New Toys

It’s been awhile since my last blog post and I’ve added a couple of new items to my tech universe. Since my Macbook has become my main computer, I have been using my PC as a Home Theater Computer hooked to my flatscreen in the living room. It could run anything a threw at it, but having to use a keyboard and mouse on my coffee table was not ideal.

So I started looking for alternatives to get my own files and internet content to my tv and stereo. I needed a device that could handle high definition and fast networking. So after much researching I decided on the Mac-Mini. It’s as small elegant computer that fits right under my tv. I can control it with my iPod-Touch (Air Mouse and the Apple remote apps), or with my Macbook using screen sharing, so no keyboard or mouse are needed in the living room. I use the Plex Media Center to play all my movies and music, plus Hulu, Netflix, and bunch of other online content. It works great!

So now the question was what to do with my PC? I decided to Windows Home Server on it and what a great decision that was! My PC has a really good processor and a ton of RAM and a lot of hard drive space ( 3.9 terabytes), so it runs WHS like a dream. I moved all my music and movies to it. My Macs have no problem accessing or writing data do it thanks to Macfuse and NTFS-3G. Thanks to this post at Multimedia-Pc.com I’m able to use the server for Time Machine. My WHS is now my computer workhorse for ripping movies and cd’s (using the My Movies add-in), transcoding music (dbPoweramp), and streaming movies and music to my mobile devices (Orb). It’s quite the setup and I’m very happy with it.