The media PC, the stalwart of living room entertainment for well over 4 years has to go. To be honest, it’s been on the cards since we got a Tivo box earlier in the year.

We’ve had a media PC in the house since about 2004 when I used an old Athlon powered Shuttle PC to run Media Portal (MEDIAPORTAL - a HTPC Media Center for free! - MEDIAPORTAL) through a large Sony CRT TV. From there I got my hands on a cheap second hand Elonex Artisan media PC based on a P4 running XP MCE. It was awesome and, most importantly, silent. After a year or so of running this I made the decision to make something that will last. So I sourced the following components:

• Core 2 Duo E8400 3Ghz
  
• 4GB DDRII 800 RAM
  
• 1TB Samsung HD (later replaced with a 2 TB)
  
• Radeon 4670 (passively cooled)
  
• BlackGold BGT3540 six–in-one tuner
  
• LG HD-DVD/Blu-Ray/DVD combo drive (you could/can pick up HD-DVD movies for pennies on eBay!)
  
• Vista Home Premium (later upgraded to W7)
  
• Zalman HD160XT Ultimate HTPC case with touch screen
  
• Fanless PSU
  
• Asus Silent cooler
  

I have to admit, that at the time, it was amazing, and to be honest, it still is very capable. We used if for everything from watching movies, recording TV, browsing the internet, streaming music from and, of course, playing games.

However, over the past 12 months it has been seeing less and less use. With the house getting a Tivo box, smart phones, another laptop and a dedicated Blu-Ray player it has increasingly fallen into disuse and now is only really used for storing photos on. Oh! And did I mention that it was HUGE?! Imagine a large AV amp and double its weight. It is a very un-portable computer. It also doesn't help that I haven’t wiped W7 since I put it on there in 2009. It is now very, very slow to boot and now takes 2-3 mins before it becomes usable.

So we are to retire it. It will be going into the office with me next week and used for ‘something else’ the Wii will now live in its space in the AV cabinet.

But, that is not the end of it. I still see the point of media/HTPC’s, I really do, it’s just that this one no longer suits our specific needs. We still need to browse the internet on a large screen, and whilst the Tivo provides many TV station ‘players’ it is not as extensive as we’d like. More importantly, we need centralised storage in the house. We need somewhere to put photos, music and documents. This type of household facility is getting a must in the modern world as more and more things get digitised in our day-to-day world.

So here is my plan, and given the cost of my original media PC it should come in at a fraction of the price of the original.

• Buy a duel drive NAS box and fit 2x1TB drives
  
• Use a Raspberry Pi for use on the flat-screen TV
  

I have to be honest here the Pi is going to be a godsend. A (very) cheap and (very) low powered device that will fulfill a major role in allowing us to browse the web, look at our pictures and play music/movies from the NAS box. Here is a device that perfectly fits the bill for the task in hand.

It’s going to be quite exciting. A new year’s project that won’t break the bank and will provide an important role in the home for very little money. Now there’s a business opportunity that someone can take up!

Goodbye old boy. We're replacing you with something smaller and more friendly!

I HATE jet-lag

Travel from Preston to London went without a hitch on Virgin Trains and all was well as I made wy way to Kings Cross St Pancras tube station, swiped my Oyster card and made my winding way down to the Picadilly line to get the tube to the hotel at Heathrow. Mere meters from the platform the emergency alarms went off with a lovely 'An emergency has been delared. Everyone is to evacuate the station now' message. Cue hundreds of passengers crowding entrances and streets all around the station and my having to go back to Euston to get the tube to Green Park to re-join the Picadilly line. It's just a shame everyone else had the same idea. Not fun when you're lugging 2 bags and a laptop backpack

Anyway, I've now had a taste of the kind of journey Shaun had to make when he visits London before he discovered the Heathrow Express, and it's not fun!

The BA flight was nice, well, as nice as 7 hours in a plane can be, and the hotel had a courtesy bus to get us from the terminal to our place of residence for the week. and jet lag prevented us from taking a trip into town last night.

But it's a new day now and we'll be off to find the convention center later today, which will be nice as I feel my brain has melted after watching US tv for a couple of hours.

I also need breakfast.

Edited to add: I won't even go into immigration at Philli airport. Image a long queue via a zigzagging barrier system for a theme park ride with no chance of joy at the end of it. I took about an hour to get through all-in-all.

Now what can I put in there I wonder?

Mind you, if more of you North American members want to say hi at the ISTE 2011 show in Philly in June plese do. It's nice to put names to faces.

