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Last week, I had written about my Home Theater Setup and this is a continuation of that post.

6. Dell Inspiron Slim 537ST HTPC Contd…
On Black Friday, last month, I got lucky with a Bing promo that was advertising 25pc cashback on all Dell Home Office stuff and managed to pick up an Inspiron 537ST for about $350.

The specs are as follows

- Intel Core 2 Quad Q8200 (2.33GHz, 4MB)
- 4GB DDR2 SDRAM,800MHZ- 2X2GB DIMM
- ATI Radeon HD 4350 512MB
- 640GB Serial ATA 2 Hard Drive 7200RPM
- 16X DVD+/-RW Drive
- Integrated 5.1 Channel Audio

Not bad for the price paid huh? In fact, a quad core might be a little bit of an overkill for most media today but you never know what will be here in the next few years.

Here are a few pointers about the Inspiron that I think I should share with you. I had a hard time getting info on these things before I bought the machine.
- The form-factor of the Slim is about the same as an XBOX-360, a tad wider maybe but overall, fits really well in the entertainment center. The piano black is about the same finish as the PS3 and is highly recommended if the rest of your setup is in black. Check out this video to get an idea about the size.
- The ATI Radeon HD 4350 that this Dell ships with has an HDMI out and it can do 7.1 Audio via LPCM. Here is a great article that explains in detail LPCM Audio via HDMI.
- If you’re thinking a quad-core box would be too noisy for the living room, well you’re in for some great news; the thing is extremely quiet, way quieter than your PS3!
- Is it beefy enough? Can it do 1080p? Well, with a quad core, it could do 2160p if it had its way! Jokes aside, almost all of your media needs will be taken care of; including even video editing and some excellent HD video streaming over the network.

Price paid: $350

That is my Home theater setup for now. I still have a few things on my list to complete the setup:
- Harmony One Universal Remote
- A wireless keyboard with a trackball (Looking at the Dinovo Mini or the IOGear Mini Wireless Keyboard).
- A NAS to put all my media in a single place and RAID it preferably.

All in all, the entire setup has cost me around $3500 (excluding the camcorder) and I should say I’m really pleased with the performance. Not to forget, 1080p with 7.1 surround with 24p all the way.

Happy Holidays and have a great new year!

UPDATE: I have posted part 2 of this article here.

Here is how my Home Theater setup looks like right now.

Components
- Panasonic 50PZ800U THX-certified 50 inch Plasma Display.
- Pioneer 1019 AH-K Audio-Video Receiver.
- Sony Playstation 3 Game Console/Bluray Player.
- Dell Inspiron Slim 537ST Desktop Computer.
- AT&T U-Verse Cablebox/DVR.
- JBL Northridge EC35 Center Channel Speaker.
- JBL GS500 Front Floor Speakers.
- Onkyo HT540 Rear Surround Speakers.
- Polk Audio PSW-505 Sub-woofer.
- Canon Vixia HF100 HD Camcorder.

Click on the image to enlarge.

This is basically my budget HT setup so far. Since I’m as frugal as I’m an Audio/videophile, in addition to throwing some light on the technical details of each component, I shall elaborate on the bargains that I got as well.

1. The Television
- My first flat panel display was a 42″ Philips Plasma that I bought about 3 years ago. Even though it was a 1080i panel, I absolutely loved the picture (I’m making it sound so bad ). Last year, I finally gave in and decided to go for a 1080p display. After reading raving reviews about the latest and greatest Samsung LCD, I got one home and the very next minute, I started regretting the decision. The blacks were way off when you sat off-axis and the pixelation during fast-moving scenes was driving me nuts. I returned it within a week. After that, I did a couple of months worth of research (without a TV ) and after repeated visits to pretty much every Circuit City/Best Buy/Frys/ in Austin, I pulled the trigger on the Panasonic 50PZ800U. You can check out the CNet Reviews on this display and see why I bought it. It was the first display to be THX-certified and came in a close second to the Pioneer Kuro in terms of black-levels. I am extremely happy with the purchase.
Price Paid: $2200 including taxes.

