Well in FugitiveThought News, Steve and I have decided to give the site a face lift. We’ll probably be working on that this weekend. I’ve been reallllly busy recently with my 23 credits worth of classes (yes, I am a psycho), so forgive me for not having updated anything recently (or don’t forgive me…. I really don’t care :).

Yea, so I had this spare monitor just sort of sitting here taking up space on my desk. We also have an ancient TV (from the 80’s) that doesn’t have the ability to play movies or anything. Soooo, being a dork I decided I needed a solution to both problems. I set up the monitor on top of the TV and ran the VGA cable to the top of our microwave which is the perfect spot to set my laptop, so we can play movies through it now. The only trick to this is that the laptop doesn’t have a large enough hard drive for all of the movies I wanted to collect, so I have to download them to my desktop’s 250 gig HD (I’m going to get another 250 soon too I think). So the question of the day was “how do I get movies from the desktop to the laptop to play without much hassle…..?”. And the solution? Well read on!

My first thought was to run an FTP server on the desktop (it’s a windows box). That meant I would have to download each movie individually whenever I wanted to watch it, which was a bit annoying. So basically what I decided I needed something to stream movies from the desktop to the laptop. To the rescue comes VideoLAN! It works great (I watched three movies with it yesterday). You basically open the movie up on the desktop an tell it to stream to a specific port, open the program up on the laptop and tell it to stream from that computer at that port, and voila, it works! Every now and then it’ll get a bit laggy, but it’s pretty good and I’m going to play with my router a bit to fix that.

I’ll update again in a couple days with more new and amazing stuff. Until then, peace out and hack on!