Archive for the ‘ Uncategorized ’ Category

Apple Predictions

With all the Apple tablet rumors preceding the upcoming Apple event at the end of the month, I thought I’d put down my thoughts about what’s going to be announced. They’re listed in order of most-likely to pipe-dreams.

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Presented in glorious surround sound

My wife and I have been without surround sound since we got our HDTV last year. When I first got into home theater sound systems I got a “home theater in a box” kit with a receiver that was also a 5-disc DVD changer. Because we now had a HDTV, I wanted to have the best visual appearance for our DVDs and got an upconverting DVD player. The problem was that the DVD player wouldn’t connect to the receiver, which makes sense…why would you have a standalone DVD player when you have 5 built-in? Another problem was the audio from our TivoHD. The old receiver had no HDMI inputs. Because of this, we pretty much only used the receiver for listening to radio. Around the time we moved the DVD player in the unit completely died, so it didn’t make the move with us. We have been using just the speakers in the TV since, and it’s been a good experience. I really wanted a new receiver though. Not only for the audio, but I wanted a good HDMI switcher and upconverter for my non-HD stuff. Thanks to my newly employed status and our tax refund I’m now the owner of a Onkyo TX-SR806 Receiver.

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Fun With Virtualization (pt. 2)

This is an addendum to the previous post. After having things reasonably set up, but unhappy with some performance, I decided to scrap everything and try VMWare ESXi. I wiped the computer and got ESXi installed…then realized that it won’t support the Realtek gigabit ethernet card I have in the system.

I’ve now put Windows Server 2008 back on in the Server Core mode and am running nothing but Hyper-V on it. I think some of my problems were tyring to do too much with the base OS, and if I can’t have something as light as ESXi, I’ll do the best I can with this. Thankfully, I still had my VMs saved, but I decided to rebuild my XP one because it was too slow. It was converted from an old desktop I had last year and needed to be dumped. Both the Server 2008 and XP VMs are working fine.

My Drobo however…I’m still trying to diagnose what’s going on with it.

Photo test

As we wait on our waitress to return with my credit card I thought I would test this put again.

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iPhone test

Test from WordPress for iPhone.