http://www.tomwaller.co.uk/blog Mon, 21 Dec 2009 16:38:05 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Just a quick note to tell you that I love the Hype Machine! [caption id="attachment_57" align="alignnone" width="264" caption="Hype Machine"][/caption] This little beauty let's you search and browse the latest music being blogged, all in real time. It's great for discovering new music, as well as the odd classic that time forgot. Follow me ... http://www.tomwaller.co.uk/blog/index.php/2009/12/i-love-the-hype-machine/ Over the past few months I've been investing (both financially and time wise) heavily in my home media center. My previous posts have given a run through of how I'm set up, but for those with not so great memory, here's a recap. Home Server: AMD Athlon X2 5050e 2.6GHz 4GB RAM 1x 500Gb ... http://www.tomwaller.co.uk/blog/index.php/2009/12/migrating-from-windows-server-2008-to-windows-home-server/ Since the festive season is once again upon us, I am planning on spending some of my holiday time coding up a new design for my blog. It goes without saying I'm pretty sick of the old design, though it has lasted me well up until now. In the meantime, I've ... http://www.tomwaller.co.uk/blog/index.php/2009/12/new-design-in-the-works/ I've been struggling for the last couple of weeks trying to find out why our new range of HP laptops refuse to let me install a missing driver, named PCI Simple Communications Controller. I had reinstalled the original operating system, installed every single application and driver that was shipped with the ... http://www.tomwaller.co.uk/blog/index.php/2009/03/hp-laptops-windows-xp-and-a-missing-driver-pci-simple-communications-controller/ As promised, here is a brief overview of my home cinema setup. It's still a work in progress, but is certainly getting there. Here is the media 'stack'. It contains my Onkyo TX-SR606 reciever, my custom build media center computer, and XBox 360. Here is another shot of the stack. You can ... http://www.tomwaller.co.uk/blog/index.php/2009/03/introducing-my-home-cinema-setup-part-1/ I've recently been trying to get some Adobe security holes patched by disabling open in browser, auto update and inline javascript. The fix needed to be executed on in excess of 2000 machines, so I created a handy custom ADM file which you can use in Group Policy to control ... http://www.tomwaller.co.uk/blog/index.php/2009/02/adobe-updater-javascript-and-open-in-browser-settings-controlled-by-group-policy/ I've been at it again... Taking my home cinema setup further. Although this time there was good cause for it. I currently run a Media Center computer in the living room, with 1.5tb of storage for media. This media isn't backed up at all, so if it were to go boom, ... http://www.tomwaller.co.uk/blog/index.php/2009/02/building-a-green-low-power-home-server/ Since getting my XBox 360 last Christmas, I've been looking at ways to get my media shifted around my flat. The thought of having a central store for all my movies and music and Alexs photos really appealed to me. So I spent some time investigating all the ways I ... http://www.tomwaller.co.uk/blog/index.php/2008/06/inside-peek-my-home-media-setup-with-twonkymedia-and-nas4220/ It was a cold, dark, day in the office, and an eerie presence could be felt lingering in the air. It was the ghost printers, hanging around on our Citrix servers, not disconnecting after the user sessions had long been terminated. OK, so my novel writing skills leave a lot to to ... http://www.tomwaller.co.uk/blog/index.php/2008/05/citrix-metaframe-4-and-the-curse-of-the-mysterious-offline-printers/ For sometime now, I've noticed that pretty much all the video content I download (all legal of course) comes in a strange new format called .MKV. Well, to be more precise, MKV is a container, not format. It contains h264 video files and various different types of audio, commonly DTS. MKV ... http://www.tomwaller.co.uk/blog/index.php/2008/04/playing-mkv-videos-on-the-xbox-360/