Most home theater PC cases aim to make a computer look as much like a DVD player as possible. They typically lay on their sides like an old-school PC or a VCR and they hide most of the inputs and outputs on the back so that you don't get distracted by too many lights and other doohickeys when you're looking at your TV.

The Lian-Li Tyr X2000 computer case certainly hides away all the nasty bits on the back of the unit. But unlike its peers, the X2000 is a horizontal, tower case. It's still pretty sexy looking, but it's probably not going to fit on the any shelf on your TV stand.

The case has plenty of room for the media center components of your dreams though. You can slap in up to six SATA hard drives, and there's space for 8 PCI cards. Throw in a couple of dual-tuner cards, a zippy little CPU and a ton of storage and RAM and you could theoretically build a little monster capable of recording up to 16 TV shows at once. You know, if you can find 16 things worth watching during the summer.

[via Engadget]

Looking for a special case to house your home theater PC's hard drive, motherboard, video card, CPU, and TV tuners? High-end HTPC case maker Omaura is showing off a design concept for one of the strangest (and most attractive) media center PC cases we've seen in a while.

As you can see in the top image, the case looks more like a speaker or TV base than a computer case. You could easily place this case in front of your TV cart or under your wall-mounted HDTV and odds are nobody would even know what it was.

But when you open the case you can see that not only does it house all of your HTPC components, but it makes upgrading your PC a snap. The unfolding case gives you far more room to maneuver when you're trying to slap a new PCI card or RAM DIMM onto the motherboard.

It's not clear whether this particular HTPC will ever see the light of day, or what kind of price tag it would carry. But it's nice to drool dream, isn't it?

(S04E04) Wilson -- You're quite impressed with yourself right now, aren't you?

House -- Who wouldn't be?

After a brief baseball break, House returned with a pretty decent episode. Not only did we get to see a further fleshing out of the new characters, but also witnessed additional connection between the old and new team members. Plus, we found out that trying to find a job outside of Princeton-Plainsboro when you worked for House was not the best thing to do.

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You may recall that Carol Burnett filed a lawsuit against 20th Century Fox Television for using her "charwoman" character in the "Peterotica" episode of Family Guy. A parodic version of the animated cleaning woman from The Carol Burnett Show appeared in the first few seconds of the episode as a cleaning lady at a porn shop. You can watch the clip here.

Burnett claims the character was used without her permission, along with a snippet of the music from The Carol Burnett Show.

You folks might recall that a man running for Sheriff in Grant County, Wisconsin changed his name from "William Harold Fenrick" to "Andrew Jackson Griffith" so he could run under the name "Andy Griffith" and hopefully use the iconic name to win the election.

He didn't win.

He did, however, have a lawsuit filed against him by Andy Griffith, the actor who played Andy Taylor on the Andy Griffith Show. Recently, however, a judge dismissed the case, saying that Fenrick did not violate any copyright and that what he did was protected under the First Amendment. I'm not a fancy big city lawyer, so I can't say much about this.