Category Archives: Home Theater

I was very excited to see that the OpenELEC team had released version 4.0, based on XBMC Gotham. I read a lot before attempting an upgrade, and I still had huge problems with the upgrade from OpenELEC 3.2.

qooxtunes, the webinterface addon for XBMC, is now in version 1.1. Read on to learn more about the new features.

I recently put together an XBMC system to replace an aging Apple TV (first gen). It was my interest in the Raspberry Pi that brought me to the idea of using XBMC, although ultimately, I did not end up going with a Raspberry Pi based system (I use one for other things around the house, […]

qooxtunes is a webinterface addon for XBMC. It leverages the powerful qooxdoo framework to present the user with a RIA interface that emulates some of the best features of iTunes for library management. It currently only supports music, but it could be extended to handle video and photos.

I love the fact that my Airport Extreme can serve as a “poor-man’s NAS” by making USB drives available as Samba shares.  But when I wanted to back up one drive to another, I ran into terrible problems.   Here’s how I solved these problems.

When I first added our Apple TV to our Logitech Harmony remote, I included our LCD TV in the device list for the Apple TV activity.  Most of the time, we use the Apple TV for music, not for video, and we often use the Remote application on ipod and iphone.  So we don’t really […]

Last year, I wrote about how much I despised the Dish Network ViP 622 DVR due to its instability.  My thoughts on this haven’t changed a whole lot.  In fact, we’re now using our 5th Dish DVR in 10 months.

It’s rare that you do something purely in a software space that renders hardware irreversibly damaged.  But somehow I managed to do it with my Philips digital photo frame.   🙁

I recently did a reorganization of our photo library (approximately 30,000 photos).  We had previously been using a centralized desktop computer to store our photos, which we would access via Windows laptops.  The desktop bit the dust recently, so I moved the library to a pair of external USB drives, which we connect directly to […]