TechnologyInsanity.com

I’ve had this issue for a long time, I always want to play videos in xvid, ogg, mpeg, mkv, whatever on my TV without having to convert them to anything. I would also like to have a DVR. How about also being able to play any kind of emulator on my TV with a PC game pad? Full Internet access & connected to the LAN so I can grab files from my main PC. Could this be possible? You bet. My answer to the issue is building a mediabox.

So far this is what I’ve come up with. I’m using a mini-pc design, I just hope everything is actually able to fit in the box. The reason why I need the cheap video card is for s-video and overall better quality.

The total cost for everything with shipping would be around $400 or so. Randomly going over the specifications, CPU: Intel Atom Dual Core Ram: 2GB HD: 500GB Video Card: Radeon 7000 PCI, TV Capture Card: WinTV USB2.0, KB/Mouse: Wireless Logitech.

I’ll install Windows/Linux through a USB cd-rw drive that I have already. As far as DVD playback goes, I might be able to use the drive on my PC to stream the DVD over the LAN to the box, or I could just use my PS2 for DVD playback. (Another option would be to just buy an external USB DVD drive.)

According to the specs on the JetWay box, it should be able to fit one 3.5″ hard drive and fit the PCI video card. However, I’m not really sure that everything will fit. Anyway, that’s the current plan, but I’m still tweaking it a bit, and I’m not sure whether I will run windows or Linux on it. I believe either one would be capable. However, it might just be “easier” to go with Windows in case there is some compatibility issues with the hardware.

If you’re curious about the TV this will be connecting to, it’s a 42″ Plasma EDTV.

Have you heard? You can test the new google at www2.sandbox.google.com. Supposedly, this new search engine is faster and more relevant to search queries. I just looked around and it seemed like digg and social bookmarks were ranking higher on this search engine.

Seems like SEO’s will have to have to develop some different strategies, but as far as I can tell it’s not THAT much of a difference. Some may lose rank when this search engine is deployed, and some may gain rank. For some, it may not even make a difference.

Seems interesting, anyway. I’m not all that worried about the change myself, I checked and a lot of my sites seem to be ranking in the new engine, some even better than in the current version of Google.

Haven’t really figured out why Google slapped me, but who knows. I’m going to assume it will come back up in a few days or so, I’ve had a listing for one keyword at the top for months, and now it’s nowhere to be found. I noticed many other of my pages aren’t ranking either. It could be something I did, but I’m not sure. We’ll have to wait and see what happens.

As far as I know I haven’t done anything with this site that would cause it to be slapped. Perhaps Google just doesn’t like me

Side Note: Anyway, I haven’t been posting lately mostly because I’m busy working on other things, but I’ll try and keep posting every once in awhile. Soon I’ll be launching a blog specifically about affiliate marketing, and I’ll most likely post much more frequently on there. I’m reserving this site for pure technology related things, and I haven’t been doing much interesting with tech lately.