It’s been awhile since I said the last third of my HTPC was “planned”. I can finally say it has been completed!

Firstly, my brother-in-law and I wired from my office down to my living room. It went from the wall in my office up to the attic, over to the back-right of the house, down to the basement crawlspace, then up to the floor of right behind my TV. Then I put in a 5 port switch, which I’m using to connect my Mac Mini (HTPC), Laptop (wired > wireless), and eventually Xbox 360.

I bought a used Dell Bluetooth Keyboard and Mouse combo (pics) on Anandtech for $35.50 shipped (goes for $89.00 new before shipping from Dell). It setup on OSX in about 2 minutes, and I was able to use it without problems from my couch ~15 feet away.

It works great, I’m surprised. Now that it’s all done, there’s only maintenance and improvements.

Wow, Sprint’s SERO plan is a great deal. I got the idea from Tom, who originally got a slick deal on a nice phone and a cheap monthly.

So I pursued the SERO plan for myself. I really could care less about the phone I use, and I’ve had enough gadgets in my pockets through high school and college to make me infertile for life, so I figured a cheap, low power emitting device was the way to go. I had originally decided to go with the free model phone from Sprint. After some more investigation, I changed my mind. I realized by paying $50 initially for a phone, I could make money on it in rebates, and that’s in fact what happened.

Here’s the skinny on my Sprint payments so far:
Signup for the Sprint SERO plan, including Vision (internets, lol), unlimited mobile to mobile in the Sprint network (big deal, I don’t know anyone on Sprint), unlimited nights and weekends (9PM on), 500 anytime minutes. $0 setup and $30 monthly.
$100 refundable “poor credit” deposit. Refundable after one year.
$50 for the Sprint LG Fusic LX550 Phone. Mixed reviews, but it’s a small flip phone with more features than I’d use.
-$200 rebate for the LG Fusic, found on Amazon. They say it has to be submitted with a new plan and 2 year contract, which it was. I just don’t have to pay $200 to buy it from them.
-$75 rebate from Kellogg’s, found on their box.
-$25 for saying someone referred me. When you sign up with Sprint if you say someone referred you within a month of signing up, then both you and the person who referred you get a $25 visa debit card (able to receive 12 referrals per year).

I was looking for a good deal on a cell phone, and this is about as good as it gets, I’d say. I don’t have any complaints about the service, or the phone yet.

Edit: BTW, Contact Me if you want to use me as a SERO referrer .

The last third of my HTPC project involves wiring up my living room. The first pass at that will occur this Thursday when my brother in law gets off of work to help me out. It will be the first time for both of us, so it should be fun…

It’s been over a year since I noted which Firefox plugins I used. I referred to that list from time to time, mostly for quick links when switching boxes. What follows is an updated list, for the same reason.

1. Adblock, still #1 in my book.
2. Session Saver, typically now I’ll leave my computer on or bookmark a page rather than use Session Saver. It seemed too buggy and laggy to be worth too much.
3. WebDeveloper, still a great web developing and debugging toolbar.
4. All in one Gestures, I gotta have my right-click left-click = back one page. I’m sure this plugin is capable of so much more, but I only use it for that one gesture.
5. Extended Statusbar, was too buggy and didn’t really offer any good information. It was replaced by a function of the Firebug extension.
6. Linkification, still handy to click a text-turned-link rather than copy and paste it into a new window.
7. GreaseMonkey, I never could find a good use for this plugin. Although there are many thousand user scripts, none really applied to my websurfing.
8. BugMeNot, of course the sites that I REALLY wanted from BugMeNot were either banned or not in their database. That really bugs me about BugMeNot…
9. New One: Firebug, the BEST web development, debugging and real-time editing plugin period. It even debugs AJAX generated content! Simply amazing.

I turned on my car yesterday, and it had a little trouble starting, then when it finally turned on the horn blared and wouldn’t turn off. Turning off the car, pressing the horn, pressing the “panic” button on the remote all didn’t turn the horn off. After about 3 minutes, the horn stopped sounding, as if the battery died.

Turning it on the next day yielded the same results, and it again stopped after 3 minutes.

Pat thought it might be the battery going bad, so he tested another battery, and sure enough the car started up without the blaring horn. So we bought a new battery at Costco for ~$50 and Pat installed it in about 30 minutes. I drove the car to work today, works great.

It’s perplexing that a car would have a mechanism that sounds the horn if there’s something wrong with the battery. Couldn’t it flash a message on the dash, or just not start the car? No, those wouldn’t be embarrassing enough…