Gadget Wisdom

Editorial: Find Me a Twitter Client

guru — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 01:46:54 +0000

Image via Wikipedia Guru is the editor of the Gadget Wisdom blog and the voice of GadgetWisdom on Twitter. I have gotten addicted to Twitter. It wasn’t my idea. I got onto Twitter to promote the blog, initially, and didn’t think I would have much use for it. But like many Twitter has mostly replaced the [...]

You and Your Android

guru — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 04:25:24 +0000

Image via CrunchBase Recently, several members of the Wisdom family got themselves Android based phones. We all dived wholeheartedly into the application phone lifestyle. The term smartphone isn’t quite accurate, and the primary advantage of these types of phone are all the possibilities inherent in being able to run applications to do almost anything with them. We’ve [...]

MythTV Rig: Part 3 – The Home Theater Frontend

guru — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 01:41:18 +0000

As the third part, and for now, the final part, of our multipart series, Better Know a MythTV configuration, we profile the second of our MythTV frontends. This frontend is the older of the two, and is hooked into some home theater equipment for a more immersive experience.

MythTV Rig: Part 2 – A Frontend

guru — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 05:37:51 +0000

This is the newer of the two frontends we currently have in use. The case is a Silverstone Sugo SG-02, which looks rather nice in black. Inside, you can see a generic DVD drive and a CrystalFontz 20x4 LCD display that hooks into the internal USB headers on the Asus mainboard.

MythTV Rig: Part 1 – The Backend

guru — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 22:20:50 +0000

As part of the first of our multipart series, Better Know a MythTV configuration, we profile our MythTV Backend. Our MythTV backend has gone through a lot of changes over the years. The first iteration was in a yellow server case on wheels. We went through a period of overbuilding, and the yellow version of the [...]

Bad Luck Comes in Threes – Detecting Hardware Failure

guru — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 20:52:22 +0000

There was an odd grinding noise that gradually appeared. Originally, we attributed it to a cable hitting against one of the case fans, but there was no such cable. We used velcro cable ties to bundle our cables together just in case. The server scales the CPU to its normal specs only when it is under load. We'd been having crashes whenever we tried any video transcoding. Finally, we tied these two problems we thought unrelated together. The fan was failing, and could handle cooling, but not when the computer went full throttle, during which it gradually overheated till the built-in BIOS shutdown temperature is reached.

The iPad…You Can Do Better

guru — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 06:45:22 +0000

Image by Getty Images via Daylife If you’ve read this blog before, you know we have some very legitimate issues with Apple products, while accepting that they have some useful and popular designs. The iPad is essentially a giant iPod Touch, with a 10 inch screen, and the ability to run iPhone applications. There are criticisms, many [...]

MythTV Rigs

guru — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 08:08:34 +0000

Recently, Geektonic featured a showcase of a MythTV setup. It has inspired us to break out the camera and take some pictures of our own equipment. You’ve already seen some screenshots from our MythTV setup, but coming soon, we’ll be offering some shots and specs on our current equipment setup, as soon as we clean [...]

Review: The Sansa Clip Plus

guru — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 23:06:01 +0000

We love the Sansa Clip. We bought a 1GB Clip refurbished a while back, and it replaced a slightly more sophisticated player with video playback capabilities. Sometimes, simplicity is more useful. Now, we've replaced our 1GB Sansa Clip with a new Sansa Clip Plus(or Clip+).

Musings on Theme Park Technology

guru — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 18:56:16 +0000

The Carousel of Progress was created by Disney for the 1964 World’s Fair. It features an animatronic show that shows how the American home has changed over four scenes, the turn of the 20th century, the 20s, the 40s, and finally, the most updated piece…the future. Right now the future was determined in 1994. In a [...]