If you’ve ever spent any time with electronics components – and by components I mean “capacitors”, not…

If you’ve ever spent any time with electronics components – and by components I mean “capacitors”, not “motherboards” – you know how heavily color is used as an identification tool.  It’s awesome to see an entirely non-functional interpretation of the form and color of those components.  We all know there’s beauty in tech, this shines a different light on it.

http://www.leonardoulian.it/i_pages/tech_mandala/mandala_02.html

I’ve had a few really memorable experiences with reading aloud. One was on a road trip with a friend where we had no…

I’ve had a few really memorable experiences with reading aloud. One was on a road trip with a friend where we had no music, so I read Ender’s Game while he drove. Another has been reading Neuromancer to my infant daughter. In both cases these were books that I’d read many times, and having the chance to read them aloud really changed how I thought about them; Books I thought I knew through and through.

https://www.google.com/producer/editions/CAow4NMT/good_lite/CAIiEMDtArC6NGK4J-JhlYTbJ68qFggEKg4IACoGCAow4NMTMKDDAjDTtgQ/whats_gained_by_reading_aloud

I live in a New York City apartment and recently had a baby, which means that over the last 6 months or so I’ve been…

I live in a New York City apartment and recently had a baby, which means that over the last 6 months or so I’ve been aggressively harvesting usable space. One of the most useful things I’ve done it’s rip/encode two decades’ worth of digital-media-on-physical-objects and store the discs offsite.

I’ve been using a Boxee Box to play my music and movies, but it was bricked by a firmware push. I picked up a Roku box to try in the meantime, but have been having a rough go of it finding the right way to play either basic rips (which Plex doesn’t recognize) or various encodings without having to live-transcode (which my dual-core Atom media machine can almost but not quite do fast enough).

Any suggestions on the best way to get a Roku box to play local network media that isn’t ”buy a new computer that can transcode fast enough”?