New Look!

I got kind of sick of looking at the same old layout.

Blogger has added a layout and template design widget that I used to give the blog a make over. I believe the new look is a bit more striking, and easier to look at. It doesn't mix together quite as much.

That said, there's not much else to post. It's raining, yet again. I have about a million things to do in the yard. However, I'm looking at it this way: a cool summer means less use of the air conditioner, thus cheaper electricity bills. Yay!

I've been tossing around an idea to build a small media player. Basically, I would use a mini-ITX motherboard and case, throw in a couple gigabytes of memory and a smallish hard drive (anywhere from 80 - 250 GB). There's a few free to use software packages out there. Notably XBMC and Boxee. I'm pretty sure that with a bit of testing, I could even make it work with a universal remote control. Run it with an invisible Linux operating system behind it, and there we go! Instant home network enabled media player!

Should play any type of computer media except digital rights managed content. (For the uninformed, that would be copyrighted material you download from iTunes and such.) The only thing keeping me from really doing it is the cost. I've been trying to find a more local vendor than the UK for the mini-itx parts, but there seems to be a somewhat small demand for the parts. Sadly, I'm looking at a $450 price tag at this point, and that's not worth it. For some reason the site in the UK is raping people overseas on shipping. If I could bring it down a hundred and fifty bucks, I would do it. I'll have to think about it. I'm really trying to save money for another vacation next year also.

Just curious, would there be anyone interested in having a media player like this if I could get the pricing down to a reasonable level? Overall size would be 62 x 192 x 210mm, or about the size of a small DVD player.

Anyway.. that's all there is right now. I'm going to go and send a grumpy email to that website about their shipping costs...