Screaming Monkey Research Laboratories

I’ve been working on my HTPC setup.

I swapped out the cable I purchased from Radio Shack the other day.  It connects nicely enough but it should really be a 75 ohm coax cable.  I found such a cable to MicroCenter which I attached to a single mono mini RCA plug.  So that works fine.

I eventually want to add a Blu-Ray drive.  The aging processor (AMD dual core 2 or 2.2 GHz Socket 939 I believe.) in my HTPC can’t decode Blu-Ray.  Just not powerful enough.  At 1GB of memory I’m probably hosed there, too.

Instead of updating memory, motherboard and cpu I picked up an AMD HD 4550 based video card.  $40 after $10 rebate.  If you don’t need gaming these things can be had for cheap.  I’d pay more than that for the audio alone. (AMD/ATI includes audio on their latest video cards.)  It is supposed to offload 100% of the video decode from the CPU.  I’m not sure if it will do it for everything but it claims to do so for Blu-Ray.

One area of immediate improvement is in reduced noise from the PC.  This is because the 4550 doesn’t require active cooling.  So I went from a pretty quiet video card to a silent one.  Because it has such a low power draw (Less than 25W under full load.) it just doesn’t generate that much heat.   The previous card was a power hungry (for its era) 6800.  That’s the card that baked a fan inside my PC case.  Just got too hot and the fan died.  Removing that heat source from the PC case should slow the other fans.  Now I just need to figure out how to silence the hard drive.  I think when I can get a Ocz vertex SSD disk for less than $100 I’ll put that in there.

I may end up with a digital cable or direct tv box but right now I only have a TV, receiver and PC in the room.  One wire from PC to the TV, another to the receiver and two from the TV to the receiver.  Pretty clean.

I’m driving this with J. River Media Center 13.   I have two zones setup.  One for TV that outputs to the 4550 and its built in audio.  The other for Audio that is connected to the digital out on the Audigy 2.  I’m leaning towards setting up a second audio zone that I’ll run to the basement.  (I wonder if I can dump the sound to separate channels on the Audigy 2’s digital outs and just run speakers to the basement off of the Marantz’s rear channels.)

This setup lets me :

• Play my entire music collection stored on a WD World Book NAS in my office.
• Play any video from there.
• Play other media like LensWork extended.
• Play Hulu.com or any other web hosted shows.
• Play DVD’s from the DVD ROM drive.
• Rip DVDs to the local disk for a much more silent setup.
• I can also use the whole thing to go online to check things out while watching TV.
• If I hooked up a TV Tuner card to the PC (and an antenna) I would even be able to use it as a DVR.

Pretty pleased so far.

The only problem with doing all this is that the PC is no longer the weakest link.  Now I’m looking at the TV, receiver and speakers.  Unfortunately any improvement there will cost me many times what I’ve currently spent to update this setup.  ($50 so far.)

I love Hulu.com.

I still use the 40D.  I want a new macro lens.  The one I have isn’t bad.

I’ve been trying to get a more pleasing range of tones in my B+W.  I think this is colored via The Lights Right set of Lightroom Presets.  Not sure which one.  The presets are nice enough.

What I’ve think I’ve learned is that you really do need to go from Black to White in your black and whites.  Not just muddle around the middle grays.

A crop from another photo.  The edge on this bottle is about as sharp as any image I’ve ever taken.

This is published with the latest version of windows live writer.  They finally allow you to select alignment for an image.

Would be nice to see some signs of spring.  At least it has been warm the past few days.

I have a cheap E-Bay hand strap that I like to use with my 40D.  It attaches at the tripod mount and at the shutter side strap mount.  This is great with my 40D and even my 400D.  On my G1 it isn’t so good.  The G1 is just small enough that you end up mashing all the controls whenever you put your hand through the strap.

I found a nice replacement in the Optech Gotcha Wrist Strap.

It isn’t a hand strap. Hand straps keep your hand tight on the camera. A wrist strap is there to keep the camera from hitting the ground. And the Optech Gotcha Wrist Strap is a souped up wrist strap. It is comfy, springy, secure and even has a quick connect allowing you to pop it off and attach a regular neck strap.

The G1 is small enough that you can kind of try to shuffle two lenses and the camera all without a strap.  This has nearly led to disaster more than once.  With this thing you can dangle the camera off your wrist while fishing lenses and what not out of your camera bag.

It gives you neck strap security with wrist strap convenience.

It was like $10, too.  (Not that the E*Bay hand strap was expensive.  Seems to me it was about that price.  It had to be shipped from Shanghai while I purchased the Optech product from West Photo in Minneapolis during lunch.)

I also found another Optech product that I just had to buy.

My new Lowepro Nova 140 AW is perfect for the G1.  It fits G1, 14-45 and 45-200 lens perfectly.  I can also wedge a bottle of water just under the front strap, too.  (Not perfectly but I’ve an idea to secure the water a little better.)  The main problem with that pack is that the strap is horrible.

Fully loaded it is hard to notice that I have that pack on my shoulder.  At least until it falls off my shoulder.  Which it does about 300 times a day.  It almost seems like slickness was a design factor for that strap.  I swear it is coated in teflon.

Enter another Optech product — the Optech Bag Strap.  It is nice and springy and has their little grippy things on it so it doesn’t keep falling off.  Just a much better solution.  It isn’t perfect but it can clip on to every bag I have and it really takes the strain off.  If you’ve been to the physical therapist as many times as I have you really appreciate that.

I’ve never liked Optech’s Camera Straps (I like the leather Tamrac ones) but these two are really nice.  I think I’m going to order one of Optech’s tripod straps.

Thumbs up.

It is just a mono minijack on the Soundblaster.  So a simple mono minijack to RCA phono plug is all you need.  Or you can just use the left channel of a stereo minijack to RCA cable.

Easy.

Just use AF tracking.  Put the focus point on what you want in focus.  Half press the shutter.  Now the camera will actually try to keep that spot in focus.  This is superior to focus and recompose in a normal phase detect AF camera as it will adjust focus as the point moves away from the center of the camera.  A camera that doesn’t do that can lead to errors in focus. (See this.)  Especially if the DOF is really shallow.

Just a quick tip.

I bought a compass the other day.  Can’t help but notice that it points between N and NE no matter where I am going.  Heading in to work?  North by northeast.  Heading home from work?  That would be north by northeast.

The following is a photo of the only known moment where the compass actually pointed in a direction other than north by northeast.  I believe the car is actually pointed west when this photo was taken.

BTW, how can this happen? I mean I’ve removed it and put it back up several times and it always goes back to north by north east. It would be one thing if it stayed where I put it. But it actively picks that direction.

Actually, it looks more like south west.