, actually).  I liked this one the best.  It accomplished what I wanted it to do.  But in order to get the lightbox functionality, I would have had to install *another* plugin.  I’m a big fan of having certain functionalities hard-coded.  (Excessive plugins seem to slow WordPress sites down).    So, that’s what took so long to get it running.  The theme files now are hard-coded for colorbox.  While I was at it, I also did the same thing here I did with Halfton 1.1 – internalized the Java to the WordPress core and also added in the Superfish drop-down menu.  (Someone complained about my lack of menu drop downs since moving away from iNove).

It’s funny, my friend Mitch (another designer) and I got to talking – we’re both now officially “jQuery whores” – if there’s a script to do it, we’re stealing it.  =p  (Most of them are GNU/GPL licensed, so it’s not really stealing.)

Speaking of Mitch, we’re discussing the possibility of a joint collaboration on a WordPress theme.  He’d do the graphics, I’d do the coding.  We’d then submit it to themeforest.net and hope to sell a few.  Split the proceeds and all.  Dunno if it’ll happen.  I’m still experimenting with a few things, and I think I want to do a “premium free” theme for submission to the WP database first.  We’ll see.

Anyways, that’s it for now.