I’m pulling my hair out trying to find a resonably priced combo of case, socket A motherboard and video card for a home entertainment pc.

Ideally, the motherboard should be microATX with integrated sound and video (and svideo out) for cost effectiveness and compactness and it should support full overclocking options so as to allow underclocking the processor (or the use of a mobile processor) in order to limit heat production and reduce the need for noisy cooling.

Unfortunately, svideo out is pretty rare on mATX motherboards, only the Chaintech NIF2, the Albatron KM18G-Pro and the Aopen MK79G-N provide it (at least among Nforce2 boards, which, for some reason, I have limited myself to). Asus also has a board that supports it, but only by adding a $20 agp card. Whats worse, they don’t all have good support for digital audio in/out (S/PDIF)

Similarly, few if any mATX boards support a full range of overclocking options and near as I can tell, none of the Nforce2 boards with vid out do.

So I started looking at full ATX boards, since they typically offer more options for overclocking, but svideo out isn’t just rare on Nforece2 ATX boards, it seems to be nonexistant.

Whats more, just about every ATX case is huge, deeper than my stereo or TV cabinets can take. There are one or two cases from Silverstone that are relatively shallow but the are in the low to mid $100s with out powersupply, which is a lot to spend for something that 1) I’m trying to do on the cheap 2) might not prove very useful. I guess I could probably recoup my money ok selling the case on e-bay, but it sure wouldn’t work well in my office.

All this is giving me a headache. I think my next step is to see if there are any decent mATX motherboards with reasonable overclocking options and no onboard video that I can price with an ATI 9600SE vid card which will also give me a relatively inexpensive upgrade path from svideo to component out to my TV.

Blah blah blah. I thought I’d have everything ordered by now!

She appears sweet and innocent, but I am beginning to worry about this dog’s plans for us. This morning I woke to find that she had cut the phone line. I can only assume the DSL connection is next.

Hardly a day goes by that we don’t get another reminder of how horribly Bush and his administration miscalcuated about Iraq. By bungling both the war and the reconstruction so badly, they have given islamic fundamentallists fresh & fertile soil to grow.

Plaestine is filled with anger, but it is a resource poor hell-hole. Afghanistan is strategically placed, but relatively resource poor, Saudi Arabia is rich, but while it may be corrupt, it is a functioning state. Iraq on the other hand, has an angry frustrated populace, mineral wealth and a strategic placement.

Now that I’m using an RSS reader, I am cursing everyone that publishes a truncated version of entries in their RSS feed. Its bullshit, and it isn’t going to encourage me to visit your actual site.

Of course, I’m pretty sure my RSS is truncated, since that seems to be the Movable type default (WHY?), I need to muck with my templates and fix it.

Yahoo! News – U.S. Denies Iran Report of Bin Laden’s Capture

IRNA quoted a story on Iran’s state radio Pashtun service which reported “a very reliable source” as saying bin Laden had been captured in a tribal area of Pakistan.

A senior U.S. defense official denied the report, telling Reuters it was “another piece of stray voltage that’s passing around out there.”

Call me cynical, but I just have to believe that this administration would keep Bin Ladin on ice for a while, so they can trot him out at an opportune time to influence the presidential election, just as the Regan administration cut a deal with Iranian militants to hold on to the American hostages until after Carter was gone.

I’ve been poking around a bit looking at RSS Readers/Aggregators because I want to increace the number of blog-like sources of information I read without significantly expanding the amount of time I spend on the activity. Having everything reviewable in one place, with the ability to see at a glance what’s new and what isn’t should really help towards that goal.

So far FeedDemon seems like the most featureful and polished application. It provides various filtering functionality, Outlook-like previews of unread items and a nice “newspaper” like view of all the entries in a particular grouping. It also has an easy to use clipping bin allowing the archiving of interesting entries.

Unfortunately, it lacks some other features I find desirable. There is no way, so far as I can tell, to use the outlook inbox-like listview to scan items from multiple feeds in a single window (unless you kludge something with the filter functionality). The only way to do this is with the newspaper view, but in that case, it appears to insist on doing a top-level grouping by source, so that all the new items for a given feed are clumped togeather. I’d rather have the option of merely sorting them all in reverse chronological order. The other issue is that it seems this grouping can only be done for a single “folder.”

The OpenSource .NET based Sharpreader seems to address many of these issues. It allows you to create a nested hierarchy of feeds, and by simply clicking on a given node of the hierarchy, it will roll all the feeds contained below it together and display them in chronological order, interleaving items from multiple feeds. Unfortunately, it doesn’t include the preview functionality, nor does it have the option of viewing the full content of all enties in a sort of webpage view like FeedDemon and some other products. It also doesn’t have a bin for archiving items of interest.

I’ve yet to explore the support of any of these products for posting to blogging tools. Also, if I were currently working, I’d be interested in the ability to synchronize state between two machines, so the articles I might have skimmed at work would show up as read when I read from home.

More later….