smackfoo.com | I find your lack of faith disturbing.

After a long stint in a closet collecting dust I’ve finally found a use for my aging xbox.

It all started earlier today when I was crashing around in a pre-caffeine state and heard a rather nasty crunch. The thought process was pretty much as follows:

• Where’s my other sock gone? .. *crunch* ..
• Hmm.. where the hell is that damn sock.. *grunt*
• .. plastic? where the hell did all that plastic come from?
• Ooh, excellent found that darn sock..
• *brews coffee*
• *pours coffee*
• *starts to drink coffee*
• *spuuurt* oh shit.. what happened to the remote?

So yes.. after discovering that I had trashed the remote for my small media player it occurred to me that suddenly not being able to play media over the network was a really, really bad thing. Priced up a replacement and discovered it was cheaper to ‘chip’ my old xbox and re-deploy it as a media centre. Thus I have ordered an Xecuter 2.6CE with external switch panel along with the Xapt3r solderless adapter.

If you’re wondering why the hell I hadn’t got around to that yet — I’m a server geek, which means I spend more time pimping out servers than game consoles. :)

The upside is that I can now actually make use of it over and above the odd gaming session — bonus.

This will be one of I hope a few in-depth looks at some of the great applications included in
Novell Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop.
First up, we have
banshee, an open source answer to Apple’s
iTunes media player.

Banshee is a
helix powered1 media player that already boasts many features.
helix is an open source media engine and […]

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