Picked up one today, gunna use it at work, we have an LCD on a mobile stand that needs a PC to drive it for interactive stuff. That I can bolt this to the back of it is very nice.

Paid $488 ex GST, but they can be had cheaper than that.

Intel Atom 1.6
1GB RAM
80GB HDD
gig-e
802.11b/g/n
Intel GMA 950 video
XP Home

The box! The printed outer layer slips off.

First layer. It also had a lid on top of this bit.

Lift out the eeeBox tray and you can see all the gubbins that come with it.

From left: Stand (required), VESA mount to allow it to be screwed to the back of most desktop LCD’s, AC adaptor and triple prong power cable. Also comes with a UK one too. The bag has the Wifi antenna, a minijack to SPDIF adaptor, manuals and a restore DVD and support/drivers CD. You don’t even get them on a $2k laptop, but on a $500 machine that doesn’t even have an optical drive? Cool.

There it is! Complete with that protective film that I LOVE to pull off.

With adult human hand for scale.

Front, behind the flap. HDD light, power button, SD/MMC slot, USB, headphones, mic.

Rear. Wifi, power, DVI, USB, gig-e, SPDIF out.

First impressions:

Quiet. Very quiet. Fan goes full speed on boot up for a few seconds, but after that, you have to put you ear up to the exhaust vent to hear anything. Nice size…same size as a Wii, but about half the width. Good weight, feels solid.

Feels snappy enough after a brief play, but anything I/O heavy feels a little slow, as to be expected with a 5400rpm laptop drive. Not loaded with crapware! Acrobat Reader and ASUS Update stuff is it.

However, it also ships with something called ‘ExpressGate’. What this is is a linux based quick boot environment loaded with a web browser (Firefox based), Skype, Pidgin for IM and an iPhoto like app. Talks to both the network cards and the SD reader, and also takes up a 3GB partition on the hard drive. Touted as ‘instant on’, it’s more like about 25 seconds from boot to browsing, but hey, it seems nifty enough. I’ve now vaped it since we wont be needing it, but could be useful in some cases. I understand that some standard ASUS motherboards come with this functionality now.

Haven’t tried it to see how it behaves with HD media yet as I’m busy replacing XP Home with something a little more useful, but I will be!

Drive by the need to test out a DVB-T capture card for future use in our HTPC (what’s the point in having a fancy HDTV without access to HD broadcasts right?), and the desire to replace the 14″ CRT TV in my room with something at least slightly more modern, I realised that with all the spare hardware I have, I might as well order up a card and get to it.

Based on my associate Troy’s recommendation, I ordered the Hauppauge HVR-4000 Quad Mode tuner card. I got mine from Playtech, where they retail for a little over $200 inc GST. The spec page listed above tells the whole story, but basically it’s a PCI card with analog TV, DVB-S (satellite), DVB-T and FM tuners. It comes bundled with Cyberlink PowerCinema software, FM antenna, IR receiver and a Microsoft Media Center clone remote. Batteries ARE in fact included.

First up: it’s handy to be aware of some of the local resources available, these will prove invaluable if you run into problems. Geekzone has a fairly busy forum based around DVB-S and DVB-T matters in NZ, with a pretty good signal-to-noise ratio for the most part. Fossie, one of the big posters on the Geekzone forums has put all his info on his blog, and is keeping it updated. This page is very valuable. Cranz has a very detailed site on how to setup MediaPortal. I plodded through it myself, but I link it for reference of others. It’s fairly straightforward if you’re technically minded and have at least some idea of installing and configuring new hardware.

Current test hardware is an entry level box with:

*ASUS M2N-MX SE Motherboard
-nForce 430 Chipset with GeForce6100 VGA onboard
*AMD Semperon 3200+
-1.8GHz
*1GB DDR2
-PC2-5300 @ 333MHz
*80GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 SATA HDD
*XFX GeForce 7600GS 256MB Dual DVI+TV PCI-E card
*Philips 190C 19″ LCD @ 1280×1024

Software:
*Windows XP Pro SP3
*Cyberlink PowerCinema (comes with the Hauppage Card)
*MediaPortal
*GB-PVR

Results so far:

*Trying to use onboard video is fruitless. Even cranking it up to 256MB, pointless. You can just get 720p streams to play, but they are jittery as hell. the 1080i of TV3, no way. Usually results in a lockup.

