FORTUNE — Sal Khan, you can count Bill Gates as your newest fan. Gates is a voracious consumer of online education. This past spring a colleague at his small think tank, bgC3, e-mailed him about the nonprofitkhanacademy.org, a vast digital trove of free mini-lectures all narrated by Khan, an ebullient, articulate Harvard MBA and former hedge fund manager. Gates replied within minutes. “This guy is amazing,” he wrote. “It is awesome how much he has done with very little in the way of resources.” Gates and his 11-year-old son, Rory, began soaking up videos, from algebra to biology. Then, several weeks ago, at the Aspen Ideas Festival in front of 2,000 people, Gates gave the 33-year-old Khan a shout-out that any entrepreneur would kill for. Ruminating on what he called the “mind-blowing misallocation” of resources away from education, Gates touted the “unbelievable” 10- to 15-minute Khan Academy tutorials “I’ve been using with my kids.” With admiration and surprise, the world’s second-richest person noted that Khan “was a hedge fund guy making lots of money.” Now, Gates said, “I’d say we’ve moved about 160 IQ points from the hedge fund category to the teaching-many-people-in-a-leveraged-way category. It was a good day his wife let him quit his job.” Khan wasn’t even there — he learned of Gates’ praise through a YouTube video. “It was really cool,” Khan says.

Found this video online and had to share it.   It’s original and unique content like this that makes me nervous about losing net neutrality.   Nobody would have been able to be inspired by a video like this because they never would have seen it.

Just wanted to take the time to point out, and to compliment, the community at Hacker News (http://news.ycombinator.com).   The amount of quality content coming from this site is amazing, and despite the name, it is mostly geared towards web startups and programming related information.   For those not even interested in creating their own startup, it contains great, relevant business information from leaders in the field.

That being said, Hacker News community has recently come up with Hacker Monthly (http://www.hackermonthly.com/issues.html) which is a monthly PDF/e-zine (also available for print if you are feeling generous), highlighting some of the most relevant stories from the previous month.   This is great content, freely available, and deserves to be promoted.   Well done guys.

Just built a HTPC not too long ago.   Here are the specs if you are interested.

nMEDIAPC Black Aluminum HTPC Case
GIGABYTE HDMI Micro ATX AMD Motherboard
CORSAIR 400w Power Supply
AMD Athlon II Dual Core 3.1GHz 64W Processor
G.SKILL 4GB (2x2GB) DDR SDRAM 1600 Memory
Westeran Digital 1.5TB SATA Hard Drive (low power)
Logitech diNovo Mini Black Keyboard
Lite-On Black Blu-Ray 4X Player
Hauppage WinTV Hybrid TV Tuner w/ Antenna
Terk HDTV Amplified Antenna

Optional: Windows Home 7 Premium 64-bit (I had a Microsoft TechNet subscription already)

Once I built the machine, and loaded all the drivers, updated the BIOS, etc.   I setup the following apps:

Windows Media Center 7
Hulu Desktop
Boxee (Lots of great content here like Revision3, Fox, etc)
Media Browser (for a great looking interface for viewing content in Media Center)
Any DVD (for archiving my existing movie content to my HP EX470 Home Server)

Also, the following plug-ins allowed me to easily swap between my 3 main programs (Hulu, WMC7, Boxee)

Boxee WMC Plugin
Hulu Desktop WMC Plugin

All in all, my wife and I were not watching cable very much anymore, so this has been a great solution for us.   I’m a bit concerned with Comcast’s 250GB data cap, but with compression getting better and better, and being able to enjoy the over the air broadcasts, it hopefully will not be a concern.

With this setup we are able to get the best of all the wonder niche content on the web (Netflix, Hulu, Revision3, Music Videos on demand, etc) and also get broadcast television in beautiful HD content in any room in the house (thanks to Windows Media Center Extender/Xbox 360).

Hope this post helps you all as well.

p.s.   Still trying to find a plug-in for YouTube Leanback (youtube.com/leanback) which just launched.  If anyone finds one let me know.

Cool wedding video, especially if you like Passion Pit.

Lauren + JP from Matt Odom on Vimeo.

YouTube appears to have added a ‘Music’ landing page (http://www.youtube.com/music) to their site.   I’m not sure about everyone else, but I use YouTube, almost more than anything, for music videos.   Good move on their behalf, I’m almost surprised it took them this long.   They have the opportunity to be everything (and more) that people complain MTV isn’t anymore.

Netflix HD, Amazon VOD/HD, Hulu HD, YouTube 1080P/HD, etc…  this list could go on an on.

Consider some of the following facts:

“Standard definition 480i DVD movies are typically 5 to 8 mbps (megabits per second) MPEG-2″

“Blu-ray has a maximum bit-rate of 40 mbps while HD DVD offers a maximum of 28 mbps.  Over the air broadcasts can be up to 24 19.38 mbps.”

