Friday... the wrap-up.

It's Friday morning, and I'm almost done with a short week of work, but a long week nonetheless.

Cell Phone Drama

Sprint... I finally kicked those RAZRs back to my buddy Brandon. Instead, I got a Hauppauge PVR-500 dual-tuner analog PCI card and a Dell Latitude laptop without a hard drive or RAM. (He thought he had a gigabit router for me, but I guess I'll have to stick it out with the SmoothWall.) I returned my D-Link Xtreme N router in hopes that I could get away with spending less, and equivalent functionality. Oh well.

Sprint is garbage. They do their best to lock you in and give you no options, even with their unlimited everything nonsense. I'm not paying $200/month... *and* taxes and fees, and bringing my own phones, to sign a two year contract.

My wife ran out of minutes on her T-Mobile pre-paid line. (Now that it's payday, I guess I'll add some.) Adding another $50 should get her into the "Gold Rewards" so that it's $0.10/min. Roughly similar to what we pay on "regular" contracts, since we sleep at night, and don't call anyone on weekends. I'll probably port my mom and myself over to pre-paid accounts soon. (I berated my wife over getting the unlocked RAZR stolen, I imagine she feels bad enough and has to suffer with the crappy Samsung R225, so I should be nicer about it.) There, done... At least online sales tax is cheaper $3.00 on $50 is 6%, while sales tax here in Indiana is 7%. Sigh...

The Monitor Saga

So, I talk to Goat on IndyGamers who is selling his LCD monitor (and system) and I planned on grabbing the LCD with the return funds from my D-Link router. The return was slow, and then we took that trip to Ohio. So, I held off until Friday (today). The CRT is okay, and I'm actually supposed to give it to Goat, but I hate adjusting that thing. And, it's too heavy... and it isn't widescreen... a Dell P1110 that I got from GallowGlass, because he didn't want to move it to Kansas City. Oh well. Log into PayPal... send money to Goat... arrange for an exchange time...

I think Mike Weldy was wanting to get an LCD... maybe I should hit him up on that exchange he was asking about. Iv'e still got 4 CRTs sitting around. Maybe he's got some PC133 SODIMMs for that laptop I got from Brandon.

Media Center Madness

Oh, and last night, I went through a stack of paperwork (bills and receipts) to retrieve some paycheck stubs for Scott's First Steps evaluation and grabbed the coupons for our OTA Digital Tuner boxes... I guess I could hook those up to the dual-tuner analog card. Maybe I can find a OTA tuner with a serial interface... probably won't be in that $40 range... I doubt that I can combine the coupons on one awesome converter box either. I'll probably end up getting the $50 Magnavox from Wal-Mart, unless I get a chance to do some real research.

So, I've got a dual-core BE-2300 mounted in a full-ATX motherboard with a stock heatsink and I put that in the beige enlight special, with a Sony DVD+/-RW drive and a 3.5-inch-bay USB card reader. It has one fan, and a 400 watt power supply that I was surprised to find out had a 24-pin connector. The Antec PSU I used was only 350, and had a 20-pin power connector, but the board didn't complain in the trial run.

I'd like to dump the beige box, and finally move on to a real case, but I can't spare $200 on something like that. However, Directron has the crappy "this'll do" box, for $69.99:

Ark Technology ATX Home Theater PC Case, w/ 80mm Fans, Model: HTPC-3701
http://www.directron.com/htpc3701.html
http://www.arktechinc.com/htpc/htpc3701.htm

It's a full-size case, and my board will be able to use the two PCI-express x1 tuners and the PCI dual-tuner I've got. I'm thinking this'll be the best I can do, until I get some extra cash, which'll be never. So, If after a day of calculations and paying bills, I have any left over, I may put the order in. Time to sell something else.

Linux

I haven't totally given up on Fedora, but I've started a pretty good clip of nightly gaming on Age of Conan. An hour or so each night hasn't really made me feel bad, but I am losing sleep... Anyway, I'm pretty sure that's not going to run in Wine, so it might be time for me to seriously equip my main computer for full-time Vista usage and games. A reformat of 64-bit Vista, on a RAID 0 array of two 200 GB SATA hard drives will be the likely configuration. The game doesn't run too bad, considering what I've got under the hood now. I'll enjoy that LCD though... the CRT experience doesn't really suit me anymore.

Why? because I'm changing resolutions all the time, and I want multiple monitors back, but I have a bunch of heavy CRTs that take up space. What's that got to do with Linux? Well, Fedora 9 is great, but I really really want to give KDE4 and openSUSE 11 a try. I actually did install 10.3 a few days ago, and then I couldn't boot Windows, so I fixed that and wiped openSUSE. Last night, I tried Beta 3 on a 700 MHz Celeron with 256 MB of RAM, a 3 and 8 GB hard drive. It failed installation as I slept... choking on the video card setting. I think it's like a 1 MB intel 810 onboard graphics chip. Probably fixable, but I didn't have time to mess with it. Too bad I sold that PCI FX5200 card. I should make this box my smoothwall, or maybe a server for files/printers/and a router... I'd need more RAM for ClarkConnect... it might be an upgrade in CPU from my 450 MHz Pentium III I'm using, but that machine has more drive bays, and more RAM slots than this 2-slotted, generally incompatible machine I've cobbled together. Maybe I can sell it... I'll work on that in my night-time session tonight. Maybe someone needs a server on IndyGamers. More likely a Torrent slave box, heh.

Well, I've been constructing this post off and on during the AM at work, and now it it time to meet a few colleagues for lunch.