1TB of storage at home, nice!

Shortly after the new year began, I started converting all of my DVDs (and even some old VHS tapes!) into MP4 format with the goal being immediate access to my entire video library on any TiVo in the house using tools like pyTivo or streambaby. About two weeks into the project it became readily apparent that my 250gb Buffalo Linkstation NAS wasn’t going to be enough to hold all of the encoded video so I started shopping around for a larger unit.

I’ve been very happy with my Linkstation … it’s been very reliable and there’s a large community of enthusiasts over at NAS Central writing custom firmware and hacks for these boxes. So naturally I started looking at Buffalo’s more current NAS offerings along with other devices like hp’s MediaVault. Eventually I decided I wasn’t quite ready to pay extra for the reduced capacity (but increased reliability) of a RAID-enabled NAS when I could get more raw storage space for my money instead.

After a lot of back-and-forth, I decided on the Buffalo Linkstation Live LS-CHL. This stylish little black box packs a mini Linux server with a 1TB (yeah, terabyte!) drive into a package smaller than my 500gb WD MyDVR Expander. Like my current Linkstation it requires no software on the client side so it works seamlessly with Windows, Macintosh, and Linux. Just plug it into your network (oh yeah, it supports gigabit transfer speeds), configure it through your browser, map it as a shared drive and you’re ready to go.

The box does have a lot of features I won’t use but other people might:

  • I don’t need the USB print server because my Epson AcuLaser CX11NF is a network-attached multi-function laser printer/scanner/copier (the built-in print server on the Linkstation only supports printing anyway, not network scanning).
  • I don’t need the Web Access feature because I have my own web server which can access the Linkstation via a normal SMB share.
  • I don’t have any Macs in the house, so I don’t need the Time Machine service.
  • I don’t have any DLNA-certified devices in my home theater setup (and I use the utilities mentioned earlier in this post to send video to my TiVos).
  • I backup to Amazon’s S3 service in the cloud via JungleDisk, so I won’t use the Memeo backup software that comes with it.

It does have some cool features I like though, like the built-in Bittorrent client and e-mail alerts. It has a USB 2.0 port on the back for attaching another external drive for backups or expanding capacity (you can also use it to download photos directly from a digital camera, but that’s another feature I’ll never use since the NAS is in a closet and not on my desk). Finally, if you only need it running when the PCs in your house are running, you can have it power down when it’s not being used (but that does require installing some proprietary software from Buffalo).

One feature I could not get to work is the one that says “iTunes automatically makes the LinkStation available as a content source in your iTunes software.” I copied my iTunes folder to the share and enabled the Linkstation’s media server. I could then see the Linkstation as a “shared library” in iTunes, but it was empty. I couldn’t find anything in the documentation or on Buffalo’s support site on how this is supposed to work. I just gave up … my library is on my PC for easy (local) syncing with my iPod and I back it up to the Linkstation manually.

Over the weekend I copied all of my encoded video, my entire music library, and all of my photos from my PC and the old NAS to the new one … 555gb total! So I’ve got just under 400gb left on the NAS plus about 220gb remaining on the old NAS now that all of the video and music has been moved over. That remaining 600gb should last me a while …

1TB in the home for under $250. Amazing.

WIJFR: World War Z

We survived the zombie apocalypse, but how many of us are still haunted by that terrible time? We have (temporarily?) defeated the living dead, but at what cost? Told in the haunting and riveting voices of the men and women who witnessed the horror firsthand, World War Z is the only record of the plague years.

I first heard about Max Brooks’ (son of Mel Brooks) “World War Z” in the same way I’ve heard about a lot of the books I’ve read recently: on a podcast. This time it was Tom Merritt who mentioned the book, and I think it was back in episode #114 of “East Meets West.”

“World War Z” touts itself as “an oral history of the zombie war.” It takes place an unspecified amount of time in the future and is written as a series of first-person interviews by the author with the survivors of the war against the undead, which ended approximately 10 years ago. Think “Band of Brothers” with a George Romero twist.

This was a really entertaining read, and very imaginative. You’ve got your typical zombie lore (being bit means your infected, the only way to kill a zombie is to destroy the brain, etc.) mixed in with modern warfare and things I’ve never seen addressed before. For example: when winter comes to the northern areas of the world, the zombies freeze. They don’t die, however, just thaw out in spring and pick up where they left off. The same goes for out at sea … they’ll just float around forever until they wash up on a beach somewhere, or get caught in a fishing net. Really scary stuff: how do you know you’ve wiped every zombie off the planet, purged the infection? How do you wage war against an enemy that never gets discouraged? As a character in the book says: how do you “shock and awe” something that can’t be shocked or awed, mentally or biologically?

The book is sequential, for the most part, but jumps around between the different people being interviewed, in different countries and locations (there’s even a section of what the crew of the international space station was doing during the war). There are interviews with military personnel, government leaders, and regular people.

It’s really a riveting book. I’ve read that someone’s already purchased the movie rights so it could be an interesting film if it’s done right.