Source:  http://www.zdnet.com/blog/ou/dont-believe-the-low-bit-rate-hd-lie/959

Given the data demands of HD movie streaming, or any video streaming for that matter, and more and more content like this appearing online, why has Comcast not lifted their 250GB data cap?   They don’t even have a portion of the customer service portal which shows your current usage.  Further appalling, is they have varying data plans (up to 50MB/s) which still carry the cap.    Why?  As the public moves towards having more and more of their content readily available and online, it’s apparent Comcast is comfortable with forcing their customers to rent their overpriced, underpowered equipment for a ridiculous fee and continue to charge a premium price for increasingly outdated television.   The data cap is only a bureaucratic way for Comcast to force it’s customers into continuing to get video the old fashioned way (via cable TV).

There is a twitter account for Comcast (@ComcastCares) which I have tried polling for this but unfortunately have not gotten a response.

Sinjin Joseph has a great (short) post outlining various use cases for most types of non-relational databases (MongoDB, CouchDB, Amazon S3).

http://www.indiangeek.net/2010/07/20/summary-of-use-cases-for-non-relational-storage/

I have an old EX470 MediaSmart machine that I use for various purposes.  I use it for backing up my existing machines, I use it as a media center extender with my XBOX, a Subversion source code server, and today I setup SQL Server 2008 Express on this machine.

*Disclaimer* – I’m sure this is not approved or condoned by Microsoft for Windows Home Server owners, so do this at your own risk.  If you brick/break/fubar your machine, please do not email me about it.

Here are the steps I followed:

Step 1:

Remote desktop into your Windows Home Server machine.  “Start > Run > mstsc”.   From here enter your home server machine name (i.e. HOME-SERVER).  Once prompted, enter your username as “Administrator” and enter the root administrator password you selected when you setup your machine.

Step 2:

Download Microsoft Windows Installer 4.5 (if you have not previously done this) as it is required to install SQL Express 2008.   Here is the download link (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=5a58b56f-60b6-4412-95b9-54d056d6f9f4&displaylang=en).  I believe a reboot is required here.

Step 3:

Download SQLEXPR_x86_ENU.exe from this Microsoft download link (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=58ce885d-508b-45c8-9fd3-118edd8e6fff&displaylang=en).

Step 4:

Run the setup program, and under the “Installation” tab, select “New SQL Server stand-alone installation”.  Follow the steps required for the installation process.  I would  reboot after installing this as well.

Step 5:

Click Start > Programs > Microsoft SQL 2008 > Configuration Tools > Configuration Manager

Step 6:

Follow steps 1 – 9 here in order to enable remote connections as this will not be enabled by default.   Steps 10 and later will not work because SQL Express Management Studio cannot be installed on a Windows Server 2003 installation (to my knowledge).

Step 7:

On your home server, under control panel, select “Windows Firewall”.   Select the exceptions tab, and add a program exception for: c:\program files\microsoft sql server\mssql10.sqlexpress\mssql\binn\sqlservr.exe

Step 8:

On your desktop machine now, enter the following command into your command prompt:

C:\>SQLCMD -U sa -P <the-sa-password-you-set> -S YourHomeServerName\SQLEXPRESS,1122

(note: 1122 is the port # of the server.   This is the default, but you can see this changed from the TCP/IP protocol settings inside SQL Server configuration manager).

If this worked, you should be given a prompt such as “1>” to enter sql commands on that server.  Just enter “QUIT” once you have confirmed it worked.

Step #9:

Install Microsoft SQL Express 2008 Management Studio (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=08e52ac2-1d62-45f6-9a4a-4b76a8564a2b&displaylang=en).   When prompted for connection details, specify “YOUR-HOME-SERVER\SQLEXPRESS,1122″ (without quotes), pick SQL Server Authentication, and enter your “sa” credentials.   Note the 1122 in the location.  This not a well documented feature, but this is how you specify the port # for a connection.

I spent yesterday listening to talks from “Uncle Bob” Bob Martin, Jay Freeman, Jason Shah, and Chris Grove.   All the talks were very informative, with only one or two notable exceptions which were lacking in actual content.

Bob Martin spoke about dynamic languages and some of the history of typed vs. non-typed languages and the benefits of each.   Jay Freeman spoke about the politics involved in app store development, as well as fielded questions on some of the very impressive work he has done for the jailbroken phone community.   Jason spoke about how to integrate multimedia development on the Android platform, and Chris Grove spoke to us about strategies for cross-platform development.

All the information was incredibly useful, and well worth the $40 price of admission.   The “Tech in the Middle” organizers did a really great job at setting this whole thing up and I would definitely attend any future conferences they may setup as well.