That looks awesome, but I can’t help noticing that windows taskbar. He probably would have been better off with a mac mini off eBay. Save space and energy, and run a nice Linux distro with an iPhone clone, if it existed. Or better yet, as you stated inthe post, XBMC. Would they be able to bring up their recipes on xbmc though?

Why not a simple BeagleBoard? It’s almost exactly what’s powering the iPhone anyway. It has a decent GPU and can drive 720p out of its DVI/HDMI port.

win7, the picture awefully looks like an old XP Geezer to me. :s

hmmm, that last paragraph has got me intrigued. i actually found an old computer on the street simply by chance about a week after i decided i was going to build a low-end HTPC. it was an insiron 2200 that i immediately upgraded to 120GB HD, 512MB of RAM, a slightly better video card (its only legacy PCI but plays some games nicely) with wifi & bluetooth cards. everything seems to run great, except that online streaming media makes it choke. hulu, zinc TV, and the like skip and sputter just below the watchability line.

can anyone reccomend a linux release that might help?

that definitely looks like windows xp, not windows 7.

derwin RAM is usually your problem there, with the crap performance on hulu & such. i dropped one 512 stick and a 160gb hd in a laptop that came with a 1.3ghz celeron and probably 256mb ram. then hulu didnt suck. i was going to max it out to 1gb but it wasnt my laptop so.. what was the cpu speed on what you’re workin with

@jeditalian, it came with a 2Ghz Celeron processor but i took a 2.4Ghz P4 out of another machine. it’s very fast. i put one 512 card in, then i considered bumping it to a gig but i’ve heard that video cards / RAM for some reason aren’t to blame for hulu’s poor performance but Flash and the memory taken up by their resident web browsers (firefox). i’m going to try a gig and possibly linux to see what that does for the performance.

A speech interface might be better than a touch interface, especially in the kitchen.

derwin flash video like hulu is pretty cpu/gpu intensive since is all software controlled. My main computer, with which I do everything including VPN/media server, pre 2005 gaming (got a 360), and htpc is the one that I will constantly mention on here because I love her so much. P3 733MHz coppermine with nvidia geforce 4 64MB and a DVD burner (lol) and ~800 MB RAM. I use amit talkin’s XPSP3 2600 build and will never bury that machine. Everyday I work on machines that are 8 times the power that run at half the speed and just kinda smile at that little box that won’t die lol.

As per hulu related tweaks, if you are running XP I would highly recommend TCP optimizer at speedguide.net and/or their post SP2 concurrent connections patch. Again FF’s about:config concurrent connections tweaking are a good idea and there are several guides ala professor google to help ya in that area. I had a similar experience with a laptop I built/fixed for my mom that wouldn’t play hulu smoothly and embarassed me a bit. Laptops are a whole ‘nother ball o wax though :) Best of luck. I know it probably doesn’t help IRL but I still disable any serial, parallel, etc ports I can in BIOS and Win to regain DMA/IRQ channels. This harkens back from my win 95 MIDI days tho so it probably doesn’t apply anymore but like lucky, stinky sweatsocks I still do it on my machines.

yeah, i think the downside is dirty fingers.

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@Derek I love the speech idea. I’ve been working with ULTRA HAL Assistant getting it to pull up internets and search and start apps, etc. It is like any TTS kind of deal, dumb at first, but with training it gets pretty good. It would work pretty well with this project it seems like and here I was trying to gooch down the touch screen $ somehow lol.
Good thinking Derek

@derwin, I have an old laptop from 2004 with a 2ghz cpu and about 700mb of ram,(the video card uses some of the system ram). I too had a problem playing youtube and hulu videos smoothly. One thing I noticed is that in firefox videos would stutter a bit, but on Chrome it would play perfectly. I’m not a big fan of Chrome, but it’s become very useful for playing flash videos on my old laptop.

Oh boy, good idea but I don’t like the iPhone style too much, it can be better (my own opinion). In the future releases will be great if they add a read and speak support :)

I’d like to see a little saran dispenser above the monitor so before you start cooking you pull a fresh sheet over the display, and when you’re done rip it off and throw it away, protecting that expensive touchscreen from raw chicken juice and coffee grounds.

I also second the Ubuntu NBR, or another other flavor (eeebuntu, edubuntu) or maybe even Moblin.

I’ve been reading a few posts and i’m adding your blog to my rss reader , thanks !