For a select few of you reading this that were at the conf in Corby (or was it Kettering?) about 4 years back when we 'geekers had the honour of being presented with the first ever netbook to hit the UK shores courtesy of Research Machines, before anybody else did, and we swooned and saw something very special happening. Well, tablet computers are like that, but by stealth. I won't mock any more when an iPad owner goes on about how good they are. Because they are, and with Windows and Android slates hitting the shelves any day now you are going to see them everywhere, and before long you will see them in you schools or places of work, and you will have to accommodate them.

The future's coming. And it's flat.

P.S. No Shaun, I haven't brought an iPad!!

P.P.S. Expect to see these as well:http://www.rm.com/shops/rmshop/Product.aspx?cref=PD1787832

I'd leave after several fruitless minuites blaming 'bad lighting' in their, sans the information I required. When reading instructions in low light or with small font sizes I'd have to vary the distance between myself and the paper before I could focus on the writing, and recently it had been getting worse. And I was in denial. My eyesight was going and I was doing nothing about it.

Well, all that ended last weekend when I was in a shop and on the counter were cheap dispoable reading glasses and an eye chart. Basically, if you couldn't read the text on one of the lines easily then you purchased the corresponding sized glasses.

Furtively I took them home and when no one was looking got out the latest copy of Retro Gamer magazine and donned said specs.

WOW! I can see again, and everything is now so clear when I need to read something (I am far sighted, so I can still pick out distant objects etc). Well, I'm home now and tomorrow I'm booking an appointment for Friday at the opticians and getting some custom bins made up. I need them, and there is no point in fooling myself anymore. I'm going to be specky and proud.

'Do you know who we are?'

'No'

Do you know what we do?'

'No'

'Do you know why we don't need any PR people'

'No'

'Try Google' I suggested.

The flight over in club class yesterday was, to be frank, amazing. You got a cubicle to yourself, complete with entertainements system, a galley and the BA staff waiting on you hand and foot.

http://flatseats.com/images/BA-0808-1.jpg

Club class seat.

We didn't get any sleep however as the oxygen level gets turned down and the temp turned up, so you end up catching your breath whilst being uncomfortably hot!, but besides this the flight was a wonderful experience. A 20 mile taxi ride from the airport to the hotel had us checked in at 9pm local time (4am GMT), and a quick shower and change of clothes later we were out in the sweltering heat of the Denver evening (yesterday was their hottest day so far this year at 35 degrees C) looking for something to eat and drink. We found something to drink, and the idea of having junk food wasn't appealing. Afer a few drink we retired for the evening.

Denver is 1 mile above sea level and we often find ourselves catching our breath, especially after climbing stairs etc , and Shaun is not to keen on the weather (scorching hot and blazing sunshine, although it does cloud up in the afternoon). So he's covered himslef in some sun screen that makes him smell like a banana fritter

We had a walk down 16th Street Mall today, a pedestrianised street full of bars, eating places (I'll struggle to use the term restraunt here), tourist shops, the occasional drug store and 24 hour stores.

We've just spent a couple of hours configuring the Mobotix camera and Ruckus ZoneFlex 7363, whilst Shaun also swears at his iPhone and MacBook for their general lack of useability.

We're off for some food in a min (it's 6pm local time) and then going to the Sheraton to await the arrival of Tom Newton and Claire from SmoothWall and mock their jetlag.

It's setup day tomorrow, and we still have to find somewhere to watch the match which is at about 8am here

I had set off the security scanners and they spent 5 mins patting me down, waving a variety of electronic gizmos over all parts of my body before realising that I had left my rather chunky watch on. At least I didn't get scanned for explosives like Shaun! It's another 2 hours until we board, and all of the shops in the duty free area have proved to be more expensive than shopping in the high street or online. Rest assured I shall be posting pictures of our rather plush seats once we get to the other side.

Wish us luck, we're going in!

We're glad you all enjot the new look anyway, and we've lots more to come in the near future.

Where do we go from here, where do we go from here

 

The more I see, the more I hear, the more I find fewer answers

I close my mind, I shout it out but you know it's getting harder

To calm down, to reason out, to come to terms with what it's all about

I'm uptight, can't sleep at night, I can't pretend everything's all right

My ideals, my sanity, they seem to be deserting me

But to stand up and fight I know we have six million reasons

It's not quite as bad as all of that, but since Ric, Shaun, and I sat down after BETT we knew one thing. This year is the one where EduGeek goes through the roof. We've seen evidence of this with not only our Google stats, the Alexa ranking amd our rapidly increasing members list. The problem is now where to take it. I have always listened to what other peoples opinions are in such matters as, I an fond of saying 'When you've trod in dog poo you sometimes need to have someone else point it out to you!'.