Tiny Bluetooth dongle

The $3 tiny Bluetooth adapter for my Eee PC finally arrived! I guess I didn’t realize it was coming from Hong Kong directly to me, which is why it took 10 days. I love the typos on the packaging due to translation. Apparently this will make a PC “Bluelooth” enabled is “supporting vioce data” as well. 😀

It’s a lot smaller than my old Kensington Bluetooth adapter, as I’d hoped:


My only complaint is that it doesn’t connect flush with the side of my Eee PC. The metal plug part is a little too long, so it sticks out a little further than I like:

But it’s still better than what I had. Now I can put my Eee PC into its neoprene slipcover without having to remove the dongle.

I had a little trouble re-pairing the new device to my Treo. I spent about an hour fiddling with scripts and PINs and hcitool/hciconfig commands and then finally installed eee-control. After that, it was a snap and I’m able to tether my Eee to my Treo again.

Inaugural panorama

Check out this incredible panoramic photo of President Barack Obama’s inauguration on Tuesday (found via Gizmodo). You can zoom in and see faces, not only of the important people behind the podium (Al Gore, the Clintons, President Bush, etc.) but of folks in the crowd. If you were there on the National Mall, you might be able to actually find yourself in this amazing image.

Super Bowl prep

I work just down the street from Raymond James Stadium, home of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and site of Super Bowl XLIII in just over a week.

As the big day approaches, it’s getting busier and busier in the general area. The logos and signage are all over the stadium and the surrounding fences, light posts, etc. There are concrete barriers everywhere, ready to direct the flow of automotive and pedestrian traffic. The newly constructed office building next to where I work has been turned into some sort of staging area for volunteers:

And an entire tent city has gone up in one of the parking lots, I presume to hold parties, dinners, and other related events:

It’s going to be a madhouse around here next week, I can just tell.

Good thing the game wasn’t this week … temps have dipped into the upper 30s here overnight the past few evenings and the days haven’t been much warmer. Steeler fans would have been wondering why they left Pennsylvania to come to Florida. 😉 Don’t worry, we’ll be back up in the 70s for this weekend and, hopefully, Super Sunday.

Stream, Baby, Stream

Over the past few months I’ve dabbled with tivostream to send MP4-encoded video to my HD TiVo boxes, but usually I rely upon pyTivo to watch my video library.

Tonight, kearygriffin over on the TiVo Community Forum announced streambaby (Stream, Baby, Stream) which builds on and extends what moyekj started with tivostream. As with its predecessor, streambaby can stream MP4 video to a Series3 platform TiVo (S3, THD, THD-XL), but by using ffmpeg it can also stream other video formats (like WMV or MKV). You can also fast-forward to points in the video that have not been buffered yet and it will show you a preview screenshot while the buffer loads and the stream picks up … true random access! It will even remember where you left off and allow you to resume the stream later. Very cool!

After a quick test run on my Ubuntu server to confirm the basic functionality, I turned to getting streambaby to run through Galleon. I posted my quick and dirty results here (there may be a more elegant way of doing this, but for now this works for me).

You can download streambaby yourself here … check it out.

Stop stealing my credit card!

This past Saturday afternoon I received an automated call from my credit card company saying that there were some suspicious charges that they wanted me to verify. The computerized voice dutifully read off the past three transactions and asked to confirm that I recognized all of them.

Unfortunately, there was one I didn’t: a $1 pre-authorization charge from a travel agent in Nebraska. I indicated this by pressing 2 as directed and was told I would be transferred to an agent to discuss the next steps. After being on hold for 8 minutes, the automated voice said no agents were available and I would be called back later, click

Nice.

By Sunday afternoon I hadn’t received another call so I called the customer support number as listed on the web site. After punching in my credit card number into the automated system, I was asked, again, to validate some transactions which turned out to be the same ones as before (including the bad Nebraska travel agent one). I was eventually connected to a live human who informed me that their “systems were down” and they would be unable to pull up any account information until after 6pm and I should just call back then.

So last night I called back a third time and again the automated system asked me to verify some transactions. This time there were two new transactions I didn’t recognize for about $38 each. Up until now I had been hoping the Nebraska travel agent thing was just a fluke, but now I had that sinking feeling that something was indeed up. I spoke to a rep, who had me validate the same information again and then confirmed that it appeared that my credit card had been compromised and they would cancel it immediately. sigh

I’m glad my credit card company is actively monitoring this sort of thing and can stop it before any major fraud occurs (it’s in their best interests, after all). What’s frustrating is this is the third time since October 2007 that my credit card information has been stolen and used in a fraudulent manner. It’s really creepy!

Sure, I use my credit card a lot online … but I’m not new to e-commerce, or protecting my personal and financial information on the internet. I only use my credit card at trusted merchants (over encrypted connections). If I’m going to buy from a site I don’t necessarily know a lot about (or trust) I’ll use a secure one-time card generated by the PayPal plugin (and I use my Verisign PIP token to further secure my PayPal account). I still wish I knew how the theft was occurring so I could take measures to stop it. I’ve got to believe it’s not due to any direct action (or inaction) of my own, but due to things like third-parties with lax security measures over which I have no control.

Anyway, now I have to wait for my new card to arrive and then I can start calling my various service providers to update my card information. At least I have a comprehensive list of who to call/update (compiled from the last two times this happened) so I won’t miss any important items.