The Nibbana Family

Ask anyone using a Home Theater PC in their entertainment center to define the “ultimate HTPC” and you’re sure to get a myriad of answers. When I set out to build my own version, I outlined three areas of most concern: power consumption, storage capacity, and quietness/volume. What I designed and built ended up meeting those requirements:

• 74 watts at idle, 83 watts under load (Blu-ray playback).
• 8tb of storage capacity with another 8tb of expansion available.
• <17dBA noise. That’s quieter than a library!

With the initial requirements in mind, I set my eyes on a case from atechfabrication.com called the Mini-Server 5x. This case blends easily with other audio components, holds five hard drives, and utilizes a low power consumption 200 watt power supply with a fanless CPU heatsync design which dissipates heat directly into the aluminum case fins. Atech offers a lot of options to customize the case to your liking and for this build I chose an IR port for a Windows Media Center remote and a Griffen Powermate control knob for volume control. Customization comes at the expense of build time however, as it took 10 weeks (or about the same time it would take to build a custom Porsche) to get a fully completed case. Granted, I had the almost completely assembled case in my hands at 5 weeks, but it took another 5 weeks to get the Powermate knob back after refinishing. Initially quoted at 2-3 weeks, Atech didn’t come anywhere close to the quoted timeframe but I can attest the wait was well worth it. The build quality of the case and components is top notch and the machine work is remarkable.

Atechfabrication Mini Server 5x case.

The Intel DH57JG motherboard was the logical choice for its great feature set in a mini-ITX footprint. Consisting of an integrated 1.3 HDMI port with a 1080p output and ten-channel Intel high definition audio with Dolby Home Theater, the DH57JG contains everything needed for a great home theater experience. I loaded the motherboard with an Intel Core i3-530 2.93ghz processor and a matched pair of Corsair XMS3 4gb DDR1333mhz memory. The i3-530 was chosen because Read the rest of this entry »

I seldomly play computer games. When I do, I get very drawn in and play really hard, quickly begin feeling guilty for ‘wasting time’ on mindless entertainment, and then quit playing just as fast. As a very logical person and computer programming hobbyist, I am also always looking for ways to beat the game by finding areas to exploit to my advantage. Back in the 90′s while playing Final Fantasy VII, I found a sequence for earning money within the game by depressing keys in a certain order. I rigged up some duct tape on my controller to hold the keys in place and 8 hours later I was rich!

A couple of months ago I became obsessed with MyBrute. The benefit of MyBrute for someone like me is that it only allows three fights per day. This equates to about five minutes of game play per day, which is perfect for preventing me from becoming obsessed with the game and puts me at ease that my competitors are given the same limitation and can’t get ahead. Still, I’m always looking for an advantage. I began looking at ways to create my own bot, or an automated script which would automatically login, go to the arena, select an opponent, fight, and then repeat the process. I wrote a PHP script using the Snoopy class which succesfully completed most of these tasks. Unfortunately, it stalled when it encountered the fight stage because the creators of MyBrute utilize Flash and require a button keypress within the Flash object. Snoopy and cURL are unable of replicating keypresses in an object such as Flash. Perhaps the creators of MyBrute anticipated this, and subsequently my bot attempt was thwarted.

More recently I became obsessed with a game on Facebook called Farmville. Farmville is a cute little game that allows you to build a farm, harvest crops, manage livestock and grow trees. As a player gains experience and money from harvesting they level up and can buy new and exciting items for their farm. It didn’t take long to figure out how to quickly level and earn money and ribbons but as the games progresses leveling becomes exponentially harder and more time consuming. There had to be an easier way! That’s when I thought about using a mouse and keypress replicator that would record my keystrokes and automate the process for me. I found an application called Axife Mouse Recorder which does exactly what I was looking for. All I had to do was record myself planting, harvesting and plowing some crops and automate the recorder to do it for me while I am away. Now I can level in my sleep.

The obvious question that may come from some of you is, “Aren’t you taking away from the fun of the game?”. My answer is no, at least not for me. Different people derive different forms of pleasure from playing a game. While you may be excited and content playing a game in a more traditional fashion, I get the most excitement from figuring out how to beat a game and finding ways to exploit opportunities to my benefit. Games are a form of entertainment after all, and I believe each person should feel free to play in the way they find most enjoyable.

Want to play a game that is free, elegantly simple and yet terribly addictive? Then head on over and dare to challenge My Brute!

Not too long ago while perusing the news on Tyler Cruz, I came across his review for My Brute. Intrigued, I accepted his challenge and gave his character a run for his money. He quickly pummeled my character and taught me a valuable lesson, but at that moment I vowed to return one day and seek revenge. Victory will be mine!

The premise behind this game is elementary. After naming and selecting your character you make your way to the arena where you can fight up to three times per day. Your character has random strength, agility and speed attributes and is given a weapon or two to begin. As you gain experience and level up, your stats increase as do your hit points and opportunity to earn special skills.

Once in the arena you don’t actually do anything but watch the screen and root for your Brute to win. There are no buttons to push or actions to take, you simply sit back and relax and let your Brute do all of the work. Initially you may think little of this mindless entertainment, but soon you find yourself addicted to the brilliant simplicity of the game and looking forward to your next battle after a nights rest. The limit of three fights per day and desire to beat your next opponent will keep you coming back for more.

So what’s stopping you? Are you daring enough to challenge My Brute?

A couple of weeks ago our host made some changes to our website that left our entire blogging platform completely disabled.  They lowered the permissions on some file settings to prevent unauthorized access (read: hacking) into our site as well as other sites on the shared server.  I can’t disagree with this move; in the end it is a necessary inconvenience that adds an additional layer of protection but requires that I move blogging platforms and recode the vast majority of the site.

Until now I have happily relied on Movable Type as my blogging CMS of choice.  MT provides all of the features I need; namely the ability to host multiple users with their own individual blogs on an easy-to-use platform with scalability and multiple plugins.  On the down side, MT is written in Perl and is extremely resource intensive, taking a long time to do just about anything.  When making a single blog post this isn’t so bad, but when making lots of template changes this can be very frustrating.  A bigger issue is MT’s requirement to access files at CHMOD 777 permissions levels in order to generate content.

For those with an insatiable curiosity, CHMOD stands for “change mode”.  The three numbers stand for “Owner,” “Group,” and “Everyone” in a UNIX file permissions hierarchy as to who can read, write and execute files on your site.  777 is the highest level of permissions, allowing global file permissions access and considered to be a security risk.  MT requires 777 on many files and folders.

My search for a new blogging platform didn’t take long, as I had already been considering WordPress when I last refreshed the site.  WordPress is a great blogging CMS that is easy to use, creates dynamic content using PHP and therefore fast, has a ton of available plugins, is extremely popular and well supported, and doesn’t require 777 perms.  It’s not without its imperfections, however.  It is designed exclusively for the single blog environment, an issue that doesn’t bode well for a multi-user family website.  Sure, you can argue the availability of WordPress MU (Multi-User), but MU is a hacked-up hybrid of WP that isn’t easily installed and doesn’t provide all of the plugins written for regular WP which make it so attractive in the first place. 

So what to do?  Well, I have chosen to go the vanilla WP route and add additional authors to the single blog while creating some of my own widgets and hacking some of the templates to create a multi-user envirnoment.  Since a large portion of the site will need to be rewritten, this will take several weeks.  We appreciate your patience during the process.