2. The AV Receiver and Sub-woofer
- This is an interesting story. I bought this receiver about 2 weeks ago and I didn’t know I was getting one until I actually got one. We were at Best Buy to buy a Washer/Dryer set and they were running an offer in the Home Theater department that gave you 36months Interest-Free financing if you spent $1000 or more. We had already spent about $1200 on the W/D set so I was kinda annoyed that we were not getting the same deal as the HT guys. The sales lady told us that we could qualify for the offer if our bill showed at least one item from the HT department. So, we walked into the HT section without knowing what to buy. We looked at the Harmony remotes (on my list for over 2 yrs now ) but found out they were priced almost double. Then I stumbled upon another offer which said if I got a Pioneer receiver along with a Polk Subwoofer, there was a $150 discount on the total. The receiver and the subwoofer were priced pretty competitively (close to Amazon). I checked a few reviews on Amazon.com right there and most reviewers had nothing but great things to say. After a few minutes of ‘discussion’, I got the green light from the wife and within a few minutes, we were out of the door with a 7.1 channel HDMI AV receiver. I was wanting to get one for a long time but just hadn’t done enough research in that direction. Most of the research came after I had brought the thing home and fortunately, it is one of the best ones in the market right now.
Price paid: $600 + tax

3. Sony Playstation 3
I don’t have to talk much about the PS3 do I? Other than being a great gaming console, it is also a superb Bluray player. Even ordinary DVDs look magnificent, thanks to its wonderful upscaling capabilities. I have had the PS3 for a while now and the primary reason for getting one was just the BD player. I started playing games on it only recently and I must say, that’s working out great too It can do excellent Dolby and DTS and at the same time, some awesome 7.1 (Dolby TrueHD and DTS HD) via LPCM. As you can see, my current setup is only a 6.1 and I cannot wait to add another speaker to the mix to make it a true 7.1 configuration.
Price paid : $250 (It was $400 at that time, got it brand new on Craigslist for almost half the price. So, look around.)

4. The Speakers
- I have had my Onkyo system for over 5 years now and honestly, it was pretty much a ‘bachelor’ setup. I was raring to get rid of the system but just hadn’t found the time and energy ($) to get a better one. Last year, I got the JBL GS500s, used from Craigslist. You will be surprised if I tell you how much I paid for the speakers. I got the mammoth front floor ones for $100. Yes, both of them together for $100. After a few months, I added the center channel (EC35) which cost me about $75 (again, used from CL). It was in an almost-new shape and I just fell in love with the gold-plated connectors. The surrounds are from my previous Onkyo HTIB which I had purchased for $400, for the entire set that is (receiver + 6.1). I sold the receiver, the sub and the front speakers for $225. I was left with the surrounds and you could give them a current market value of maybe $50.

5. Canon Vixia HF100 HD Camcorder
Until last year, I was using a Sony Hi-8 DV Tape Camcorder to record most of my home videos. Almost all of the other stuff in the household had gone digital but for the camcorder. After a while, it just felt there was too much work involved in recording videos and then transferring them to a digital format before storing them to a digital medium (SD, HDD etc.). I had almost resigned from using it for over 3 years as I was getting back to stills via my Canon DSLR. Finally, I gave in to the temptation and got myself a 1080p HD-capable Canon. I wanted to future-proof my purchase for at least 4 to 5 years (if not more) and since the Panny supported reading media directly from an SD card, I wanted something that recorded to SD media.
Price Paid: $700 (I will exclude this from the total sum since this is not a mandatory item for an HT setup)

24p
The reason I included the camcorder in this setup was to highlight the fact that it can record in 24p Cinema mode and the Panny 50PZ800U can receive and display 24p signals. If you’re a video-enthusiast, this might be something that would fancy your interest. But wait, there’s more! The PS3 is also capable of playing back media recorded @ 24fps and so is the Pioneer 1019 AH-K AV Receiver. So, your entire setup pretty much can handle 24fps throughout, just like in the movies? Yes, it can! If you’re planning on taking the 24p route with your setup, this would be a configuration you might want to look at.

6. Dell Inspiron Slim 537ST HTPC
Now comes the HTPC, the driver that hosts and streams all of the media to the other components. Ever since my classic XBox started failing on playing HD content, I started toying with the idea of building an HTPC. Previously, I used to stream all of my content via the XBox or my PS3 (thru TVersity) and it worked really great. The only downside was that I had to keep two components ON at all times, the XBox and the desktop that the media resided on. And as I mentioned before, the newer skins and high-bandwidth video formats were a straight no-no for the aging XBox. There were very few choices available in the market for an OEM HTPC, even as of this writing. I wanted something that could handle 1080p video and beyond (it will be here in a year or two, I’m telling ya!), so it had to have a good GPU with an HD output that could deliver 7.1 audio to my receiver. I looked at the ASRock ION 330, the Acer AspireRevo and the newer Dell Zino HD. All of them used something on the lines of an Intel ATOM processor in conjunction with NVidia’s recent ION onboard GPUs and claimed to seamlessly do 1080p. I hadn’t looked at one first hand, so there was no way to tell if they really did. And if at all they do, I have a feeling that it is going to be borderline. Add something advanced like the BD Live and I am sure they will start crapping out. Most of them were selling for somewhere between $300 to $450.

