The most common way of trying a different flavour of Linux is to burn a live CD. A live CD will let you load Linux into memory from the live CD rather than installing it on your HDD. It’s quicker and easier than dual booting Operating Systems.
But the problem with live CDs is that they are not persistent. That means that any changes you make aren’t remembered, i.e. next time you boot from the CD you will be back at square one. You will have to change settings, install programs etc. again because changes you made will be forgotten when you reboot or shut down your PC. Although this could also be a blessing in disguise for noobs who might be prone to breaking things.
If you need or want persistence you could use Linux in a Virtual Machine which can be slightly harder and take a little longer than burning a CD, but it’s still easier than dual booting and you get persistence.
Another problem with live CDs is that they eat up blank media like a kid eats candy, sure CD/DVD-Rs or CD/DVD-RWs are cheap but they still cost money.

If you have a spare USB flash drive (even if you don’t you can pick one up for less than the cost of a spindle of CD/DVD-Rs) then I’d suggest trying Universal USB Installer “a Live Linux USB Creator that allows you to choose from a selection of Linux Distributions to put on your USB Flash Drive.”. It’s as easy as 1 2 3 to use, it’s relatively noob friendly, although it’s not 100% idiot proof, and takes care of creating the bootable USB flash drive for you.
You select which flavour of Linux you want to try from the drop down menu. If you don’t have the ISO then the program will provide you a link to the home page. If you have the ISO then you point the utility to the ISO, sometimes it’s smart enough to find the ISO itself. Then you tell it the drive letter of your USB flash drive, click create and wait. It will take about 5 minutes after which you will have a fully bootable USB flash drive containing your selected flavour of Linux.

Any real geek usually has some spare parts laying about. I have a spare ASUS M4A785G motherboard with 2 GB of Corsair RAM and a spare TV tuner card.

So what am I going to do with the spare parts? I could try and sell the parts, but I wouldn’t get much for them because they are older parts despite being perfectly good and more than powerful enough for most people. I could leave them to gather dust or I could build the parts up into a new PC.

I opted to use the parts to build a HTPC.

The problem is that the ASUS M4A785G is over 3 years old and 3 years in computer time is equal to 30 human years. When you have a motherboard that is so old it sometimes becomes harder to find parts to suite it.

My ASUS M4A785G is an AMD AM3/AM2+/AM2 board and AM2+/AM2 CPUs were discontinued a long time ago. The only CPU that you can still purchase new is a socket AM3 CPU but even those are getting harder to find.

One of my favourite online computer shops had sold out of their last AM3 CPUs and my other favourite shop only listed an AMD Athlon II X2 260 for $65, but they had no stock. So I decided that maybe I could find it on eBay for the same price or cheaper.

Everybody knows that eBay is touted by every Terry Tight Arse as being a great online destination for bagging a bargain on new and used goods. I have used eBay in the past and have scored a few good bargains in the past (before the internet started going to hell in a 2U rack mounted server) so I figured I might be able to get a good price on an AMD Athlon II X2 260. Unfortunately eBay has gone down hill, too many people have jumped on the band wagon and it seems that eBay is now full of rip-off merchants.

The cheapest price I could find on an AMD Athlon II X2 260 was $69.00 plus $9.95 for shipping. One person was asking for $109.80 plus $36.03 shipping! Good luck to that person, only an idiot would fork out that much.

After searching for a little longer I found an an AMD Athlon II X2 260 at another local computer shop for $63 plus $2.26 for a train ticket so I could take a ride and pick it up. The savings are enough for a game or two on Steam.

Another example is I recently came across the DataVac ED500 Electric Duster, I decided I wanted one because it’s cheaper than buying cans of compressed air all the time. On eBay the cheapest I could find the ED500 for was $64.55 plus $59.86 for shipping. Elsewhere I found it for $49.31 plus $49.66 for shipping, that’s a saving of $25.44 which is enough for a 6pack of my favourite German beer.

So I’m not convinced that eBay is such a great place for bagging a bargain, certainly not for new goods. Every time in the recent past that I have hit up eBay to do a price comparison it has come up more expensive. The bottom line is be careful of eBay it’s not the best bargain destination any more.
Sure you might still be able to bag the odd bargain on something new, if you buy second hand then you could possibly get an even better bargain.

For new goods always shop around and use price search/comparison web sites to find the best bargain because your probably not going to find that great price on eBay.

