I’m getting close with my HTPC.

I waffled long enough that the Biostar m7ncg-400 motherboards available were at version 7.2, which offer control of voltages and multipiers — Just the thing for running a cool system. I matched that with a Athlon Mobile 2500+ processor, 512 MB of memory and a 160 MB Barracuda (or was it 160). I stuffed them all in a Athenatech A100 case. All and all, compact and not too ugly to put into the living room.

Its a bit noisy though. The 60mm case fans don’t help, and the CPU fan is probably running faster than it needs to, since the CPU temp roughly matches the case temp (32C under load). I’m going to wait until I have the thing configured fully though before I start tweaking. I’m planning on cutting out the stamped fan openings and putting in wire grills for less turbulent flow, and perhaps using quieter fans. I’m definitely going to work on lowering fan speeds. The HDD is pretty quiet, but I may try isolating it from the case with rubber washers or something. The final possibility is to ditch one or more of the 60mm case fans in back and add an 80mm in front, which will likely require improving the airflow through the front panel.

Still left to do on the hardware software side:

1. Network connectivity in the living room. I’ll probably use wireless. I could get away with 802.11b since video storage is going to be local and I already have an 802.11b access point. However, since I need to acquire additional hardware, I’m thinking of going with something 802.11g ready so that at some point in the future, I could actually use a storage server somewhere else and still deal in high quality MPEG2 video

2. The actual tuner and PVR software. Probably going to go with SageTV and a Connexant Blackbird reference design based card.

3. THe TV front end. Sage does most things (TV, other vid files, pictures, music) in its own UI, so I’ll probably start with that, but I may need to try something else if Sage’s parts aren’t up to snuff.

4. Configuring the remote. I bought an ATI remote wonder and will have to set it up to drive whatever front end I use.

One final note: I started out with Corsair Value Select PC3200 CL2.5 RAM and it gave me fits. The system would reboot whenever I did anything even slightly graphics intensive. Memetst86 didn’t show any problems. I suspected the powersupply, but neither sever over or underclocking made a big difference as far as stability went. I finally started to believe other reports of problems with the above mentioned ram and the onboard video on my motherboard, so I swapped it for some Kingston Value Ram with similar specs which may have actually been cheaper, and my problems went away.

The fact that movable type’s configuration UI only allow you to limit the number of posts appearing on the front page by date, rather than number is annoying. I know I can acheive it by muddling with my templates, but as is probably obvious, I’m not keen on muddling with my templates at this point.

The Internet Jukebox – Does Rhapsody have the answer to the downloading wars? By Clive Thompson

By using licenses, the labels and their download sites are secretly transforming music into a service…

Music used to be service, but one rendered by musicians.

Our Hidden WMD Program – Why Bush is spending so much on nuclear weapons. By Fred Kaplan

Measured in “real dollars” (that is, adjusting for inflation), this year’s spending on nuclear activities is equal to what Ronald Reagan spent at the height of the U.S.-Soviet standoff. It exceeds by over 50 percent the average annual sum ($4.2 billion) that the United States spent—again, in real dollars—throughout the four and a half decades of the Cold War.

Meanwhile, military families hold bake sales to buy their loved ones in iraq body armor?

I guess the nuke manufacturing lobby gets its political patronage before the body armor manufacturing lobby.

I’ve heard people justify the memory consumption of this or that application they are either developing or evangelizing with the argument that “RAM is Cheap.” It can be a very seductive argument, especially if the app is really fast as a result of its memory consumption.

Unfortunately, the “Ram is Cheap” philosophy, like many similarly concise words of wisdom, is only appropriate in a limited set of circumstances, such as when your app is going to be the primary application on a machine. This might be the case with a graphics app, or a piece of server software, in which case the machine is probably speced for your app, and RAM is a small price to pay to make things run really fast.

But how many people can really claim to be developing such a mission critical piece of software?

Very few, and those who delude themselves into thinking otherwise are going to make it less and less likely that their app ever becomes a must-have.

Why? Because they are going to find themselves fighting for a place in physical memory with the one or two RAM hungry mission critical apps on the machine, along with all the other nice-to-haves, and RAM may be cheap, but it isn’t that cheap.

For one thing 1/2 GB of reasonably fast memory probably costs more than most any other single component in a mid-priced PC (excluding monitor). For another, most PCs can only address 2-3GB of RAM, and may only have physical space for half of that. If the slots are full, RAM has to be pulled to make way for any upgrades.

But really, who is going to upgrade for an it-might-be-nice app that seemed too slow on their system in the first place?