Boxee Power Consumption

, February 10, 2012

Hello TV fans! I’m about to make a change to my A/V setup inside of my house. I was curious about how this would affect my power consumption. Out comes my Kill A WATT and I roll up my sleeve and go to work. First, lets take a look at the TV just for comparison [...]


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How phone companies could have kept us using land lines

, September 29, 2009

I have a friend that does technical sales to one of the companies that sell land lines into homes. He told me a story about his latest visit. These telephone companies know that land lines are a dying breed of technology but evidently they are in a panic on how quick it is happening. I [...]


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HD Antenna with Over The Air Broadcast, Alpharetta, GA

, June 11, 2009

I repositioned the antenna rotator in my attic this past weekend. It’s got a full range of motion now instead of it hitting some attic joists, which is nice. I lost a couple of pounds in the 120-130 degree temps in my attic. Ah well, it’s all for the cause, eh? I then hooked up [...]


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Garmin Nuvi Map Update – A long hard road to map

, July 29, 2008

My wife surprised me with a GPS system for my birthday last month, and I love it.  Georgia is a difficult state to navigate around.  Each of the older roads are named for where they go.   This means that the roads end up changing names every 5 miles or less.  For example, Roswell Rd. is [...]


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Linux Widescreen LCD Love At Last

, June 16, 2008

My office is an oven in the summer. I’ve got two servers, a desktop, a laptop, and two 19″ CRT monitors. By the afternoon, temperatures are over 84 degrees in my office. I’ve contemplated doing all sorts of expensive solutions. Window AC unit was one, but it would be ugly, loud and my neighbors wouldn’t [...]


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Don’t buy that extended warranty from Dell

, May 28, 2008

Here’s the link: Dell deceived customers, judge says The article isn’t well written, but the gist of the article is that Dell deceived people into purchasing extended warranties and service contracts that just didn’t deliver.   I never go for that stuff anyway, and you shouldn’t either. There were a couple of times where I think [...]


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Windows Monitor Demoted; Linux promoted

, April 18, 2008

I’ve run this setup for a long time: Windows XP machine with dual monitors of 1 17″ LCD at 1280×1024 and a 19″ CRT at 1600×1200.  My  MEPIS Linux laptop was running off of it’s LCD monitor at 1440×800. I’ve been doing more and more web design work and less Visual Foxpro work.  My favorite [...]


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Whither TVease

, December 16, 2007

A while back, I was helping to promote a (very) small company called TVease that sold a killer Linux based box with this blog entry.  Unfortunately, like most small companies, it fell apart which is too bad.  They made what looked like a killer box. Perhaps this is an opportunity.  Perhaps someone else will succeed [...]


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Got a new Puppy

, November 6, 2007

My kids demanded it.  They were fighting, causing trouble.  I finally gave in. They were fighting over the computer.  I had some (very) old laptops hanging around and I decided to slap Puppy Linux on one of them.  Just damn.  Every time I try Puppy, it is astounding.  Stupid name, great product. This doorstop of [...]


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Grandma gets her Ubuntu computer

, August 7, 2007

I delivered and set up the computer on Friday night.  We scheduled an hour on Saturday morning to go over how to operate the computer.  I don’t think they really need it because it’s so easy. For the printer, I checked Walmart to see what they carried.  There was a HP D1420 that was only [...]


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