One short film that deserves an award of some description is Aperture: A Triumph of Science, it was produced by a wonderful collective called SyntheticPH who happen to be working on a new Portal-esque film called Lab Rat, it will tell the story of Doug Rattmann in mixed media and live action.

In the meantime you enjoy the fruits of SyntheticPH’s labour in Aperture: A Triumph of Science.

If you ever wondered what Google Maps would have been like on the NES? Wonder no longer! Google is producing Google Maps 8-bit for NES. This has to be the coolest thing I have seen all week. Yes this is that it’s real. It’s not a proof of concept picture or animation, hit up Google Maps and click on the quest button to checkout Google Maps in 8-Bit goodness.

My new favorite hobby is to paste shellcode backdoor payloads to pastebin and title it MS12-020. It’s like cat nip to script kiddies.

Beware of web sites that offer the cheapest price. Always be sceptical of sales and discounts. You are constantly being lied to about price, those sales and discounts that you are being offered probably isn’t the best deal you could be getting.

A couple of weekends ago after having dinner and doing the dishes I sat down to unwind in front TV. The TV was on SBS and a Japanese movie had just started, I decided to keep watching despite the sub titles. Normally if I want to read I’d pick-up a book but this film had some nice animated 3D characters called Death Angels so I kept watching. I’m glad I persevered with it because it turned out to be a good film.

When the film was over I checked the TV guide for the name of the film, it was Death Note: The Last Name. I enjoyed it enough that I Googled the film, it turns out that it was the sequel to Death Note a live action film of an Anime series also called Death note.

Death Note: The Last Name was so good that I wanted to see the first film and the Anime series. Thanks to the wonders of the internet I found out that one of my favourite entertainment distributors Mad Man distributed the films and the Anime series.

I was very tempted to pull the trigger and purchase the films and Anime series right there and then but I held off because I couldn’t justify it. There were plenty of other things that I needed to do with that money, like pay ISP bills otherwise I wouldn’t be ordering anything online without any internet connection.

Death Note had dropped off my radar until now when I checked my email. There was an email from MoviePlus, apparently they have brought out one of my favourite online DVD shops, Atlantic. MoviePlus were offering a $5 discount on any order over $20, there is always a catch… So I decided to have a look for Death Note because the email boasted of ‘excellent deals’.

MoviePlus had the double DVD of Death Note 1 and 2, for $37.95, so $34.95 with the $5 discount, and then add postage on top of that. Now I don’t know in what universe that constitutes a good deal in but it sure as shit not an ‘excellent deal’ in my world. Mad Man had the exact same DVD set for $29.95, plus postage which would be $4 as stated in their excellent FAQ.

Unfortunately I can’t describe anything to do with MoviePlus as excellent when they failed to indicate how much they charge for shipping, it wasn’t even listed in their FAQ!
Really MoviePlus? You don’t frequently get asked how much shipping costs?

That’s ok, it’s no big deal it just means MoviePlus won’t be getting my business even if they do offer me ‘discounts’… dicounts haha! Yeah right. Ahem! I like to know how much everything will cost before I purchase goods so that there are no surprises. The fact that MoviePlus can’t provide me an answer to what I think would be a fairly common question makes me think that they are dodgy which means that I’m going to shop elsewhere and forget that they ever exist.

Sure I could have put the item in the shopping cart and proceeded to the checkout to find out how much shipping would cost. I could have even sent them an email and hope that I get a reply. But I didn’t have to because Mad Man was already $5 cheaper and shipping costs were covered in their FAQ (along with processing and shipping estimates, something else that MoviePlus failed to do) which meant that I knew the total cost of my order.

Another Example is I found a 55” Samsung LED TV at a local home theatre shop for $240 less than JB Hi-Fi were selling it for. Anyone that lives in Australia knows that JB likes to boast that they have the best and the cheapest prices. Usually JB does have some pretty good deals in general but not always.

The moral of the story is always be sceptical of advertising and ‘excellent deals’, the cheapest prices, the best price etc… Unless you have too much money always shop around and use price search web sites to really find the best price.

If you do have too much money shoot me an email, I’ll alleviate you of any excess cash that is a burden to you.

Love it or hate it, Lana Del Rey’s Video Games is a great song, on YouTube 34,984,645 people have viewed the video and of those people 121,138 like the song, compared to 4,719 who dislike it. If we are going to believe the numbers then yeah it’s a good song.

