Projects

I’ve finally silenced my HTPC. It’s been through a few changes over the years, the spec as it stands now is:

Silverstone SST-LC17 Case
Seasonic S12-430
Intel Pentium D E2180 2x 2Ghz
Thermaltake AXP-140 Passive Heatsink
2GB DDR2 RAM
Asus P5B Mobo
Passive Geforce 9400GT GFX
Lite-On Blu-Ray Drive
Avermedia A16D Hybrid Tuner
Hauppage Mytv.t Tuner
160GB Seagate IDE HDD
Windows 7 Ultimate

If it wern’t for the HDD it would be completely silent, it’s made a massive difference – this system is in my lounge and it’s the only device which makes any noise at all. I’m undecided about the HDD solution – SSD would be ideal, but expensive as it’s the TV recording HD, so would require a good 128Gb at least really. I am probably going to try using a spare old 80GB SATA disk see if i can get away with it, if so i may be able to pick up a 64Gb SSD and problem will be solved. This also means i can head toward a smaller case in the future – the current one is 4U!

I may as well mention the blu ray, since i’m here. A bit disappointed to be honest, i had expected by now, that playback would be fully integrated into Windows Media Centre, however, it is not. The system wouldn’t even begin to play at first – just like the old Windows XP MPEG2/DVD problem. So i installed the enclosed Power DVD 8 BD and tried again – it just minimised Media Centre and launched PowerDVD – with a message saying it won’t run under 1024×768, FFS – my monitor is set at 720p of course it is, and how many other people will have done this!?! I was forced to raise it to 1080i whereby the text on the desktop looks awful, films look good though as does Media Centre. So now it runs, but not full screen, remote functions are basic at best.

So disappointed, i wanted the experience to be seamless, i’m strongly considering moving the drive to my PC and just ripping every film i get. It’s no wonder people pirate films, its a right pain to do it properly. On that subject, i was ripping my CDs – all originals. And i have a ‘Copy Controlled’ CD in my collection. Can’t rip it. Bloody annoying, i can pirate the album no problem, within minutes, but can i rip the CD? No. People who have paid full price for films and music are coming off worse. If it wasn’t such a pain then i wouldn’t mind – CSS on DVDs was never this problematic, sure you had MPEG2 licencing issues, but that was a different game.

Anyway, i’ve ranted long enough.

PS don’t pirate, support artists and film makes, buy CDs, DVDs and Blu-Rays (but use eBay and Amazon market place, don’t get ripped off!)

Sods Law. Curse whoever gave it a name. My Be* Pro ADSL2+ connection has been running constantly without outage since July when it was installed – modem has never been powered off and the internet has never been down. 3 days after i go away for christmas – my VPN goes down. Since there has never been an issue with the connection i immediately thought my house had been flooded/on fire/broken into. The next day i drove down (7 hour round trip, in the thick heavy 15mph on the motorway kind of snow) to find that all i needed to do was reboot the modem! Shock horror this has never happened before. Few days later, it happened again, i gave up this time, since it was Christmas Eve i just took out home insurence instead (which i had been meaning to do for a while).

I got back a few days later and again, rebooted the modem. Weird. Went onto the Be* forums and it appears as of 20th December, many many people who previously it was fine, have been having issues. Could it be the cold? Maybe. Personally, i think that there has been some firmware updates on the DSLAMs/Line cards and it’s causing a problem. That said however, i did notice there was noise on my voice line when the internet went off – it’s been on and off like a yoyo for the last few days. Not had to actually reboot the modem yet though, it’s been coming back up on it’s own.

I think i’ll wait it out for a little while, given so many people are having problems which has not attributed to the usual bad filters/cables etc i’ll see how it goes. On the plus side, Be*’s customer service is faultless – on Christmas Eve i was in an IRC chat with someone who helpfully – although i’m not running their modem and couldn’t swap any plugs about, checked the connection status to see if the modem was online, re-training etc.

They have also announced that line bonding will be available starting end of January – BONDING!!! At a price of around £55/monthly, total. 44meg down 5meg up (max). Yes please!

I have decided that a suitably long period of time has now elapsed since i completed my degree in Audio Technology at The University of Salford for me to publish my dissertation. I’ve also noticed that i get quite a lot of search hits on my site for people looking for dissertations. Rip it off if you want, really, go on, if you can’t be arsed to do your own work and you can sleep at night stealing someone elses work which has had literally hundreds of hours put into it then go right ahead. If you can live with that.

The focus of the project was to find a new means of creating MIDI data, i chose to use the Nintendo WiiMote and convert user movements into MIDI data – how is that different from WiiDrums/Guitar Hero etc. well i’ll tell you how – this system is spacially aware. That means that the physical position of the controller affects what data is generated, not just relative movments from the accelerometer and button presses. When i wrote the dissertation, no one else had done this. I suspect that is no longer true as both the commercial and hacker markets have exploded in development for the WiiMote. Anyway, heres the link for you to enjoy, sorry no CD-ROM but i’m not just going to give away the source code… you’ll have to ask nicely

http://www.lewty.org.uk/dissertation.pdf