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I spent the first couple of evenings this week putting together a new home theater PC for our friend, classmate, and neighbor. I wanted to give her enough power to smoothly play 1080p content on her TV, while leaving some headroom for upgrades down the line (and space for extra internal HDDs). All the parts [...]

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My new computer setup has an older machine, Zoe, serving media to my TV. Before this, I used TVersity to stream content from my desktop to my XBox, a solution that worked decently well for standard definition content. Unfortunately, the XBox 360 doesn’t like a lot of the popular containers for HD video, like .mkv, [...]

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Building a new computer has given me another opportunity to reevaluate how I arrange files on my various hard drives. Significant changes to my system this time around include my decision to give up RAID and my inclusion of a 60 GB solid state drive. The challenge is to decide how to manage my various [...]

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Even though I’ve been building computers since somewhere around Windows 95, Tess was my first torrid affair. In 2005’s  nether summer between high school and college, Jason and I researched components, ordered them from Newegg, and built cutting-edge sister machines. Between her hardware and my Windows customizations, Tess was the hottest computer in Erickson West, [...]

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Tess, my five year-old desktop PC, has been throwing all kinds of conniptions over the past few months. Macheads, I see your fingers poised over the keyboard: If you are interested in purchasing Apple’s overpriced hardware and gifting it to me,  I will gladly accept. Otherwise, silence.
Classes and my lab rotation are now in progress, [...]

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Ignorant corporate executive Cory Ledesma thinks buying games used somehow cheats developers (read: his company, THQ), so he doesn’t have any problem with tying a game’s online multiplayer  mode to a one-time-use code. This is the kind of ridiculous decision one can expect from the knee-jerk fiscal entitlement mentality everybody making things seems to have [...]

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My new apartment has a cable hookup in the living room, but Tess (my desktop computer) is on the other side in the office. I had a similar problem at the old place, and solved it by bridging two wireless routers. I end up being able to physically connect Tess and the 360 to the [...]

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Amusingly, the keyword searches that bring the most traffic to my site (what little it is) have to do with the AMCAS application not working in modern browsers, including anything running on OS X. It looks like they’ve finally decided to update the site for the 2011 application cycle, and this time they’ve added an [...]

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Apparently at the recent Game Developers Conference, OnLive was revealed as the future of video games. Rather than buying consoles or upgrading your computer, you just pay for the service. They run all the latest games on powerful computers out in “the cloud,” and pipe the content directly to your TV screen through the magic [...]

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