Larry Templeton
(REVISED Jan 2010)
At the April 2009 SPAUG meeting, member Larry Templeton described how he built his own Home Theater PC.
Bill Young really laid the groundwork for tonight's talk a couple of month's ago when he made a presentation to the group about how to build a standard desktop for the PC so I'm not going to go into the nuts and bolts of it, but I do want to talk how they work, how they fit into a home entertainment system and the parts that you might want to procure if you are going to build one.
What can an HTPC provide?
What can an HTPC provide?
- Record /store/ replay off-air/cable TV shows, DVDs, CDs, ipod, MP3s, etc.
- From the internet, download /store /play YouTube, Hulu, Netflix, TV shows, movies (amazing amount of content now available)
- Edit video, burn DVDs, CDs, load iPod, etc.
- Any other PC function such as surf the internet, play games, etc.
- Watch off-air, cable & satellite TV
- Get rid of all your old CDs, DVDs, etc.
Most of us love looking at photos of wild animals, but few of us can afford the expense of a safari to the places where they live in order to take the pictures ourselves. But there is another option available to us. Our local zoo. On June 19, 2009 Bogen Imaging presented a webinar with Julie Larsen Maher, the head photographer for the Wildlife Conservation Society which oversees the major zoos in New York City. This webinar, which might be titled "Safari on a Budget" was replayed at the July DISIG meeting. For those who were unable to see it, I have compiled a list of the many tips and tricks which Julie described along with a few of her superb photos. If you want to see the entire one hour webinar, you can visit the 
While poring over aerial photos of a coastal valley in southern Peru, I noticed the fuzzy images of several large, complex, grid-planned sites in a virtually unknown region. Visiting the sites, it was easy to see that the architecture was complicated, but difficult to understand the layout from the ground. Some aspects of the plan and walls suggested that the sites might have been built by the Wari, a pre-Inka expansive state dating to around AD 500 to 1000, but a millennium or so of debris flows from the valley walls and a layer of volcanic ash from AD 1600 cover the surface, hiding the artifacts that would normally help to date the sites. Understanding the architecture will be key to guiding excavations in three of these sites this summer, and to accurately mapping them using a sophisticated GPS and laser rangefinder system.
