I am now seriously considering reworking the way the livejournal side of my blog stuff works, in particular only having one lj blog, and having its contents be the same as this blog. This would use the auto-posting magic someone pointed me at, with my modifying my blog-posting stuff to do that as well. I actually have a number of other updates to make live on my blog software, but development has been long and slow due to my working on too many things at a time. Right now, for example, I am working on eating a very tasty orange .. heh.
My TV continues to be of ill health, and shows signs of approaching death. According to a sticker on the back, this particular one was made in 1989. Ahh, 1989.. I was 11, and presumably in 5th grade. I remember watching the Berlin Wall fall on TV, not really knowing what it meant on much of any level. A number of other interesting things... and among them my parents bought that TV. It was probably pretty expensive -- for something made in 1989 it's large, the sound is pretty decent, and it has a nice interface. Tonight, after observing that I'm doing decently enough in the cashflow area for now, I ordered a new TV, a Tatung V32FLBB. It's not super high-end, and isn't as nice as what my audiophile friends were suggesting I get in the same size, but it's also $400 less. One of my friends who's one of the few people I'd say knows more about computers and linux than I do (the guy's a genius who graduated university at age 15, CTO of a few companies, gets free hardware samples from companies a year before they come out, and .. well, let's just say my pride isn't too hurt to say he knows more than me), while pushing me to get a nice, expensive TV that I didn't get, also made a suggestion for sound hardware for the desktop I'll be hooking into the new TV. He said that the Turtle Beach 3430-01 has great sound quality and is very Linux-friendly. At $50, it's a good deal. My next task, having ordered the monitor/LCDTV, is to actually put together a desktop to accompany it. I need to decide between 4 ideas:
- MacMini - I largely have decided against this because I don't think I want to run MacOS on it for various reasons
- SGI Casemod - I have a nice SGI Octane case I rescued, sitting in my office at work. I could buy a motherboard, mount it in there, try to figure out appropriate cooling/airflow, and make a computer. Downside is that modern systems are more sensitive to airflow
- Barebones - I could get a barebones system with case and such and build it into what I want. Downside is .. there's no Micro Center or similar around.
- Complete-ish system - I could get a mostly complete system and tweak it into what I want
In the end, I know I want:
- WinTV card - Use with LinTV to take video-in from my VCR, Gamecube, and possibly N64
- That Turtle beach soundcard
- Some decent DVI videocard with good Linux support
- Decent amount of RAM
- AMD64 CPU of some sort
- Not huge (this may actually rule the octane out)
Hmm...
Wednesday I am to go climbing for the first time in awhile with.. ahh, let's just leave that quiet for now.
