I've been quiet lately, mostly because I've been spending a bit (read: a lot) of time settings up my media center PC at home. But now that it's almost complete, I'm really loving it! I've set it up to record every episode of The Simpsons, Futurama and South Park as they happen... any with 600-odd GB of storage, that's a lot of cartoons :)
One of my favourite components that I bought with PC (I'll get to my other favourites in a minute :p) is the Antec Fusion Black case. It looks like some piece of retro hifi equipment, with it's LCD screen and enormous volumne knob, but in fact, it's actually really hi-tech. This thing is so quiet that the only way I know it's on is whether the little light on the power button is lit-up (my wife's computer makes more noise from the next room!)
I also bought a Logitech DiNovo Edge keyboard, which looks very stylish and matches perfectly with the shiny black finish on my Samsung TV. It's quite expensive, but for the living room, I think worth it. The integrated mouse pad thingy is nice, too. I can use the mouse from a distance, if I need to...
... which I generally don't, thanks to my Logitech Harmony 1000i remote! This was a complex beast to set up, but it's great for the talking-point factor :) I'm a little (actually, a lot) dissapointed with the interface for programming it. The interface runs entirely off the Logitech website -- which I guess is because they don't want people stealing their database of remote codes for the 100's of 1000's of devices they've got -- but woe unto you if you want to program it without an internet connection!
And MythTV! What a wonderful piece of software! I was tossing up between MythTV and Windows Media Center 2007 (I am, after all, a bit of a Windows guy...) but in the end, I decided that I wasn't going to pay AU $200-odd for the Vista Home Premium edition (the cheapest one that comes with Media Center!) -- I mean, what were Microsoft thinking there? Why would I pay for the second-most-expensive edition of Vista if I was only ever going to use it to run one program!?!
But I'm definitely glad I went with the Linux + MythTV setup. I haven't used Linux since my uni days, but it's progressed quite well in terms of usability since then. And there's an enormous community of people around MythTV (so much so, in fact, that I found a page on their website which describes the exact, step-by-step, process for installing the exact model of tuner card I bought -- mind you, I did set out to choose that card specifically because it was well-supported in Linux...)
The only thing to mar the experience so far is that the LCD screen on my case is not supported in Linux. The word is that they're not "planning" on supporting it yet either. The good news, however, is that I managed to patch LIRC and LCDproc to get it to work (I love open source!) I plan to release my patches here, hopefully later this evening, once I tidy it all up, but hopefully that'll keep all those others guys on that forum happy as well :-) As proof, here's a (crappy, sorry) picture showing that I was watching "My name is Earl" last night:
Anyway, I gotta go... I've got 15 episodes of The Simpsons to catch up on...