RedBeard’s Curious Life

As I mentioned previously, I’m planning to maintain a media center at home, mostly for use as a PVR, but why stop there… I consider this task more of a nail in search of a hammer, as I am already torn by the anguish of missing some good TV show while watching a great one. Five years ago I would hardly have considered video capture or editing to be feasible consumer options, but the computer world moves at a blistering pace. The technology has reached the point that building your own self-contained media center is just as feasible as, and more convenient than, renting a custom solution from the likes of Tivo or the cable company. The software to tie everything together seamlessly is still somewhat misty, if not vaporous. So to help my in my decision on the various components of a media center PC (MCPC henceforth), I’m assembling a manifesto of sorts. This should enumerate the various aspects of the system, mostly from a usability and convenience standpoint, but also in terms of versatility and expandability. Let’s begin.

The most basic feature of a media center is of course to store and retrieve various forms of media. For my purposes this media amounts to music, pictures, video, and perhaps games. The media must be stored in a reliable manner, accessible through a seamless interface, and manageable in useful ways. The featureset of the MCPC should be as fully-fledged as possible without breaking any bank accounts.

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Continued existence is better than the alternatives.

So it’s about seven weeks since I moved from California, and three since I moved into my current (permanent) residence. It’s a 2-bedroom townhome about 2 miles from my office, in a quad-plex building on a fairly quiet street. I haven’t really seen much of my neighbors, but I hear them enough. My commute is about 5 to 10 minutes, depending on the density of cars on the road and the timing of traffic lights. I’m considering getting a bike to ride to work, although I’m not entirely sure why; some of the hills around here are pretty intimidating, especially the one my apartment sits on.

I went down to Ikea a couple weekends ago and picked up some stuff to fill the gaps in my furniture inventory. I only had a few, as my folks donated a decent amount of stuff to my move-out charity, so I got a desk, chair, bookcase, and swivelling drawers/storage thingie. Ikea furniture is sort of like a grown-up lego set – you get all the basic pieces and a pictorial assembly guide, and spend anywhere from 10 minutes to 2 hours putting together your new toy. My first endeavor was the drawers thingie, and it had a couple of flaws – one of the main panels had holes drilled in the wrong place, and one of screwholes in the backing plane for a drawer was split – but neither are really fatal and I assembled it all apart from the drawer while I contemplate gluing the split together. Assembly of the other items was less eventful, with only a bit of effort required to get the bookcase backing plane into place. The desk was too massive for me to move by myself, so I waited to make sure I knew where it was going before starting assembly on it.

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