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A side hobby of mine is tinkering with computers, I know quite a shock to those that know me. I always have lots of computer equipment littered around collecting dust and what not. About a year ago I started to put together a computer to use as our home theater PC, HTPC. HTPCs are usually connected to a television and used to show videos, pictures, play music, etc.

For the past year this HTPC was not really fulfilling it’s true potential. I was only using it as a file server for our TiVo’s. Now that unto itself was beneficial as we could place all of our photos, music and videos on the HTPC and all of our TiVo’s play any of the content on it.

Last month I decided that it was time for the HTPC to become more than just a file server and get all the required components to output true HD to our big screen TV in the basement. I ordered a faster CPU, more memory and a couple of Terabyte hard drives.

I was a bit surprised when I went to hook up the drives that my old motherboard did not have the SATA ports that were advertised on the box (Collecting dust in my closet). This required me to purchase a new motherboard, and a new video card.

When the motherboard and video card arrived I knew it would be better to reinstall Windows from scratch than to try to jury rig it all together. So a few hours of installs, updates and patches later Windows was installed. But I still had an issue, the computer would lock up when it tried to shut down, probably due to a bad driver.

So after moving all my drivers to a separate folder I reinstalled Windows again. Another 3 hours down the drain, but success as Windows could start up and shut down properly. Now I could play with the system and see what it offered.

The new video card could support 1080p but my older HD TV proved this was too hard to read the text on the screen at 1080i, so I switched to 720P, much better. I installed all my software to convert videos, stream them to my TiVos and to play movies in the basement.

About this time my last component came in the mail, a Blu-Ray drive. The new drive would allow us to watch the newer format Blu-Ray discs on the big TV in the basement. A simple upgrade, so I thought.

After removing my old DVD drive and putting in the new drive I turned on the PC. As it hummed to life I flipped through the manual of the new drive, anticipating what extra software I would have to install to play the BR discs. When I looked up I saw that Windows locked up while booting up. An hour of tweaking start up settings did not get my any further. Nuts, I have never had a windows boot up issue with a new drive before.

Three more hours later I had Windows installed from scratch again and was installing my software again. At least I was getting good at this part. I pulled out a BR disc, Batman The Dark Knight. The new, albeit crappy, default player loaded it up. The picture looked great, but no sound. Oh no, what is wrong now.

Flipping through Windows settings and defaults I ran across the fact that my new Video card has it’s own sound device for the HDMI cable. This was the default, so no sound was coming out my other sound device. A simple setting fixed this and I was getting sound. Not HD Surround sound due to the crappy video player bundled with the Blu-Ray drive, but at least sound.

So the only things remaining are to reinstall my TV cards so I can timeshift ATSC, Clear QAM, and NTSC cable and the HTPC should be complete enough… For now.

A few days ago a quest of mine was completed. This particular quest started back in 1998 when I obtained the first piece to this collection. I was intrigued and started to search out and obtain each item in this collection. The last piece took me a bit longer than the others to come across but that day has finally occurred. Some of you may have figured out that I am talking about the statehood quarter collection and my last piece was the Hawaii quarter. I doubt this collection will ever be worth more than the 12.50 face value, it was fun to collect and see all the difference designs. Click to see the Hawaii quarter if you have not seen it yet.

Aiden’s potty training is basically complete. He mostly gives enough time for us to help him out of his pants and onto the potty. He sits w/o using any special seats which is a huge plus. The only remaining item is for him to be able to get out of his pants and on the potty by himself. I am sure that will take quite some time to finish but we are proud of him.

This last weekend Brandon went to a Blue and Gold ceremony. That is a cub scout ceremony where the second year webelo’s advance from being a cub scout to being a boy scout. This particular ceremony was a medieval theme, so Brandon made a sword and had a shield made with his name for the back of his chair. They had a magician show that was pretty cute. The magician was not that good, his sleight of hand needed work and you could see him pulling things from his pockets or storing things into them, but the kids loved it. And the rest of the night was very LONG. Aiden was going nuts by the time we could leave.

However there was one high light that made most of the adults smile. The younger kids were having mock sword fights and a little girl about four years old started to chase after the boys and hit them with her pink purse. I have captured a few pictures of her hitting Brandon, I will try to get them online at some point. So I will just leave you with a picture of Brandon, Hunter and his tiger den leader Scott.