Tech Crocs for Christmas
December 25th, 2008One of the many wonderful presents (thanks Mom, Dad, brothers, sister) I got this Christmas was a pair of Virginia Tech branded “Mammoth” Crocs from my Dad. I have to say… I’ve been skeptical about Crocs, but not only are these things warm and comfy, but they show my Hokie pride as well. 
Ripped DVDs + Media Center, Better with Cover Art
December 25th, 2008Over the past few months I have really gotten into ripping DVDs to my computer in full quality (without re-compressing the video), so that I could play them in Media Center just as though I had put in the physical disk. (I learned how to do that from a blog post on a Microsoft student site.) Since each disk contains about 7.2GB of data, this did require getting a little more hard drive space. Since I started I have ripped about 250 DVDs, but I had only taken the time to manually get the cover art for the first few that I ripped. Getting coverart for the DVDs to show up in Media Center required going to Amazon.com, searching for the DVD, clicking through to the large picture of the box cover, saving that image, cropping it, and moving it to the DVD folder and naming it “folder.jpg”. That was more mindless work than I wanted to put up with, so I did a little research.
Here’s a quick jump forward to the final product:
About FRI
December 3rd, 2008FRI is a ROM manager that I have worked on in my spare time since Summer 2007. FRI’s goal is to simplify the execution of ROM images by bringing all of the use’s ROMs of game cartridges into one place, making it easy for the user to find a specific or new ROM to play, and simplify the selection of the correct emulator for any given ROM.
Here is a screenshot of the FRI version 1.8.0.0 main window with no search filters applied.
![fri 1[4]](http://mypieceoftheinter.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/fri141.png "fri 1[4]")