To be contd…

This might come in as a big surprise to most of my blog readers. You might wonder, of all things, how can one stay cool, on a frikking IM client? After all, GTalk is nothing but another internet messaging tool like the rest of them out there (Yoohoo, Windows not-so-live etc.) right? Well, you might want to think again. GTalk is different and I’m going to teach you a few cool tricks on GTalk that could make you uber-cool from uber-boring in a jiffy! Ready? Let’s do this.

1. Pick a badass username

This is where all the coolness begins. You ain’t nothing in the G-world if you don’t have a sick username. Don’t pick boring names like reachme12345, emailtime90210 or fungirl2005. I personally knew fungirl2005. It wasn’t fun anymore creating an account every year!  Try something cooler. Something that tells everyone out there how awesome you are. I remember having IDs like LonerInAustin, TostitoLover and KittiesRock.  If you’re a guy, go with names like LifeIsABeach, DramaKing or LoveMahCouch. If you are a chica, something like HeartSugahDad, BootieMama or DonutGal would be the best choices. Never ever use your real name. Believe me, I have gotten into trouble many a times coz of that. I must also mention that zip codes are a straight no-no (makes it easier to locate you).

2. Update your first and last name

A lot of people somehow miss this very basic feature of GTalk. What happens then is, you end up displaying your username to the world and believe me, a lot of us have weird usernames (like the boring ones above). A friend of mine had a username  ’touch_dear’. Now that should get you popular with the ladies huh? His idea behind that ID was, he wanted people to keep in touch with him and also wanted to let them know that they were very dear to him or something like that; you get the drift. So, your first step should be to update your account information. Choose a name that sends a strong message out. I remember having google accounts with names like The Real MacGruber, Furious Loner, Burrito Lovah and Schitt Happins. You will not believe me if I tell you how many friends I have made using those names.

3. Get a cool profile picture

This is extremely important if you want all your friends to talk about you in the G-world. In fact, more important than your username or your first or last name. Like they say, a picture is worth a 1000 blah blah blahs. This is your true identity and you should choose a picture that tells everyone what a beautiful person you are, both inside and out. However, it is also important that it connects well with your username. A few ideas to help you pick one easily.

GUYS

GALS

4. Choose a cool status message/icon

If you never thought about this, now is your chance! Twitter made a fortune just by letting people tell other people what they did every minute of their ‘exciting’ lives. And there are a lot of people out there who are really interested in everything you do, right from what shaving cream you use to chop your beard to how many packs of Frito Lay’s you consume in a day. People who care about you more than you care about yourself. For starters, check out Gul Panag’s Twitter page. Now, I care about her and I seriously wanna know what she ate for lunch, if she drinks diet or regular coke, what is she planning to have for dinner, what does (not) she wear at night, what time does she wake up, how many times does she flush her toilet and a lot of other such important stuff. You might laugh at me if I tell you that the status message is the new status symbol. But trust me since I’m always right. Another one of my fav five Twitterers is Mallika Sherawat. Her account name stands at MallikaLA. Why the LA? She opened her Twitter account in LA dummy! One of the tweets from the sweet seductress was “yes, sir! M indeed veg and proud of it! how do u think I maintain this body figure?“. Now how would I know if she was a vegetarian or not if it were not for her status message? And how would I know whether that was indeed the real reason behind her ‘body figure’ ? So, respect the status. Everybody wants to know what kinda underwear you’re wearing right now. And don’t forget to set it to ‘Busy’ with the red ‘talk to my hand‘ icon. People can be in their underwear and still be busy!

5. Always ‘leave the conversation’

Oh ho ho. I just can’t wait to reveal this G-secret to you. This neat trick can catapult your life in tha G-world overnight. You can thank me later for giving you such valuable piece of advice. When I was new to GTalk, I was like you; naive, innocent and gullible. Then, one fine day, I stumbled upon this cool trick that, all of a sudden, made me look like Antonio Banderas. Eager to know how I did it? Here it goes.