We are at a crossroads now, and it's taking a great deal of thought to ensure we get things right. Here are a few things that I'm currently pondering:

1. More and more EdUgeek members are from outside of education and are based in teh private sector. I've no probelem at all with this as our technical forums are possible some oth ebes there are on the net, especially for providing solutions to higher end non-home based technical problems. SO do we create a seperate 'BusinessGeek' site and share the same technical databases, after all, problems are problems! Then create seperate forums to deal with particular issues faced by businesses? The same could go for the NHS. A MedicalGeek site perhaps? These members are already posting on the forums and their problems are the same as ours, but they have special issues that need their own spaces to discuss.

2. Funding is now getting an issue. We currently make plenty enough to run the site day to day, but we need to ensure our ethos of providing free conferences, offsetting your costs etc still continues, as as we get bigger so do the costs.BETT set us back about 10k and with daiky runnign costs of around £300 to feed, transport and meet other costs for the volunteers on the stand and provide free pizza

We still need to raise funds and there is no way that we are going to follow the 'get rich quick' schemes that land in my inbox on an almost daily basis, so we have to explore other avenues.

I am looking at running EduGeek full time by later this year, but more on this at a later date I think

Anyway, if you have any thoughts of what we should be doing that we are not, or what we are doing that you dissaprove of than please let me know. We have a lot to do this year and we have to ensure we get it right first time.

We have several apps currently in development which should prove priceless to those doing the standard jobs during the summer, and may save our members at least a day of work. The other is a tie-in with a very successful company (actually, 2 companies!) who will enable us to offer a useful service to our members without stepping on the toes of our sponsors.

Anyway, vauge hints they are, but they will be huge in impact for us and our members.

Thanks to Shaun (ZeroHour) for working his bits off contacting Fasthosts and generally being the best webmaster we could ever wish for.

Thanks also go to the other admins for their support in contacting the media and looking into SLA's and things.

Right, what's to worry about next then?

Don't worry, we will have enough (eventually!), but, if you didn't know, Fasthosts decided to take a years worth of hosting out of our bank with no warning, yes, it was due for renwal (I though we had another 2 months and was going to cancel anyway), but it was galling that they didn't send a reminder email, and that the invoice\receipts was automatically sent to my spam folder.

And Fasthosts refuse to refund us. Anything. Shaun has been through the fine print and basically we are stuffed. We will be shifting ISP this summer and it will be not be a moment too soon. I would recommend that no one reading this ever takes up with these chuckleheads. Ever. It's just not worth the poor service and lax methods they employ.

The long and the short of it is that half the money that was going to be used to pay for the conf went to Fasthosts and I am chasing up oustanding invoices to ensure that we have enough to pay for the event.

We booked for 70 and had 15 no shows, and at £30 a head that comes to £450 we didn't need to spend. Please remember boys and girls that when we say an edugeek conf is free we mean it is free to you. We have to pay a small fortune to set these up (this one was circa £4500) and to have people 'not bother' turning up leaves us seriously out of pocket. We are considering that people leave a small deposit for the next one, but we simply cannot allow for this kind of drop out rate when it costs us so much.

Anyway, I'm tired and off to bed. I'm going to be ripping the DV footage of Tom Newtons' talk and the 'Ask the admins' session tomorrow.

I should have known that if I brought a second hand car with a towbar it may have been 'overworked' a bit.

I recently upgraded my GeForce 7300 low profile HDMI graphics card for the newer 8500GS version from the same company (MSI NX8500GT MTD256EH). Once installed I could never get the BIOS or boot screens to show until Windows (Vista 32bit) had loaded up the drivers when connected via the HDMI interface.

After a little asking around and digging I had found that unless the card has HDCP onboard (as my last one did) then it is almost useless. The picture is also of a 'lesser' quality than the 7300 it replaced. Looking at the MSI site reveals that HDCP is *optional* on this model. Bugger. I brought this card to decode Blu-Ray when I invested in a drive during the summer. Looks like I'll have to shop around again.

My advice is that should you need a graphics card with a HDMI interface make sure it has HDCP or else you will have no end of niggly problems.

Additional content:-

It gets worst. This blog from the Firing squad lays out in easy to follow detail why you really NEED a card with HDCP on board for HD and Blu-Ray content!

http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/ati_nvidia_hdcp_support/

Its not all joy though, its pretty hard work, especially as I have to do it at night and some of the questions make our users look like veritable IT gods!

*sigh*

<goes back to the keyboard>

Anyway, here is the new blog system they, and in my best royalty voice:

'I now declare the blogs open. God bless them and all who vent their spleens through them'

That should do it.