First I purchased a first generation Zune Home AV Kit and a Scoshe USB12 Car Charger. The Zune kit from Buy.com was only $24.99 plus $6 for the USB charging adapter. This was much cheaper than the second generation docking station and comes with a remote. I thought I would take the Zune dock apart and figure out a way to mount it, but after getting the dock apart I realized that the board that Zune plugs into is just about the same size as the dock so there was not much of a point in pulling it apart.

Next I needed a way to mount the dock in my car. I wanted to be able to see the Zune screen so I found a spot over top left drink holder. I chopped up a old car dock from my Dell music player to fit into the drink holder used a hot glue gun to glue the dock to the rubber insert. Next I ran the USB cable under the dash into a add-on circuit that I wired into my fuse box. I ran the 1/8″ stereo plug under the dash into the back of the stereo.

If you have a 1/8″ input into your car stereo and are looking for a way to dock your Zune this is a great option in my opinion. I have yet to see a FM Car Adapter work all that well, and with the Zune headphone jack on the bottom, it makes it difficult to see the Zune screen while it is plugged in.

I just had enough of the horrible Comcast DVR that I finally went out and orders a Tivo HD. I have to say it was a great buy, sure I had to buy the hardware, and there is a monthly service cost, but as the math worked out it was not much more per month than the DVR from Comcast. And it works, I can transfer un-encrypted shows from the Tivo HD to my computer using TivoToGo, I have yet to miss a show, get it cut off, have it reboot, or have the device be unresponsive to remote commands (all features of the Comcast DVR).

It did take a few days to get the CableCards working correctly, but Comcast was great and helped get it fixed pretty quickly. It turns out the Motorola dual-tuner card does not play nice, so we had to go with two single tuner cards. Not a big deal Comcast did not charge me for either card. Btw, I know I have been slamming Comcast's DVR, but their customer service is great, they just need better hardware solutions, or buy Tivo.

A more recent upgrade was my purchase of a HP MediaSmart – Windows Home Server. I have had NAS for the last couple of years but had been wanting what WHS was offering since I heard about in internal beta at Microsoft. My first NAS was a old white-box computer I purchased for $60 from my last company, I installed Window 2k3 put 3 120 GB hard drives in a RAID-5 configuration and things were good. Of course things were also complicated, I was administrating a server, technically not a big issue for me but still not the thing I want to be dealing with at home. Next I decided to go with a Buffalo Technology LinkStation 500 GB NAS. I attached two additional 500 GB USB drives and life was good, for awhile. The LinkStation solution worked pretty well, the things I did not like about it was that I was maxed out on hard drive space, and I did not feel all that comfortable with the weekly backups between the LinkStation and the USB drives.

I could have built my own Windows Home Server, but decided that based on the price of the HP MediaSmart Server it would be worth it to have someone to call if it fails. I ordered the 500 GB HP server from Buy.com surprisingly they had some in stock. Currently I have two 500 GB drives in the installed within the server and two 500 GB USB drives attached, that gives me 1.82 TB, with 2 internal drive slots, two USB connections and a eSATA connection available. How I configured my server seems better left to another post.