Archive for September, 2007
September 26th, 2007 | 
Author: I’ve spent the past few days looking for the easiest method to rip a DVD and stream it to my Xbox 360 from my Windows Media Center (or Vista) PC. There’s many different methods for this and most of them involve ripping the DVD to a single VOB file, renaming that file as a .MPG running it through some sort of AC3 filter and then streaming the large MPEG file to your Xbox. The problem with each of the methods I found for this has been that they are time consuming and require you running 2-3 different programs before it’s completed. My goal was to find a way to do this with just one or at most two programs involved and in as short a period as possible. This is how I’m doing it.
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Since I have my wireless mesh network setup in the house, I have OUTSTANDING wireless access throughout the entire house. Now with good latency and no packet loss it’s time to start making the best of the network in the house.
The first thing I did this weekend was enable my Xbox360 to connect to my Windows Media Desktop running Windows Media Center Edition 2005 Rollup Patch 2. If you’re not familiar with windows media center it allows you to stream media files (videos, pictures, music), watch TV (if you have a TV tuner card), act as a PVR and more.
This week I started playing with sveasoft.com’s talisman wireless mesh firmware at home. What this firmware does is allow you to re-flash your wireless routers and enable many other features in your router. The firmware I opted for allows me to take multiple broadband routers and create a wireless mesh network out of them. What a wireless mesh is basically is a wireless network that gives each router multiple paths to the uplink connection so that if one router fails the entire network still works and can still get to the uplink. At home I have both DSL & Cable and the big problem has been how do I fail over easily from one to the other. An option has been to replace my router with a router that has this functionality built in, but then where’s the fun in that.
A long time ago (okay about a year ago) when I first launched my wordpress based blog I stated one of the nice things about Windows hosting is that you can run a mix of applications. If a PHP application is the best blogging engine available to fit your needs, you can run it while still running an ASP.NET e-commerce application for your main site, maybe a ASP based app for your livechat. Well, as it turns out for my particular blogging needs, a PHP based blogging engine is the best fit.
So I’ve spent the past 24 hours with my blog converted to dasBlog. I’m pretty pleased with the blog but I have to say it’s got a long way to go if it’s going to match the power of wordpress. Here’s my take on it so far: Read the rest of this entry »