*With the 7600GS – joy, it works, sometimes a very very slight jitter, but it varies from channel to channel. Long and the short of the above two points, you need a card with good H.264 decoding skills.

*PowerCinema wont give me the AAC LATM sound for some reason. Also, it’s a piece of shit, but at least it seems snappier than the other two.

*GB-PVR is a piece of shit. Complex to configure, barely documented, works in a generally stupid way.

*MediaPortal is better, but still a bit tricky to setup, but at least it’s got better documentation and a wider community.

*EPG (Electronic Programme Guide). This is the KILLER app of any PVR. Not knowing when shows are on SUCKS for recording purposes, and most PVR software makes it hard for you to record anything unless it’s in your guide. The advantage of digital TV is that the guide is built in along with the signal, unlike analog TV, which is a stone cold bitch to get a solid, stable guide source for. In fact, it’s unsupported by any official channels here in NZ, and many other places. Thanks Microsoft (and HP/Dell etc) for selling us products we can’t make full use of here! Anyway, I digress….with digital TV, you tell your capture card to grab the EPG over-the-air, and all is well in the world! Apart from the fact that the quality and depth of detail varies greatly, but I can only hope this improves with time.

*The UI of all 3 bits of software, at default skin settings, are all ugly as fucking sin. Cheap rip offs of WinMCE, which at least as some kind of slickness to it. MediaPortal is your best bet here with a far wider skin range.

*If you’re installing on Windows XP, you need THIS hotfix. In WinMCE it’s included in a rollup, but not on XPSP2. Note, I used a particular version because doing it the standard way will result in the updated file being replaced by the old version thanks to Windows trying to be secure. Once I find the page that told me how to do that again, I’ll link it later.

*Codecs: you need to be able to support H.264 and AAC LATM audio.

Next steps: Trying same DVB-T card and 7600GS in more powerful hardware, recording, and trying to wrangle Windows Media Center (XP and Vista versions), and some kind of linux PVR setup into playing the game. Also, remotes, but this should be trivial. I have both the remote that came with the Hauppage (MS clone), and a genuine Microsoft MCE remote here. That, and I’ve already tried the MS one with MediaPortal, as it has the best support templates it seems.

Purely for my own future reference. Use at your own risk!

Bringing Alt-S back!
Modify ui.key.chromeAccess to 5
Modify ui.key.contentAccess to 4

Tab behaviour.
browser.tabs.autoHide -> false
browser.tabs.closeButtons -> 3
browser.tabs.loadBookmarksInBackground -> true
browser.tabs.loadDivertedInBackground -> true
browser.search.openintab -> true

XML
iCal

With summer in full-swing, it’s time to get ready for our annual Summer Series, and this year’s series promises not to disappoint! With a licensed bar, food and market stalls, kids entertainment and more, there’s no reason to miss our first installment of Summer Series 2008!

The first concert of the Summer Series kicks off at Albert Park on Sunday, February 10th from 12pm-7pm with the following fantastic acts:

SJD
The Coshercot Honeys
Unity Pacific
The Shades
Sonz Of Zion
Lawrence Arabia
Timmy Schumacher & MC Kyla

Our second series is also in Albert Park, on Sunday, March 2nd, from 12pm-7pm and the line-up is as follows:

Tyra & The Tornadoes
MC Tiki
Family Cactus
Scribe
An Emerald City
Bulletproof & MC Twincam
New Telepathics

And last but certainly not least, the series will come to a close on Sunday, March 16th from 1pm to 5pm – at Henderson Park in Waitakere.

Tenement Yard
The Managers
Batucada Sound Machine
State Of Mind