If you search “Lana Del Rey – Video Games” on Sound Cloud you will get 50 pages of results. Some of the results have nothing to do with the song, others are really poor covers/remixes, and occasionally you will come across a good remix. These are my top 10 picks in no particular order:

A nice laid back chilled out down beat remix


Everything is better with a break beat including these remixes

If everything is better with a break beat then it’s 10x better with an Amen break beat

I know Dubstep’s now main stream and turned to shit but it’s ok in moderation

Who says Disco is dead? This remix has a bit of a Disco feel

Video Games is a great song even without the lyrics it still sounds great.

If electro is more your thing then you’ll enjoy this remix

Maybe House is more your thing?

Most typical entertainment set-ups usually consist of a set-top box (unless the TV is fairly new, I haven’t seen a new TVs that doesn’t have a built in TV tuner), a DVD or Blu-ray player, maybe an Amp and some sort of network media player like a Boxee Box, possibly a PVR or DVD recorder. That’s a lot of devices, remotes, and tangled cables (cable spaghetti anyone?) cluttering up your entertainment space.

All of those separate devices make it a pain to do something simple like watch TV. You have to turn on the TV, then turn on the set-top box if your TV doesn’t have a built in TV tuner, and if you have an Amp then you have to turn that on too. It seems a bit ridiculous just to watch TV, it’s more complicated than it should be.

Sure you could get a universal remote to replace your other remotes to make things a little easier, but you still have a bunch of different devices and tangled cable spaghetti. How cables get tangled while they sit there and don’t move is beyond me. There must be a messy cable tangling monster out there that visits in the dead of the night and messes up the cables and gets them all tangled. But I digress.

A better, and arguably the best, solution for a lot of people is a Home Theatre Personal Computer, or HTPC.

To prove that a HTPC is the best solution I’ll show you how one HTPC can replace multiple devices and do all of the things that those individual devices used to do.

For the sake of this example lets say that you have the following entertainment set-up; A set-top box, Blu-ray player, Boxee Box, and a 500 GB PVR

Now lets look at how a HTPC can do the same job as each of those devices.

Set-top box
It’s kinda obvious, it lets you watch HD TV. A HTPC can do the same job with a TV tuner card.

Blu-ray player
Do you really need me to point out the blindingly obvious? The addition of a Blu-ray optical drive in a HTPC will let you do exactly the same thing as a standalone Blu-ray player with less cables, clutter, and one less remote. A Blu-ray burner or combo drive will also let you burn Blu-ray and/or DVD discs allowing the HTPC to kill the standalone DVD recorder.

Boxee Box
Basically this device, like any other media player, will let you watch digital videos and listen to digital music on another computer connected to your home network. It also lets you watch streaming media. Media players are little more than a a device that offers a small subset of the HTPCs functionality. Any HTPC, or even any normal PC, connected to a TV can do everything a media player can do and more by default.

500 GB PVR
So a PVR lets you record digital TV, it’s the digital equivalent of a VCR. A TV tuner card in a HTPC will not only let you watch HD TV it will also let you record HD TV while you watch another channel. So if there are two shows on at the same time that you want to watch then watch one and record the other to watch later. If you get quad TV tuner goodness up in your HTPC box then you can watch and record even more shows! With a HTPC you can always install larger or more HDDs so that you can store more, try doing that with a dedicated PVR.

That’s how one HTPC can replace a bunch of different devices, and do more than any of those individual devices could ever do. Can you play streaming internet radio with any of the devices you already have? Can you can get the weather? You can on your HTPC. You can even integrate Twitter, Facebook and Skype into your HTPC, you can even browse the web, now that’s not something that you can do easily unless you invest a ridiculous amounts of money in a “SmartTV”.

You could even possibly replace a Wii with a HTPC that runs Dolphin a Gamecube & Wii emulator!

A HTPC can cost less than a bunch of dedicated devices. It can reduce the clutter, also reducing the amount of cables you need to hook everything up making it easier to set up and less cables = less tangled cable spaghetti.

A HTPC is more customisable, for example if you want to use some Hi-Fi speakers you can by connecting your HTPC to an amplifier, alternatively you can use regular speakers like Logitech’s Z906 5.1 Channel THX Certified Speaker System.

It’s easy to build a HTPC that fits the look that you are after, with so many PC cases it’s easy to build a HTPC looks like a piece of Hi-Fi equipment or to build an extremely small HTPC to fit in a tight space. HTPCs come in all sorts of different shapes, sizes and configurations to suite your needs.

I can’t think of a reason why a HTPC is not a better solution than a bunch of dedicated devices. Can you think of any reason why a HTPC is bad in any way shape or form? Let me know what you think, leave a comment.

Download Mari0!