Say you’re talking to a contact on your G-list. He/she types something at you. You type back. And then, immediately, you hit the ‘X’ button on the top. Yes, you close the window. GTalk has this cool little feature that, whenever someone closes their chat window, tells the other person that ‘XYZ has left the conversation‘. That XYZ is you. It is like walking out of a meeting room full of people, without giving two hoots about the rest. Feel it? Feel the energy, the power now? It’s like telling the other person, ‘I have said what I had to, you can go take a hike now.‘  Try it out and let me know the results. You will be a changed man (alright, woman too), I promise.

There are a lot more tricks that I can teach you, however, for that you will need to be at least moderately good at these five. I have put endless hours behind GTalk and it has taken me years to master these techniques. With a lot of practice and hard work, I’m confident that you will be as good as me someday. If you need help with any of the above tricks, please do not hesitate to contact me at LonerInAustin[AT]yahoo.com.

It has been a long long time since I have posted anything substantial. My last post that was not a ‘copy-paste’ was on April 12th where I went on and on about my new Time Warner cable connection! For my next post, I did want to write something more interesting than a stupid cable connection who nobody cared about;  just that the Gods of Procrastination had set their eyes on me for a while now. Before you ask, I do have a long list of excuses for not blogging, ready for you. The long hiatus has partly been due to the recently concluded elections in India, which I had been closely following (unlike the previous ones) and was lucky enough to be a part of too^ (^=opens in a new window). We ran the 100 Thousand campaign for over a month and came out mighty victorious. A few other things kept us ‘busy’ too. We joined a fitness bootcamp at work which was whooping our asses big time, 3-times a week that is. Here is our trainer, Crystal’s blog^  and you can see for yourself what kinda deal we got ourselves into. It has been nothing short of terrific (read terrifying) though. Both myself and K have shed a couple percent off our BMIs. More so K, since I kinda look pretty much the same, no matter how many Tabatas^ I do.

Well, what other lame excuses do I have? Oh yeah, I got a little occupied with my MCTS^ prep as well. I gave my first exam^ on April 25th and thankfully, passed. I still have the second exam, 70-562^ pending, to get the actual certification. I’m not sure when I will finally be prepared for the second one since I have already rescheduled the exam twice by now. There has been a lot of stuff going on at work too. We sent out a major release for www.joe.com^ last month and then I started work on www.lennar.com^.  If we did some cool LINQ on Joe, we got to do tons of nifty jQuery and AJAX on Lennar. There were a lot of painpoints in the project, while being fun and pleasure at the same time. You know the kind when you get whopped by someone and then get to go for a shiatsu massage?   The entire credit for that would go to my huge learning curve with Javascript in general.

A trip to good ole Dallas

To add to all the fun and frolic I bored you with above, I also managed to get a day off from work last week. Yes, a day off! The last time I took a day off was in October of 08. A few more months and K would have buried me alive. For a change, this time I was actually looking forward to my ‘vacation day’. As most of you know, we live in a country called Texas and the country happens to be so huge that, it sort of becomes mandatory to board a flight to visit any place in the neighboring country (United States). However, this time we did not want to mess with all the visa formalities etc. to go to the US, so we decided to stick to Texas and zeroed in on Dallas. Dallas is a 3.5 hour drive from Austin. The drive is not that popular among travel folks nor is the city of Dallas a great tourist destination. Having said that, we still wanted to explore the area and have a good, relaxing time. And relax we did.

We started our trip on Friday evening and reached Dallas by 9.30 or so. Most dining options were out since it was ‘too late’ to eat per American norms! We somehow found an Indian restaurant^ and hurriedly ordered whatever was available at that time. To say the least, it wasn’t one of the best Indian culinary experiences we have had so far (Yelp 1-starrer coming soon).  After finishing our dinner, we headed to our hotel all ready to crash, thanks to a loong Friday filled with craploads of work, a bootcamp and a 4 hour drive. Fortunately, our hotel experience was nowhere close to our Indian meal experience. Just the previous night, we somehow got a pretty sweet deal for The Adolphus^ (pic below).

