New Media Center, Windows Vista

I decided to build a new Media Center because our old one (Hewlett Packard) was sucking air. I’ve been slowly buying the parts over the last several months as I saw things on sale. The new one is pretty swank – A terabyte of storage (4x250MB SATA2 drives), 2 GB of RAM, three HDTV tuners, dual-core AMD 64 4800+, a sweet Asus motherboard, and Windows Vista Ultimate (yes, we bought a legal copy). It rocks, and we finally get HD channels on it. It’s been awhile since I built a new machine (I’m married with mortgage now), but I had forgotten how fun it is.

Vista is taking a bit to get used to, and I’m not sure I like the new Media Center interface as much. However, as with any new OS, I’m sure I’ll get used to it and it will be old hat in a couple of months. I’ve found a fair amount of annoyances with it, but again, I’m sure I’ll get used to it. All-in-all, Vista runs very smoothly on the new machine (it really makes our old Media Center look pathetic).

March 18th, 2007  Gadgets, Television   Tags: media center, Television, toys, ui, vista, more...

Slashdot Now Using CSS

Well, I don’t know if hell froze over or if pigs can now fly, but I checked Slashdot today and noticed that they have finally upgraded their site to use CSS for layout. It looks pretty good! It also appears that the Slashdot Rendering Bug is no longer an issue. I find it amusing that Slashdot provided a solution for this bug before it was fixed in Firefox. The bug has been present in Firefox for quite a long time. I remember experiencing rendering problems since at least 0.7.

Update: While browsing the comments on Slashdot, I found an interesting article entitled, Sending XHTML as text/html Considered Harmful, which describes why you should use HTML 4.01 instead of XHTML.

September 22nd, 2005  Online Services - General   Tags: css, slashdot, ui, more...

Microsoft to Unveil Official Web-based Messenger

Microsoft announced that it is testing a new web-based version of its popular MSN Messenger Service, similar to Yahoo’s web-based service. There have been several third-party services to offer this, but this one’s official and will hopefully provide seamless support for all features. The interface is quite cool.

• Link: MSN Web Messenger Beta

August 9th, 2004  Software   Tags: im, messenger, microsoft, msn, ui, more...

New Releases from the Mozilla Foundation

Firefox 0.9, Thunderbird 0.7, and Mozilla 1.7 have been released. Some changes I’ve noticed in Firefox: new theme and plugin system (old themes need to be ported), an “update” feature that acts like Windows Update for Firefox, and the new theme. I don’t really care for the new theme so much, but the old theme (called Qute) is available here for 0.9.

If only Thunderbird would support “posting” to a mailbox like Outlook/Evolution do. Overall, it’s an awesome product and it’s what I use as my e-mail client.

June 17th, 2004  Software   Tags: firefox, mozilla, opensource, Software, thunderbird, ui, more...