Category
Hardware
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01.08.07Look – no fans!So I finally changed the last parts in my media center to make it completely silent. I have already installed two 300w Silverstone fanless power supplies. Why two? Because one power the mainboard, graphic card and boot disk. The other one power the extra disks and the DVD drive. Now I installed a Thermaltake Sonic Tower on the CPU and a Thermaltake Schooner fanless cooler on the graphic card. The graphic card cooler needed some horrible and very manual hacks to fit on my old Geforce 6600GT AGP. Anyway, now my system has only one fan. A 120 mm that is ...
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08.03.06The multi touch screen revisitedLink to video. I guess many of you have seen this video on YouTube already. An amazing piece of input device. It is on display here at Siggraph and I can't say much more than WOW! After trying it I can confirm that it works just as well as it looks like in the video. The guys behind it are setting up a company and hope to put it into production. Where can I buy shares?
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04.24.06A cheap portable DVD and DivX playerThomson DTH 620 Travelling with kids can be anything from very rewarding and fun to a complete nightmare. Kids are in general very curious and easy to please as things happen around them on the way to a new destination. You always have the traditional games of spotting and counting special objects, following the map, telling stories etc.. If you combine these methods with some new technologies like MP3-players, iPods and portable DVD-Players you could end up managing even quite long trips with no problems. I have written about the long plane ride and the iPod. In our car we have used ...
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03.17.06Building a quiet bleeding edge PCYesterday ExtremeTech featured an article about building a quiet but high performing computer for gaming. When building a computer that you want to place in your living room as a media center the question of noise is more important than the question of performance. You need some power, but not the same kind of bleeding edge processor and graphics that gamers need to drive their advanced 3D action. That's why it's interesting to have a look at people that have tried to silence a very powerful PC. By using the same methods and simply replacing some of the components with slightly lower ...
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03.14.06Recommended HTPC hardwareBecause hardware changes fast it is difficult to make a list of recommendations that will last more than a couple of weeks. But people keeps asking, so here's a quick list of some good equipment if you want to build yourself a home theatre computer. Cabinet The expensive but perfect: mCubed HFX The cheaper one: Silverstone LC03 (review) Power supply Silverstone ST30NF (review) TV-Card Hauppauge PVR-500 Screen card Nvidia GeForce 6600GT (review) Note I don't know if this card fits in any of the cabinets recommended here. My main message is: choose a Nvidia GeForce 6600GT that is as silent as possible but still will fit into the case you choose. CPU As powerful AMD ...