This time last year I confessed to one hidden cost I hadn’t counted on in moving to a one-bedroom apartment from a studio: purchasing another TV. Well, I seem to be back at it again, contemplating the not-so-hidden costs of moving from a one-bedroom apartment to a two-bedroom townhouse. This time around, in addition to another TV/monitor, I’m thinking of what to use to “drive” it. What I mean is that I don’t have cable TV and don’t plan to, so I need some kind of media player/server on the three TVs for my music, podcasts, video-podcasts and DVDs. I’ve been toying with the idea of getting a PS3 for the living room and another mac mini for the other bedroom, but I’m not so sure if I’ll be happy with the PS3 playing networked media stored on the mac minis. Then I saw the following segment on the Tekzilla show about building a “desktop” hackintosh (9:30 into the episode), that would make for an awesome media player/server that would be much more flexible than a mac mini. hmmm….
Of course I need to get the paperwork through the over-loaded CA teacher-pension system before spending said moneys. Ack. Fingers tapping.
I was very excited about the possibility of building a Hackintosh media server using the plans discussed in the Tekzilla episode mentioned above. It’s been years since I’d built a PC and I often kick myself when I think about the beautiful see-thru blue lucite PC case I left in California when I moved to Florida. Then as I was researching the project I ran into this notice: “No IDE Components supported“
One of the things that I was looking forward to was reusing two IDE hard drives (and one big SATA drive) in this Hackintosh project. Damn. At this point I’m beginning to think that it might be time to retire the IDE drives as archive-drives and go the much cheaper PS3 media center route. Damn