I gave them a go, ordered the 10mb service well in advance to avoid being without internet at the new house however they messed that up. For a start the nearest installation date was a week after moving in and the day before installation they advised they couldn’t install it just yet as they needed to do some work before they could come around, apparently 2 1/2 weeks isn’t a large enough time-range for them to get their act together.

This was going to leave me without the internet for about 2 weeks and as networking student (now with a networking degree) I thought I could solve this problem and I did!

One of the advantages of the house is that it is a stone’s throw away from my parents’ house, the house I grew up in, the house with the internet. I quickly worked there is an option three. Steal some internet from someone else. Having discovered this I noticed that the houses are near enough to setup a wireless bridge and as I have access to my parents’ house it was very easy to reconfigure everything so I could setup two D-Link DIR-615 access points running DD-WRT to provide a wireless bridge.

An hour later I had the internet. My parents have Virgin 10mb and now so do I. So I thought to myself, do I even need my own internet connection? The answer is probably not, I have access to the 10mb via the wireless link, I get 10mb speeds, I do all my downloading at night, I’m now at work all day and the wireless doesn’t affect xbox live game play… So I got my Virgin install cancelled and now I’m saving just a little bit more because I’m stealing my parents internet and they’re OK with it.

I’d recommend it to anyone, if you’re in the position to do so… I may even write a how-to on it sometime although the information is already on Google.

Its not cost very much so far as upgrading my main desktop a couple of months back. I have a spare motherboard and memory as well as a power supply. The only missing pieces are a CPU and case. I am using my desktop CPU and have a new faster one on order for my main PC.  The case, well I have purchased a new one as well as a new hardware as I’d prefer not to use my old drives that are probably starting to degrade.

The case I have got for it is a Fractal Design Define R2. I had seen it a while ago and was impressed with its 7 internal drive bays and sound proofing features. First impressions I see these are actually working and its current near silient sitting on my worktop while its copying data across from the old home server.

More on this soon!

The kit its self if quite cheap, £55 and it comes with everything to get started, lots of cool LED’s! A mini servo and motor, push buttons as well as photo resister. I’m not going to reel off the list of its contents you can check it out here.

I’ll leave you now with some nice photos from my iPhone but more on this later and what my plans are with it!

Anyway, another picture…

I’ve now been recording various TV shows with easy and no real issues for the last couple of weeks. Although I have to say I have not really hit the limts and don’t really watch that much TV. I got a second TV card so that I could watch and and record a different channel but I have to get the proper cables to split the ariel feed.

It was nice to wake up at a normal time and watch the Chinese Grand Prix before the replay on BBC One in the afternoon. The web interface it pretty simple to use and I’ve set it all up so that if at work I remember I want to watch something I can login and set it to record. Bet Sky+ doesn’t let you do that now does it! I have a suspicion that it doesn’t properly flag up commercials but I’ve only watched recorded shows from the BBC channels so not sure yet.

The whole system though is pretty much complete now I got a MCE remote control off ebay which gives its the proper feeling of a TV rather than controlling it from a keyboard. I’ve had to wait a while though I think it got held up at the airport what with the UK airspace being shutdown, it was a seller in Hong Kong.

I was surprised at how easy the remote was to set-up, I just had to select the MCE remote from the Myth Control panel and reboot. I expected an evening of a mixture of googling and pulling my hair out…

I’ve been pretty much mainly using XBMC as a frontend as XBMC can access Myth’s recorded files which is pretty neat! Next step though is to hook it up to my 5.1 speakers, the Logitech 5500′s and get a HD tuner, oh and a bigger TV and a new laptop!

I haven’t however watched it enough since to see if the cooler actually works but reading around others seem to think so. Its also stopped acting up. After a little playing around after my previous post, here. It turned out the Windows Home Server wasn’t 100% happy with the Xtreamer on the network. Its fine now, the problem was the WHS, at idle spun down the hard drives when they were not in use and when the Xtreamer started to stream a file there was a delay while the hard-drives spin back up. This is ok when your streaming to Boxee, a PC etc as there is about a 2 second delay the Xtreamer however seems to get confused. I think I’ll file a bug report when I can test this more.
On a similar note the Xtreamer with its HDMI output is pushing me towards getting a HD TV. I’ve been watching the new series Life on BBC/iPlayer and the awesome shots they have in HD are just amazing but I’m stuck watching it on my PC monitor… for now.. any recommendations?

I have mine set-up on the Wireless N router (D-Link DIR-655) which doesn’t cause any problems at all. I wasn’t sure how well the wireless would work, as I don’t have the option to hook it up to a real connection, but no complaints with the wireless. One annoying point is the cooling fan inside the device. Its whinny even on the lowest of the low settings, sound a bit like a fly buzzing around. However you can turn it off but as I found out the other night after about 4 hours of streaming or being turned on its performance starts to get affected by it over heating. A new head sink add-on has just been released but still it shouldn’t really over heat.

Although when it works its a really good little device. The navigating the menus are quick but sometimes there is a little delay from the remote. I hope a firmware update maybe fixes of these issues when it arrived it needed updating so maybe another one is in the wind. I should ask google.

This is not suppose to be a rant or a review of it I’m just saying. I’ll keep this updated. I think I’ll get this heat sink and with a firmware update then maybe all these problems with go away!

Not a picture of it as I was using it to take the photo.. the box will have to do!