I woke up this morning and it was 38 degrees outside here in central Florida! It’s not even going to break 50 today. This is one of the coldest winters I remember since we moved down here in 2001.
Yeah, okay, this is nothing compared to what’s going on up north and in the midwest, but don’t you guys care about the upcoming crop of oranges and strawberries?
Luckily we’re going to be back up in the mid-70s for the weekend, which is good because the Florida State Fair starts today.
I found this interesting article via Slashdot this morning that explores the topic of naming computers.
I don’t really remember when I started naming my machines, but I’m sure it started once I had a home network with more than one PC. I do remember that my first naming scheme was using characters from Babylon 5 (kosh, londo, vir, etc.). At some point I switched to Farscape and have been using that ever since: rygel, sikozu, moya, talyn, stark, katratsi, zhaan, grayza, etc. (I’m about to run out, actually, unless I start re-using old names from retired machines).
When I was still a consultant many years ago I worked at a company that used the periodic table of the elements for their server names (they even had a Periodic Table of the Servers printed out and hung on a wall … it was huge). That was a bit confusing as I could never remember if argon was a database server, or maybe that was hydrogen, or carbon?
At my current job, the old naming convention was Star Wars characters and locations (I’m responsible for VADER and SIDIOUS, for example) but new servers are given more logical, coded names (like LOC02MAIL03) which are less fun but more functional.
Super Bowl XLIII didn’t end the way I wanted it to, but what a fantastic, down-to-the-wire game! Some random thoughts:
After all the sun, blue sky, and fluffy white clouds we had on Sunday, the weather turned cold and rainy today as if to say “ok, you had your fun, go home!” to all the Super Bowl visitors. It’s nice to have traffic around the stadium area back to normal.
If you missed any of the Super Bowl commercials, you can watch them here.
The Senate on Monday voted unanimously to postpone the upcoming transition from analog to digital television broadcasting by four months to June 12.
We’ve been preparing for Feb 17, 2009 for 4 years … why push it back now? Just because there’s a new administration in the White House? It seems to me that this is going to cause more confusion, especially with the blitz of advertising just about every TV channel has been doing for the past few weeks (“did we say February 17? Sorry we meant June 12. For real this time.”).
On the other hand, I guess the electronics industry will be happy … now they’ve got more time to convince people they need new televisions for the switch. If you have friends or family that are confused, consider this flowchart. 😉
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.