Xmas in September

NOTE – not real drunken posting, but done with pharmaceutical assistance. Shay is typing and thinking in slo-mo.

So I bought Rachel a new Dell inspiron 531 minitower. It friggin rocks. Dual core 64 bit athlon, 2 Gig of RAM, Vitsa home premium. It is pretty sweet. I was going to wait to score me a new one, but having all that power in teh room made me jealous, so like a pouting child, I had to get my own. I went with the 256 graphic card, the dual core 64 athlon 5800, and Windows Vista. I skipped on the 2 gig of RAM ($100 more) and bought 2 gig from Crucial, for $100. So I has 3 gig. This shit fucking flies. (I had to build my system up  to over $999 to use a $350 coupon found online. Was worth it for sure.)

I was one of the Fuck Vista, OS X, Linux punks. I have to say, while not ready for full on work release, I am pleasantly  suprised at how much I enjoy it. The flash is not too much, enough to keep me interested. And while there is lotsa shit moved to new places, I am getting the hang of it. There is just a lot of shock when you are first setting up. While most people hate the needs permission popups, which are so prevalent the first few days, one I began thinking of them as popup “sudo” commands, they seemed easy and useful to me.

My only disappointments, I ordered 2 64 bit systems. and they come with Vista 32 bit. WTF? Also I had to open a ticket as SATA ports 2 and 3 on the motherboard don’t work, so I get either C:\ and either my CDROM or extra 500 Gig SATA drive. They’ll be shipping out a new motherboard this week. I am so using the Gparted/ImagePart rescue CD as found on Lifehacker. The 320 gig C:\ is getting chopped to 60 gig OS partition, 6 Gig swap partiton, 40 Gig linux (64 bit Feisty Fawn) with the rest as SCRATCH for video and such. All data stays on Truecrypt volumes on the 500 gig drive, with offsite backups to Mozy. I highly suggest using it for offsite backups. Moving the /users/Shay special folders (Pictures, Music, etc) to be on the second drive was way easy.

So in two days I got my system, RAM, new nic (Gige), soundcard (not pilfered from work), speakers, and on the side a woot special XM radio alarm clock. As I need to fall asleep listening to something, this beats watching the same old Forensics Files or Dirty Jobs.

We are also going to try doing a job like this one, as cable management really sucks in the office. Instead of BBQ grill we’ll use black painted pegboard cut to side.

I also went to look for the Tivo Desktop. Version 2.5 is out there, and I am installing it now. Here’s the specs:

TiVo Desktop 2.4 allows you to transfer the following types of video files to your TiVo DVR:

• Windows Media Video (.wmv)
• QuickTime Movie (.mov)
• MPEG-4/H.264 (.mp4, .m4v, .mp4v)
• MPEG-2 (.mpg, .mpeg, .mpe, .mp2, .mp2v, .mpv2)

TiVo Desktop 2.5, and later versions ,also allow the transfer of .divx and .avi files containing divx content.

I stopped using it around 2.2, so this could be badass. I always wished TiVo would switch their base encoding to Divx, it is much higher quality in a smaller package. Sure MPG2 is supposed to make it burn to DVD much quicker, but any time I tried doing it it always re-encoded the whole file anyway. Besides, whenever I try pulling or transferring shows, it is slow as dog shit. I went from trying Wireless B to Wireless G to hard wired 10/100, and my pull speed is alway 200 kps.  WTF.

Anyone using 2.5? Vista? Tips and tricks?

~ by kinshay on 2007-09-15.