For those of you DIY-types who lust after the Italian OnCinema TEATRO D1 A/V component sized, aluminum encased MCE 2005 PC with a built-in 7-inch touch screen I discussed earlier, here’s a nice option. Atechfabrication has announced a slick case, complete with a cutout for a 7-inch LCD touchscreen. Not a bad idea to offer this to the home consumer market itching to leverage the MCE2005 approach to home media convergence. Still gonna cost a bundle to build a complete system, but it’s nice to dream about, isn’t it? Meanwhile, my DHS system from Alienware has now been on order since 11/16, even after they called to swap out video cards to avoid a ‘lengthy delay’. Grumble.
Category Archives: technology
Tsunami Video
On vacation last week, I was away from any readily available broadband access, so I’m catching up with some of the incredible content on the web related to the Christmas Tsunami. Cheese and Crackers has one of the better aggregated collections of video content I’ve found. Definetly worth a look.
I almost forgot…
Yes, it’s true. I’d say it’s looking a lot like Christmas, excpet for my religious affiliation. I have just received a brand-spanking new G5 dual-2.5gHz liquid cooled PowerMac at work. Oh, baby! I spent much of the last day of work before heading out on vacation getting this bad boy set up. It’s just amazing. First off, the Setup Assistant was able to seamlessly transfer my home directory and most of my applications from my old 1Ghz TiPB drive with little or no work on my part. It took a while – over 2 hours – but when it finished, the new machine rebooted and looked just like the old one. Same desktop, same dock configuration – everything. Except of course the incessant slowdowns whenever I tried to do much of anything. Gone are the days of the spinning beach ball in iPhoto. My current library has about 2,000 6MB+ photos. Even touching the thumbnail slider was enough to trigger a beach-ball wait of 15+ seconds. Scrolling was the same – each page took at least 10 seconds. Now, I can scroll from top to bottom of my collection in a blink of the eye.
The new G5 arrived only a day after I received a new Seagate 100GB 2.5″ 5400 RPM internal drive for my aging Titanium Powerbook. The enclosure I ordered was dead out of the box, causing some concern until I could confirm that it was not the new drive, and I have managed to migrate the old data onto the new one, and installing was easy-peasy.
Put simply, I am a very happy man.
MCE Envy
It’s Italian. It has a built-in touchscreen. It’s freaking gorgeous. It’s the most lust-inducing Windows Media Center Edition PC I’ve seen to date. The specs – 7” 1280×720 VGA touchscreen, dual layer DVD burner and 500gbHD, dual SD tuners, plus FM and integrated Wi-Fi. I don’t speak Italian, but their web site is worth a look. Meanwhile, it’s been like six weeks since I ordered an Alienware DHS – and no sign of it yet.LINK to Oncinema web site (Italian).