The last few days I’ve been spending a considerable amount of time working on a new project. I’m installing XBMC onto my newly acquired Acer Aspire Revo R3610 nettop. Despite the fact that I’m hitting lots of roadblocks along the way I’m enjoying the challenge. Regardless of the fact that many have done it before there doesn’t seem to be one complete guide that takes you from A to Z, presumably because everyone has different setup and configuration requirements. I’m working on a large post detailing how to get my specific setup up and running in the hopes that someone else might find it useful.

I just came across a bit of an old post on Geek Dad listing 100 Quotes Every Geek Should Know. It’s a great quick read. Check out the post to see if your favourite quotes made the list. Here are some of the highlights for me:

1. “Ray, if someone asks you if you’re a god, you say YES!” – Winston, Ghostbusters
2. “The Road goes ever on and on/Down from the door where it began/Now far ahead the Road has gone/And I must follow, if I can/Pursuing it with eager feet/Until it joins some larger way/Where many paths and errands meet/And whither then? I cannot say.” – J.R.R. Tolkien, Lord of the Rings
3. “Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together… mass hysteria!” – Dr. Peter Venkman, Ghostbusters
4. “Never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line!” Vizzini, The Princess Bride
5. “Who’s gonna turn down a Junior Mint? It’s chocolate, it’s peppermint – it’s delicious!” – Kramer, Seinfeld
6. “My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die!” -Inigo, The Princess Bride
7. “These aren’t the droids you’re looking for.” – Obi-Wan, Star Wars

One omission that stands out for me:

“1.21 Gigawatts?!?! GREAT SCOTT!!!” – Doc Brown, Back to the Future

That’s all the geeking out for me today. ‘Til next time.

While looking through XBMC I noticed that of the 1005MB of RAM available only 25-75MB were free, and that’s before playing a video. It’s obvious that if I plan on making this machine anywhere near capable of being an HTPC I’m going to have to upgrade. So that’s my mission tonight, head to Memory Express to pick up some RAM for the Ubuntu Box and potentially a 1TB hard drive to pair with the current 300GB I’m running. Let’s go over the specs on my current Linux Box.

Motherboard: ASUS A7N8X-E Deluxe link
Processor: AMD Athlon XP 2500+ 1.833GHz link
Video Card: ATI Radeon X1600 Pro 512MB link
Audio: Onboard (Have an Audigy XS but not sure if it’s supported in Ubuntu as it’s not working)
Memory: 1GB DDR1 SDRAM (max 3GB)
Operating System: Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex 32-bit (seeing that my processor is 64-bit capable perhaps I should upgrade?) link
Hard Drive: 300GB
Continue Reading…

My girlfriend of 7.5 years and I have recently gotten engaged. A result of this, the computer I gave her (my old PC) is now useless, or at least it serves no immediate use. Then one day I came across a posting on Lifehacker talking about the latest release of XBMC. Now, XBMC is a media center. I won’t go into a lot of detail but you can think of it as a suped up Windows Media Center that can play any file and not just those supported natively by Windows Media Player.

What I’m loving about XBMC is its ability to use “Scrapers” to grab the files in the directories you tell it to look in, and automagically download posters, information, runtime, etc. I especially love its ability to download the specific TV episode information. You can see that in the below screenshot which shows the TV Show House with a description of what the show’s about, etc.

XBMC using the Mediastream Skin displaying TV Show information.