2010 February » Stuff and Things

Building a Media Server – Ideas and Preparation

Feb 242010

My iMac’s third birthday is fast approaching and as a thank you for three years of loyal service and enjoyable computing I am planning on selling it. It is starting to feel a little long in the tooth – the 2.16GHz Core 2 Duo is starting to feel a little sluggish and I would really like more than 3GBs of RAM. We are also moving into a smaller place in a monthish so I shan’t have enough room for a proper desktop. My plan is to sell the iMac on eBay or Gumtree for (hopefully) around £450 and then pay the difference on a 13″ Macbook Pro (when they are finally updated).

I have never had just a laptop and it brings up some issues. The main being a lack of large, always on storage. My iMac currently sleeps rather than being fully powered down which means I can wake it up remotely using an iPhone app and then stream my large music and video library to my XBox 360 connected to the living room T.V. This would be a little inefficient with a laptop as it has a smaller hard drive, it isn’t always available to be woken up (cannot be done over wifi with my router) and wifi sucks for media streaming.

So in comes the idea of a media server that I can hide out of the way in another part of the house that it still wired up to the network. The plan is to fill it with several large drives -

160GB – System (Ubuntu Linux)
1TB – Media
1TB – Media Backup
1TB – Backup for laptops and system drive

The media drive and lap top back up drive will be shared via AFP (Apple Filing Protocol) using this incredibly helpful guide. I will use Rsync to back up the media drive overnight.

XBox media sharing will be done by using Twonky Media Server. I did have a look around at free and open source alternatives but the ones available all had fairly major drawbacks such as not understanding ID3 tags on MP3s. I managed to pick up Twonky for £10 as they are currently offering it half price. It seems to work as advertised with very little tweaking. Apparently it supports many other devices so it gives me an option to grow.

The system is running on a 2.8GHz Celeron processor with 512MBs of RAM. It seems to be running quite nicely although the graphics card isn’t recognised and even with the NVidia driver I cannot get higher than 800 x 600 resolution. It’s not really an issue on a server though when most interaction will be done through web interfaces and SSH.

So far I have only the system set up. AFP and media sharing are working nicely. I’m going to keep an eye of drive prices and see if I can pick up a bargain once the Macbook is bought. I also need to pick up an SATA PCI card as the motherboard only has two SATA ports.

I’ll try to keep the blog updated with my progress just in case anyone out there fancies giving it a go as well.

Weekend in London and Should a Vegetarian Like Taxidermy?

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Feb 222010

I spent the weekend in London visiting in the ‘in laws’. This was the last weekend we could get down and stay as they are having some pretty extensive building work done to the house which means no house visitors for at least four months. Friday night we went to a tapas restaurant called The Lounge which is quickly becoming one of my favourite places to eat in London. After much tapas and beer we ventured home.

On Saturday it was suggested that we check out the Horniman Museum (the website really doesn’t do it justice, they seem to brush over all of the stuff I found most interesting). The museum was set up by Victorian tea trader who collected curiosities during his travels all over the world. As this was ‘the olden times’ this includes many weird and wonderful animals that were obviously shot and brought back to the U.K. Other items include pickled and dissected animals in jars showing the brain and other internal organs, various animal bones and even a human baby skeleton. All in all it is a rather wonderful and somewhat unknown attraction which I cannot recommend enough.

Jordan (my girlfriend for anyone who didn’t know) loves taxidermy. She is also a vegetarian. Whilst walking round we started discussing whether it was OK for a vegetarian to like this kind of taxidermy. We have talked about getting our cat, Fritz, stuffed once he’s dead but I think that is different as the animal wasn’t killed just for stuffing. Jordan decided that at least these animals shot 100 years ago on the other side of the world were teaching generations of people about the natural world and anything that gets children excited about nature is a positive thing. And obviously the Victorians were complete bastards when it came to exploring the world so a few animals are really the least of our worries.

Any vegetarians out there have a view on this?

Introductions

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Feb 172010

So here it is. My (I think) forth attempt at blogging. My last blog fell into disrepair whilst I was working in the media industry. I kept wanting to write about what a horrible time I was having and what bastards I had to take orders from but I was always too worried about potential employers Googling my name and finding a post where I bad mouthed their closest and dearest friend in the industry. I didn’t really have much else to talk about due to the fact that I was sometimes working 60 hour weeks and didn’t really get much time to do more interesting things.

So I just stopped.

My last post was in April. So at least it has been less than a year.

My last blog was also lacking personality. For some unknown reason I didn’t tend to talk about things that I did or places I went. I think I had ideas above my station and took the whole thing a little too seriously. I hope that this one will be a little more personal. As well as that I’ll probably end up writing about my many interests like computers, video games, films, books, travelling and whatever else pops in to my head. I’ll also cover what I’m doing in my Open University course maybe.

By the way, I haven’t really spent any time fiddling with things on here so I’m sure there are many rough edges. This is my first time using my own proper webserver (I did have a paid Geocities account back in the day but the less said about that the better) so I’m still working things out. I settled upon using WordPress as they have an iPhone application for blog management. I wonder how many decisions are made by that fact. The Natwest bank iPhone app almost had me tempted…

Anyway, that’s enough for tonight but I will hopefully make my first post soon.

Good night.