Cookin’ up some Wii homebrew

I saw this post on Lifehacker yesterday about installing homebrew on the Wii without needing to use the Twilight Princess hack and decided, what the heck, let’s give it a try! Wow, talk about amazingly simple. Only minutes after downloading the necessary files, I had the Homebrew Channel running on my Wii. After doing a …

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Vizio VECO320L 32″ LCD HDTV

We’ve been transforming our guest bedroom into a combination guest bedroom/exercise/game room. The TV in that room was an old silver 13″ Magnavox tube that just wasn’t going to work for playing Rock Band 2 on the Wii, so I started shopping for a new flat screen television. While I wasn’t specifically looking for a …

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What’s a Chumby?

I’ve been doing some (work-related) research lately about the Chumby. It’s basically a tiny Linux device with a touchscreen and wireless networking that runs Flash Lite stuffed inside a squishy beanbag (yeah, seriously!). Here are the current specs: 3.5″ LCD color touchscreen Two external USB 2.0 full-speed ports 350 MHz ARM processor 64 MB SDRAM …

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1TB of storage at home, nice!

Shortly after the new year began, I started converting all of my DVDs (and even some old VHS tapes!) into MP4 format with the goal being immediate access to my entire video library on any TiVo in the house using tools like pyTivo or streambaby. About two weeks into the project it became readily apparent …

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Palm’s new handheld is Pre-tty cool

Today at CES, Palm unveiled its new smartphone: the Pre, running webOS (formerly code-named Nova). The Pre has a 320×480 high-resolution touchscreen display, built-in 3G/GPS/WiFi/Bluetooth, a 3 mega-pixel camera, 8gb of user storage (the most on any Palm handheld ever), an accelerometer (for screen rotation), and the Treo’s familiar keyboard (it slides down from under …

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I can play Wii during a power outage …

… for about 10 minutes anyway. Last night I tested my new APC J15 home theater power conditioner and UPS. A neat feature of the unit is the front VFD that shows various informational screens, one of which is the total watts being drawn. With everything connected turned on (receiver, DVD player, TiVo, Wii, and …

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