March 2005 Archives
Here are some pictures of Iceland.
I've been considering different ways to handle centralising the (digital) storage in the house. With a number of machines in daily house (ie desktop plus portable each) it would make a lot of sense to keep stuff we both need access to in one place. The main things this means is the music and photo collection.
Up to this point the music collection had been on one custom machine (Orsino - currently being rebuilt) connected direct to the hifi - but I've been experimenting with streaming it from a dedicated store instead. The photo collection - which when we get round to scanning all the old pictures will be large - is scattered over separate machines. Part of the problem with photos is they can be large and so if you're doing editing or even browsig you don't want them to be accessed over a slow network. But since we're going up to 54Mb then that won't matter so much.
So bearing all that in mind a NAS (Network Attached Storage) box seemed like a good idea - especially once I discovered that one of the UPNP servers I've been using to stream music from (TwonkyVision) can be installed directly onto some of the NAS boxes (they're mostly just embedded Linux so you just need to hack your way to the root password) - giving a completely PC free solution.
The LinkStation 250 looks like the best choice. It's pretty good value for money, is a good amount of storage, can be hacked and has 2 USB ports for adding external drives if you do run out. I'll probably order one next week and see what happens.
We've finally decided to upgrade the wireless network to 802.11g so I've put in an order for a 3Com Router. We don't strictly need a router - we've got a perfectly good 3Com one we've had for years now. However we did need a 100Mb hub/switch to replace the current 10Mb one and it actually turned out cheaper to buy a wireless router with builtin wired ports than a separate access point and switch. In fact I ordered from Komplett because the router there was cheaper than the access point and I could get a USB wireless adaptor for a tenner thrown in.
Of course we're going to have to keep the 802.11b access point running to allow the non-G devices in the house to still connect.
Tonight was a bit of a night out for us. We had tickets for Blue/Orange at the Arts Theatre so we decided to get some proper food first rather than just a curry or chips afterwards like normal. The original plan was to go to Light but when we got there it looked pretty much closed, or possibly only the bar was open, either way it looked uninviting so we went to Fitzbillies instead who these days run a restaurant as well as the cake shop. We had a pretty good meal, my Moroccan vegetable lasagne was a bit on the heavy side (and rather lacking in vegetables), and friendly service, but it's quite pricey (£50 for 2 courses for 2 with no alcohol). We did have the restaurant to ourselves for the first hour though thanks to the early start.
So then to the theatre. The play is a three-hander including Roger Lloyd Pack and directed by Kathy Burke. It was very well acted but I have to confess to not really getting it. It was hard to see (for me) quite what the message was meant to be. Also quite heavy going with a first half of 80 minutes - it's actually structured as three acts but these days nobody seems to believe in two intervals, which is something that I'm sure used to be common when I was younger.
Interestingly it was actually on BBC4 a month ago starring Brian Cox - in that case it was cut down to a 90 minute screenplay. Having seen the stage version it would be interesting to see what a faster version was like.
I've been adding some plugins to our MT installation to allow us to play around a bit more. I had to get dc-hosting to install an XML parser first (which they did without problems but I must remember that medium priority translates to 10 days or so) but we've now got MTAmazon, MTRegEx, BookQueueToo and ProcessTags installed (see the Credits sidebar on my index page for the links). The main purpose of this post was to record a link to the documentation for MTRegex.
Expect listy things soon(ish).
Oh yes, the Regex plugin was prompted to allow auto-linking of URLs in entries. But I can see there are other possibilites for it...
I've never really tried getting USB to work on Linux before - I just assumed that it would be too difficult. Turns out that that's not really the case after all - although we're not talking plug and play here.
For the purposes of not forgetting next time I want to do this more than anything here are some notes on the rebuild of my Linux Jukebox, Orsino.
A while ago I decided I needed to buy some X server software for my Windows machines. The reason was that I've got a Linux server to run and the original plans to avoid giving it a dedicated screen didn't work out so I decided to splash out and buy some software.
The SciFi channel (US) - Bright sparks or idiots?
