It took us a long time, but we finally found a nice television stand that didn't cost an arm-and-a-leg. We found this nice black oak stand from O'Sullivan Furniture. We were having problems finding a stand that was the right size and that had a space big enough for our center channel speaker (Polk Audio CS400i). We also added a pair of speaker stands from Sanus Systems to elevate our two front channel speakers (Polk Audio RT55i).
Sunday, August 13. 2006
Entertainment Center Update
Tuesday, July 4. 2006
Silicon Graphics, Inc.
Silicon Graphics, Inc. [SGIDE] Stock Certificate
This company is a sad story. Back in the day SGI was at the cutting edge of technology. There was a time that if you wanted to do serious animation or graphic design, SGI would be your top choice hardware vendor. As far as I can tell, their extreme niche is what doomed them. They recently declared bankruptcy (reorganization) and their stock is in the crapper.
I wanted this stock certificate to commemorate the time when SGI was a Titan in the field.
Sunday, June 25. 2006
New Home Theater Setup
Monica and I just got finished installing our new Home Theater. The biggest "new" part is the Sony Grand Wega SXRD HDTV. The rest of the system is a set of Polk Audio Speakers, an Onkyo Receiver, and a custom built HTPC. The HTPC is the brain of our setup. It feeds DVDs, CDs, local television, HD television, and timeshifted video to the rest of the system.
For the geeks out there, the HTPC has the following components:
- Shuttle SB51G Case
- Intel Pentium 4 3.02Ghz Hyperthreaded Processor
- 1 GB RAM
- 4 x Hauppage WinTV-PVR2-USB Tuners
- BFGTech NVidia Geforce 6600GT
- Creative Soundblaster Audigy 2
- Snapstream BeyondTV 4.3
- Snapstream BeyondMedia
- Snapstream Firefly Remote
The most important part of the HTPC is BeyondTV. It is an excellent software package developed by Snapstream Media, headquartered in Houstin, Texas. The developers keep packing in more features with each release. I encourage people who want to go the HTPC route to take a good look at BeyondTV. It kicks the crap out of TiVO and other competitors. You can find more information at the Snapstream Media site, Snapstream Forums, and Snapstream Blogs. You can see other peoples' Home Theaters in Snapstream's blog under the Digital Livingroom category.