The Impellizzeri Family

It has been very busy at the old Impellizzeri house hold. Joseph has had 3 rounds of Christmas so far and one more to go this weekend. All is doing well.

So it has been a few months and Joseph is now 6 months old. He is doing great. We just moved into a new house…left our 109 year old Germantown camelback shotgun to a 1950 brick ranch north-east of the city.

So with the new place, I decided it was time to setup the media center a little differently. I am using my PS3 as the “set top box”. It is connected with HDMI to the Onkyo. The sound is sent out to a pair of Klipsch Synergy F2. The video is sent to a Mitsubishi 65″ DLP projection TV via HDMI off the Onkyo.

The media server is my old 17″ MacBook Pro with a couple of TB external drives runs iTunes and iPhoto. I had to buy a $15 program called MediaLink for the Mac. This basically adds uPNP to the machine and allows the PS3 to see it on the network and stream music, videos, pictures from iTunes, iPhoto or your own home grown folder structure. It transcodes the videos on the fly to work with the PS3. The quality is excellent. I don’t have any Ethernet run to the living room so I am doing the whole thing over wi-fi. It has been working so well, that I see no advantage to running a cable since there is no data stored. The PS3 is controlled with the PlayStation Bluetooth remote (the dogs don’t get in the way of this one).

I also have an AppleTV hooked in so we can do the iTunes movie rentals and if you want to play Tiger Woods on the PS3, I can still listen to my music. It is kind of the backup media gateway that does about 80% of what the PS3 will do.

We do not have cable or satellite service. I have a Samsung OTA HDTV tuner that I got a while back with a set of Phillips “rabbit ear’s”. The Mitsu has a built in tuner but it is not as nice or as powerful/fast. It changes channels a lot faster than the Mitsubishi and has a nice channel guide. The house came with a huge aerial TV antenna mounted in the attic. As soon as I can find the cable, I am going to tap into that. I should pick up stations from as far away as Indianapolis.

This setup also requires an Internet connection. At the old place, I was connected via WiMAX to our office and had about 12mb x 12mb service. The new place is out of range of our current footprint so I had to go with a cable modem. Paying the competition but residential internet is sort of a commodity these days. So now I have 20mb x 1.5mb. The download speeds are nice but not really that much different than the 12 x 12 service (our network was just that much cleaner) but the upload speeds of the cable modem are taking a bit to get used to. Either way the cable company is still getting paid…got to hand it to them on their business model.

I figured that with the setup, there is no real need to have a computer hooked to the TV. We both have our laptops….if i do need one for a specical occasion, I already have the DVI to HDMI cable that will just plug in the front panel of both the TV and the Onkyo.

I am eventually going to hook my old Onkyo into the secondary source output and get music into the kitchen and back yard. I can output two sources, either the same or different (Watching a movie in the front room on the PS3 and have the Apple TV playing music in the back yard. I have all the cables I need, just need a few hours to pull it all together.

Well off to enjoy! Talk to you soon.

Today Joseph is 3 weeks old. It has been one heck of an adventure that is forsure.

Impellizzeri Baby Site

Here are some shots from Thanksgiving 2009 up in Columbia City, IN.  Laura’s family also threw Joseph a baby shower after dinner.  It was a great time by all.

Back in late 1978, my Grandfather was running a small neighborhood grocery store in Old Louisville at 4th and Gaulbert.  Below is an article that I scanned in from The Messenger, talking about the closing of the store because of Urban Renewal among other things.  This is a nice piece of family history.

I remember going down to the store as a kid.  The wooden floors, high ceilings, the one little spin rack with toys and trinkits, the meat cutting area in the back.  I wish there were more but time has suppressed or deleted the rest of them…I was 6 years old at the time also.

I have changed the site once again.  The new setup will allow me to run the site much more efficiently.  I will continue to tweak and tune and make the thing work.