Linked by David Adams on Mon 27th Oct 2008 23:11 UTC
As part of our ongoing series, "Building the Wired Home," we've been experimenting with what could be a sea-change in the whole concept of a home computer. Home computers, of course, have long ago become commonplace, and computers have even taken on some roles that used to be delegated to standalone consumer electronics, such as audio and video storage and playback. They've gone from being exotic oddities to ever-more-useful home appliances. Interestingly, though, as our home computers have become more powerful, sophisticated, and useful, they have also become decentralized and have, in most inefficient fashion, been chopped up and redistributed around the house. "Read more" to learn how our experiment worked out.
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Member since:
2005-06-29
I've been thinking about doing something similar to my apartment ever since I go it (over two years ago), but even during the planning stages I run into a lot of problems.
My goal is simple: have a central computer in my walk-in closet (located centrally in my apartment) that would handle all incoming signals and storage and printing. I run into countless problems.
I have two types of TV coming into my house: old-fashioned analogue cable, and digital cable (with the high-definition channel package). I have the only compatible HD digital cable TV decoder on sale in The Netherlands (ridiculously expensive), but it's only a single-tuner, and doesn't have a built-in hard drive - in other words, I'd need to buy a separate hard drive recorder, and even then I'd only be able to OR record, OR watch TV (or watch and record the same channel, but that kind of defeats the point).
The old analogue TV is part of my all-in-one contract at my ISP/cable company (phone-over-IP/internet/analogue+digital TV), and can't be removed from it - which turned out to be a good thing sine I can only hook one TV up to my decoder, meaning the TV in my bedroom gets analogue input - it's an old 37cm CRT TV. I have a HD-ready small LCD TV left over, but it's an American model, and doesn't come with PAL. So, the only way for me to use it would be to hook it up to my decoder - but since that thing can only take one device at a time, I'd need to buy another decoder. And another contract. Fcuk that shit.
That's just one of the issues.
So, now I've settled on making my desktop computer the central computer. I've hooked up a large USB drive, shared it across the network, and now I can use my laptops (Powerbook G4 and the Aspire One) to access its contents all across my apartment. The downside of course is that it doesn't record TV, and my desktop has to be running all the time, in my living room.
I don't want to get a NAS or something similar because it would be just another device that can only do ONE thing. If I were to place any computing device in that closet, it should be able to handle everything.