Pete Brown's Blog (POKE 53280,0)
Pete Brown writes on a variety of topics from XAML with the Windows Runtime (WinRT), .NET programming using C#, WPF, Microcontroller programming with .NET Microframework, .NET Gadgeteer, Windows on Devices, and even plain old C, to raising two children in the suburbs of Maryland, woodworking, CNC and generally "making physical stuff". Oh, and Pete loves retro technology, especially Commodore (C64 and C128). If the content interests you, please subscribe using the subscription link to the right of every page.
Archive for tag:
Digital-Home
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I like to mess around with computers. Every primary computer I've owned since my first 486 has been built by me (my previous computers, a 286 and a Commodore 128 were purchased). I also run a moderately complex network at my house which I realize I have never fully described anywhere. So, thought I'd tell you about it here. Why My first server was a linux box I had in our last apartment. It w...
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I wrote a small media player for my son. I wrote the original version in Silverlight, but quickly ran into a problem where no matter what I did, Silverlight wouldn't read the larger video files (encoding was fine, so I'm pretty sure this is a 1.1 alpha bug). Anyway, I rewrote it as a WPF app. The first time it ran, my wife realized I had forgotten something very important: the screensav...
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I used to have a very thick tome titled "MAPI, TAPI, SAPI" or some reordering of those acronyms. I recall that SAPI was a bit of a chore to use to get voice synthesis going.Well, I've been messing with .NET 3.5, and found a .NET 3.0 "System.Speech" namespace after looking at SAPI to read the timestamp on voice mail messages. It's a nice managed equivalent of SAPI. So...
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I've been kicking around the idea of writing a windows service that acts as an answering machine and integrates with the rest of my network (accessible from the kitchen PC, for example), but I found .NET TAPI information hard to come by. TAPI 3.0 isn't officially supported when accessed via managed code (and I found enough information to make me think that that is for good reason), so ....
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In a previous post, I mentioned that I had won an APC Netshelter server rack on eBay. I just put in a dedicated 20amp circuit to power the computers on this rack. So far, 20amps seems to be more than enough. If not, it's easy to run another as the rack is in the same room as the main panel.Here are two photos (click for larger versions) of the rack loaded with the current equipment:&nb...
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This was an interesting weekend.We had the AIS company picnic on Saturday, which was a lot of fun. I couldn't believe how many young kids (under 2) were there. My son love the ballons and whatnot. Unfortunately, he picked up a deer tick so we're off to the doctor today for that.Saturday night, I ripped open my PC (which really needs an upgrade once the server/infrastructure situation ca...
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I just won a close-to-mint condition APC ar2100blk 42u server rack on eBay. I need to pick it up in the next week or so from a person in Baltimore. I had been waiting some time now for a good black server rack with sides and doors to show up locally on eBay. Most of the good ones are out of Texas and California, and shipping 400 pounds up from there gets pretty expensive pretty quickly.Tha...
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Over the weekend, I seriously looked into what I could do to have a centralized media server in the house and a HTPC setup in the TV room. It turns out, it's a lot more difficult to get a good experience than you would think. Ideally I'd like a full solution that gives me:TV everywhere, including on-demand (currently have this with Comcast). Only viewing one channel at a time across the...
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This site has a pretty decent set of links to various internet radio streams. It's grouped by genre and also by state.The quality is hardly CD quality (or even regular broadcast quality), but it is very helpful for those of us who live in areas that for who-knows-what-reason don't get any clean radio signals.
