Oct 2
The housing market, mortgages and more!
So my Buddy Ben Drawbaugh over at his site posted up a little topic about the state of the economy and housing market and mortgage deal and brought up some interesting points. You can read some of the comments I left and his responses makes for some good reading and good debate material.
Anyways some points I raised was that if the banks/mortgage brokers weren’t so eager to give out “risky” loans as Ben describes them we wouldn’t be in the situation we are now, and having to bail out the companies at fault. However Ben states that if people weren’t so eager to accept those loans we wouldn’t be here either, which is a valid argument as well. I think thought that a bank who is approving these loans should be more fiscally responsible and do further checks on who they are giving these loans out to.
I will be the first to say that I am a recipient of an 80/20 ARM mortgage, but for me it was the only way to stay under the payments that at the time, my wife and I could afford. We both were fresh out of college, just starting out our careers, and just getting our feet wet in our marriage as well. We did the 80/20 ARM to avoid paying PMI as we weren’t able to come up with a 20% down payment on our new home, and if we would have gone with a conventional 30 year fixed we would have had to pay nearly $400 more a month with the PMI and at that time it just wasn’t possible, it would have put us up in the uncomfortable zone where we didn’t want to be, hell that $400 could have been a car payment or two for us.
In the end though I still don’t think it is right for our government to bail out these companies for the mistakes they made, and yet you still see the CEO’s and other higher ups of these companies walking away from the ordeal like nothing was wrong, and they didn’t do anything wrong. I feel if they didn’t give out such risky loans, to risky people without doing anything more than an income verification check, meaning they should actually look into their monthly expenditures as well, than we wouldn’t be in this precarious situation we are in now.
- Josh
No commentsSep 19
Nice HTPC Build
James Quintin over at we got served one of my daily stops for WHS news has started a series of posts about his “ultimate HTPC build” and thought I’d share it.
The first post James goes over what his goals are, what he expects out of the system and what he plans on doing with the system. The second post James goes over his hardware choices for his HTPC build and how he set it up, as well as shares a few photos of the build.
Note that James is located across the pond (UK) and thus has different tuner card requirements than what we have here in the states, but all in all, the build is quite good, and looks to be a solid performing HD HTPC.
So head on over to we got served and check out James’ build.
- Josh
No commentsSep 19
Microsoft Gates/Seinfeld Videos
I don’t know about you but I think these videos are fawking hilarious. So I thought I’d throw links up to these videos and share them with you all.
Video 1- Shoe Circus
Video 2 - New Family Part 1 (long Version)
Video 3 - New Family Part 2
Enjoy!
- Josh
No commentsAug 21
PC Parts for Sale
Image via Wikipedia
Motherboards:
- Asus A8n-VM CSM w/ Zalman 7700 HSF and AMD 3200+ 64 socket 939 $50 for set or BO - Foxconn WinFast 6100K8MB-RS w/ 3000+ AMD 64 socket 754 cooler master HSF $25 for set or BO - Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2h socket AM2/AM2+ $60 or BO
Video Cards:
- EVGA Geforce 6800GS PCIe 16x 256mb $35 or BO - MSI Geforce 7900GS PCIe 16x 512mb $65 or BO - PNY Geforce 6600GT AGP 128mb $20 or BO - 2 x Generic Geforce 2MX AGP $10/each or BO - Zalman VF 700-CU video card cooling fan (bran new in box) $20 or BO - Abratross Geforce 4200 AGP $10 or BO
Hard Drives:
- 2 x 320gig Western Digital IDE $35/each or BO
- 2 x 5 1/2″ bay removable hard drive enclosures $15/each or BO
Wifi Equipment:
- Proaxim Gold Orinoco 802.11 b/g PCMCIA card 842X-WD $25 or BO
MISC:
- USB addon PCI card, 4 external 1 internal $10 or BO
- 2 x PCI sound card (Chaintech AV170 via CMI8768 chipset) $15/each or BO
Memory:
- Corsair PC2700 2 x 256mb 333mhz CL2 $15 or BO
- Buffalo PC3200 2 x 256mb 400mhz CL2.5 $15 or BO
- Misc bag of ram, 25+ sticks of ram $10 or BO
DVD Drives:
- White DVD/DVD burner drive $10 or BO
- Black DVD/DVD burner Drive $10 or BO
- White DVD drive $5 or BO
Computer Case:
- APEVIA X-QPAC cube case w/ 350watt Antec Green PSU $50 or BOPictures:
if you are interested post in comments or find me at umdivx at the big G mail dot com ;)2 comments
Jul 28
Debate: Is the HTPC dead? My Thoughts was it even Alive?
