Media home status

My how time flies! Work takes its toll as well as personal life, so this blog is less updated than I'd like it to be. However, here's a brief status report of my digital home:

I am currently building a media PC based on a miniHFX chassis. The intention is to reduce the number of boxes under my TV from four to two. It will have a dual tuner card, it will use the motherboard audio and a graphic card with s-video out. The plan is to run Linux (Slackware probably) and MythTV.

I am slowly stringing cables through the pipes in my walls, so my D-link (and later the media PC instead) will have a fixed connection and then I will turn off the wireless of my D-link DI-624+ - yay! I also moved my desktop PC to the attic and since that is still my center for recording TV I needed to have an antenna outlet up there. Luckily the cable was already there so I just needed to connect it and it works beautifully apart from the fact that the desk is on the other side of the attic so I currently have a loose antenna cable lying on the floor. The move also meant that I need to string ethernet up there - but I use a wireless connection for now! It works fine and I currently have three tuners in my PC, and my new 800GB RAID-0 setup is really great for storing all the crap I intend to see at some point in time...

Oh, and speaking of D-link, I realised that I have bought lots of their stuff:

1. Access Point DWL-900AP+
2. Access Point DWL-2000AP+
3. Wireless router DI-624+
4. Wireless PC Card DWL-650+
5. Wireless PC Card DWL-G650+
6. Switch DES-1005D
7. Mediacenter DSM-320

Ok, so I've been reasonably happy with this stuff but it's worth noting that number 1, 4 and 6 all broke (although number 4 was possible to RMA, the rest were too old) so the failure rate is actually pretty high. In addition I've had TWO power adapters break with the router, one was RMA:ed and the other one broke just this weekend so I just decided to repurpose the adapter from the old broken DWL-900AP+.

I think I might change brand next time I buy some networking stuff.