I must admit, this has been one of the best hotels I have checked into in the US and highly recommend it if you’re in or around Dallas. The next morning, after getting a good night’s rest and waking up all refreshed, we decided to venture out, leaving behind our car though. The Adolphus is located right in the heart of Dallas’ downtown and if you’re in Dallas, there are tons of things you can do in the downtown. Our first stop was The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey^. I highly prescribe all Dallas visitors to stop by this modern marvel. The museum brings in front of your eyes, the entire proceedings of the fateful day that JFK was assassinated. A good three hours were spent at the museum. Then, we started to stroll around the ‘grid^’ checking out the wonderful buildings surrounding the museum. A few pictures below for your viewing pleasure.

Sixth Floor Museum on the left. You can see the 6th floor window from where JFK was shot at. The second pic shows where JFK’s car was (right where the crowd is standing) when the shots were fired.

After wandering around for a good six hours, it was time to get out of the Downtown and explore the burbs. At the same time, I was in no mood to get the car out. We said ‘heck, we gotta experience some American public transport now!’. We took an all-day premium pass at a DART kiosk and off we were within 5 minutes, on-board a rail.

We roamed all over the town changing trains and buses, visiting malls, eating and taking naps. Yes, K took a nap at The Galleria^! At about 7 or so, we ended up being dog-tired and thought it was a much saner option to go back to the hotel than to miss our last train and then get mugged. We had made plans to catch a movie at the Angelika^ but, before that, we wanted to hog on some Indian food; but we were looking for something better than the previous night’s onslaught. You might wonder why most Indians are hell bent upon eating Indian food everywhere they go. There is a reason behind that. You see, in America, the food served at almost every Indian restaurant is, ummm, you know, not that Indian. I’m not kidding. Indian restaurants try too hard to Americanize Indian food and in the process, forget the whole Indian deal there is to Indian food. So every Indian is on a self-imposed quest to find that one Indian restaurant you can eat at and say ‘Mmmm.’ Yours truly has been on a similar quest since 2001.

After driving for a good 30 minutes, we reached a place called Chettinad Palace^ in Plano. It was not a fancy place by any stretch of the imagination. But at the same time, we felt a tad optimistic as we had heard good things about it (and we were hungry too). The food arrived in 15 minutes and I must say, we were quite impressed. It was still not the quintessential Indian-American restaurant we were looking for. Ohh well, something to strive for in life you see. We ate to our heart’s content and headed back to the hotel since the last movie at Angelika had started like 45 minutes ago. No regrets though. The food was awesome, the day was pretty uneventful. Mission accomplished.

The next morning, we went back to some of the places that we had visited the previous day in Downtown, to do some picture-clicking. Why again you ask? Well, the first time around, we forgot to put the batteries in our camera. So no pictures!!! This time, we were ready with the batteries and managed to take some good pix. All the above pix were taken on the second day, just in case you haven’t figured it out by now. After an hour’s worth of pix, we headed back to the hotel, checked out and were ready to hit the burbs again. This was never planned to be an action-packed trip Just a good, relaxing time is all we wanted to have. We were going to Plano again not coz we had started missing Chettinad Palace already but to meet some family friends. They had invited us over when they visited Austin last time and it had been more than two years since then. I told you, Texas was a big country after all!  We went to their place, ate some home-cooked Indian food and chit-chatted for a solid two hours. Needless to say, there weren’t too many things left to do for the day. At around 4PM, we were ready to head back to Austin. K had started to miss Dash and Dash is a handful when left alone for more than 4 hours. It had been more than 48 hours this time.

The drive back to Austin, even though on a boring Interstate^, was nothing short of exciting. There were thunderstorms, rainbows, sunshine and a lot of construction! K clicked some random pictures on the way which eventually turned out to be pretty darn beautiful. Well to appreciate the beauty on some of them, you will have to look past Dash’s saliva on the glass window.

By 7PM Sunday, we were back in Austin. We picked up Dash on our way. He wasn’t too excited to see his parents. Maybe it was more fun at the doggie party he had with his siblings, mom and aunt over the weekend. By the time we reached home and he got to see his toys, he was back to normal; ready to cuddle on the couch. The following day, which happened to be the official ‘vacation day’, was reserved for movies and detoxing (Indian food does that to you). Aah, this is my version of a perfect vacation. I do proudly accept that I’m boring

This is one of the best articles I have read in recent times. Spare a few minutes and read through the entire thing. You’ll know what I’m talking about.

Enjoy