As many of you may or may not know is that I am a huge HTPC nerd. Ever since I got into home theater I’ve also been hugely engrossed in the HTPC community especially AVS Forums and their HTPC sub forums.
Recently this article posted over at Arstechnica was posted asking if the HTPC was dead, and this article over at geektonic was written to counter the arstechnica post.
After closely reading both posts, I’ve come to the conclusion of has the HTPC market even started yet? The way I look at it, is that it is still in pre-alpha stage, maybe even earlier. Look how long it took for the average house hold to get a tv, and then look how long it took for the average house hold to get a pc, now your asking the average house hold to connect said pc to their tv, and calling it a Home Theater PC.
To me the HTPC is still a niche market, where enthusiast, the brave, and the adventurous dare to be different and don’t conform to the norm. For me I got into HTPC’s because it at the time, was the cheapest way of upscaling DVD’s, post processing the dvd’s, and getting the best absolute picture quality out of the DVD without spending tens of thousands of dollars on a high end video processor/scaler.
I soon learned that on top of dvd post processing/scaling that I could also catalog my dvd collection via third party plug-ins like My Movies or enabling the DVD Library cataloging inside of windows media center. I then went one step further and discovered that I could turn my dvd upscaling pc, into a DVR. Soon I was busy purchasing tuner cards, testing them out, adding additional storage space and by the end of the whole ordeal I am now running vista media center pc, with 1.5TB of hard drive storage for DVR purposes, to store all the recordings that I can make with the 6 tuners I have installed in said pc.
I recently even went a step further and picked up two Linksys media center extenders on sale for $125/each with free shipping though the dell affiliate program. I put one extender in my bedroom, the other in my office. On top of the new extenders I also have an xbox 360 that I use as a media center extender. So between the three extenders, I now can stream live TV, and recorded (DVR’d) tv shows on any tv in my home.
My eventual goal is to replace the comcast cable boxes with these extenders and my htpc setup so that I no longer have to pay the $15/month hardware rental fee’s. I currently am paying for 4 boxes with my comcast subscription, and paying a total of nearly $40/month in just hardware rental fee’s. If I could use the extenders and drop the comcast boxes after one year I’d have the extenders paid off. The main issue however is HDTV, and trying to get HDTV from cocmast into my HTPC.
Currently my only option is to buy a bran new PC, such as a dell XPS 420 with dual cable card tuners, as the only way to get cable card support is by purchasing a bran new pc from an "approved" OEM vendor such as dell. This requirement alone is one huge road block for making htpc’s main stream, but I also think that because HTPC’s are not main stream is the reason for cable card support to be so complicated and cumbersome.
Yes you can do things like Firewire into your pc, but then your still back paying hardware rental fee’s to comcast, which for me is the biggest proponent to using a HTPC is to get rid of the monthly hardware rental fee’s that I pay to comcast. There are also things like the Hauppauge HD-PVR which allows you to capture and record up to 1080i via component video, however it is mpeg4 only and currently doesn’t support Vista Media Center which again is a huge downer for me since I am a huge proponent of VMC.
HTPC’s also gain you access to a huge online video store, IE Hulu, Youtube, Joost, ect… I just got into using Hulu, and have been using my htpc for youtube and Joost for a while now. I love being able to load up Hulu and just start streaming tv shows and movies right from the website onto my tv. I truly believe that if more people found out about how easy it is, and how you can watch hulu on your tv instead of the small pc monitor more and more people would get into that in a heart beat.
Other added benefits to HTPC’s like big screen pc gaming, Pandora radio, and Last.FM radio, pictures, movie guides, Netflix streaming, Amazon Unbox, you name it, just adds to the benefits of what make a HTPC that great of a tool to use. Whether or not it will totally replace a stand alone STB remains to be seen but in my home the HTPC is more alive now than it has ever been.
In the end I think THPC’s still have a long way to go, and are just starting out, give it some time and you will see, till then keep on HTPCin!
- Josh
No comments
