Home electronics
Lots of electronics-related stuff going on lately at the Hobie House.
As I mentioned last week, my 3-year-old Xbox died. I tried to order a replacement from the MS company store but that put me over my spending limit for the year. Since I've got a couple of games that are burning holes in my shelf wanting to be played, I broke down and picked up a new one at Best Buy. Fortunately, I was able to offset the cost a bit by selling off all of my redundant old Xbox parts... hell, I even found a buyer for the broken Xbox console itself (yes, he knew it was broken)!
Also, I've had a little construction project going on. I've had enough of trying to take cheap second-hand computers and trying to turn them into workable media center PC's. I've gone through three of them now... the first was an old Gateway that was okay for watching youtube videos on the TV, but not much else. I replaced that with a small-form-factor Dell computer that I got just because it was tiny. Naturally, the performance still wasn't quite up to snuff. My last attempt was a Sony XL1 media center computer. This thing should have done the trick, as it was designed from the ground up as a media center PC. Unfortunately, it was a piece of junk. It was okay for most things, but it kinda hit the upgrade wall when I tried plugging in an Xbox HD-DVD player. It just didn't have the horsepower to play HD video.
To (hopefully) keep this from happening in the future, I decided to build my own media center PC from all new (or refurbed) parts. I've done plenty of part-swapping (memory, hard drives, optical drives, etc.), but never totally built a PC from a pile of parts. After a handful of false starts (the first motherboard I ordered was out of stock, they sent me the wrong case, etc.), I finally got it all assembled last night. By some miracle, it works! I still have to tweak the BIOS settings a bit, plug in some of the external peripherals, and get it connected to the TV, but my latest computer is at least alive.
More electronics stuff... in the near future I may do some soldering for the first time in about 20 years. Potential Project #1 is to fix my Roomba's crappy battery. I found a few articles online about how when a Roomba's battery craps out, it's usually only one bad cell (out of about 10). If you can find and replace that cell, you can save yourself a bunch of dough.
Potential Project #2 is my old rear-projection TV. I got this thing about 8 years ago, and it's starting to act a bit flaky. Every once in a while, the convergence goes all wacky... it's fine in the middle, but the red/green/blue all go way out of sync at the sides of the screen. After a few seconds, it snaps back and it's fine. This is apparently a pretty common problem for this model of TV, and it supposedly only takes about 5 minutes and some basic soldering skills to fix it. Well, that and about an hour to disassemble to relevant parts of the TV, and another hour to put it back together. I'm debating whether to attempt to fix this myself, or drop the $300 or so to have it professionally done. Part of me wants to say "oh, gee... the TV is broken. I'd better buy a new one!" Then the rest of me tells that part to shut the hell up and not be an idiot.
As I mentioned last week, my 3-year-old Xbox died. I tried to order a replacement from the MS company store but that put me over my spending limit for the year. Since I've got a couple of games that are burning holes in my shelf wanting to be played, I broke down and picked up a new one at Best Buy. Fortunately, I was able to offset the cost a bit by selling off all of my redundant old Xbox parts... hell, I even found a buyer for the broken Xbox console itself (yes, he knew it was broken)!
Also, I've had a little construction project going on. I've had enough of trying to take cheap second-hand computers and trying to turn them into workable media center PC's. I've gone through three of them now... the first was an old Gateway that was okay for watching youtube videos on the TV, but not much else. I replaced that with a small-form-factor Dell computer that I got just because it was tiny. Naturally, the performance still wasn't quite up to snuff. My last attempt was a Sony XL1 media center computer. This thing should have done the trick, as it was designed from the ground up as a media center PC. Unfortunately, it was a piece of junk. It was okay for most things, but it kinda hit the upgrade wall when I tried plugging in an Xbox HD-DVD player. It just didn't have the horsepower to play HD video.
To (hopefully) keep this from happening in the future, I decided to build my own media center PC from all new (or refurbed) parts. I've done plenty of part-swapping (memory, hard drives, optical drives, etc.), but never totally built a PC from a pile of parts. After a handful of false starts (the first motherboard I ordered was out of stock, they sent me the wrong case, etc.), I finally got it all assembled last night. By some miracle, it works! I still have to tweak the BIOS settings a bit, plug in some of the external peripherals, and get it connected to the TV, but my latest computer is at least alive.
More electronics stuff... in the near future I may do some soldering for the first time in about 20 years. Potential Project #1 is to fix my Roomba's crappy battery. I found a few articles online about how when a Roomba's battery craps out, it's usually only one bad cell (out of about 10). If you can find and replace that cell, you can save yourself a bunch of dough.
Potential Project #2 is my old rear-projection TV. I got this thing about 8 years ago, and it's starting to act a bit flaky. Every once in a while, the convergence goes all wacky... it's fine in the middle, but the red/green/blue all go way out of sync at the sides of the screen. After a few seconds, it snaps back and it's fine. This is apparently a pretty common problem for this model of TV, and it supposedly only takes about 5 minutes and some basic soldering skills to fix it. Well, that and about an hour to disassemble to relevant parts of the TV, and another hour to put it back together. I'm debating whether to attempt to fix this myself, or drop the $300 or so to have it professionally done. Part of me wants to say "oh, gee... the TV is broken. I'd better buy a new one!" Then the rest of me tells that part to shut the hell up and not be an idiot.