So now that I’ve got my laptop hooked up to the tv, I can actually watch movies and enjoy them. I grabbed media portal and installed it on my laptop. So far it looks pretty damn good. I customized it a little with a few plugins and a new skin (need to change the background, it’s a bit risque right now).

After awhile though I got tired of walking to the laptop now that’s it is across the room instead of next to the bed. I bought a Media center remote off someone for 20 bucks and hooked it up so it’s easier to control. Unfortunately my laptop sucks and I can’t do the super cool power it on with the remote, only power it off. That’s pretty much it for now. I’m going to start building my actual media center sometime this month (still waiting for Intel to release the motherboard). I was originally planning on going with linux. The big deciding factor will be whether or not I can output video over hdmi to the tv. If I can’t, I’m going to scrap it and go with windows and load mediaportal on there. I’m really hoping I can use linux since I want a remote shell so I can move all the services I run on my desktop over to it.

I also finally got a usenet account. Downloading via torrents works, but the speed varies too much. Plus I’m on a 6Mb connection that limits the amount of seeding I can do. I grabbed a 4GB file last night and it took about 1.5Hours, as opposed to a couple days. It’s only $12/month, so it is definently worth it. I’m looking into a seed account on a website someone told me about, I’m doing a trial right now to see if I like it, and right now it’s pretty sweet. The biggest downside I can see is I have to wait for the download to finish, then when it’s down I download it again to my computer, fortunately it’s at full speed.

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