Archive for the ‘technology’ Category
I’ve had so many people ask me if these pixelart images I’ve made are “legit” or really made block by block, or what have you. So to save myself from having to type in this explanation yet another time, I’ll put it all down here in one place to set the record straight. Read more
c’mon feel the noise. girls, rock your boys…
Didn’t have as much time this week for reading/research. Chaos reigns supreme, it seems…
Nomnomnom… food for the mind.
I read, you read, we all read for…. ok, that didn’t work as well as I might have liked. Here are some links:
Some new links for the week. Let James Brown be your guide!
This week’s links, courtesy of yo momma’s tasty fried chicken…
This week’s reading…
Aaaannnnddd…. another week of links!
This week’s links!
I should mention, though perhaps for some it goes without saying, that I don’t necessarily agree with all of the things I’m pointing to here. In fact, I’d go so far as to say some of them are just blatantly wrong. However, I point them out because they are interesting reading. Your own brain is going to have to reach its own conclusions about the veracity of the article, its source(s) and whether what they purport should influence your own thinking or opinions. I’m not an expert on (ok, most of) these topics. You may be. If you want heated debate, we can take that up over a beer. In the meantime, I’m just going to throw stuff out there for your amusement, and leave it up to you whether you elect to consume this fare or not. Enjoy…
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Links from this week:
Enjoy!
I started this post nearly two years ago, and it has been sitting in my “Drafts” folder since then, untouched.
I recently came up against a need for which Amazon’s cloud was once against the hand’s down most cost effective way to meet my needs, and I figured it was worth documenting the use case. If you don’t know already, I play minecraft. I have a realm. I’ve hosted my own server in the past, and have done a whole mess of stuff with it over the years, including some pixelart (which I will link once I’m not at work anymore). Realms don’t support any kind of mods or plugins, or maps, etc. And so I’ve had to do some manual work to get a map of our realm available online. When I was using fragnet (had great experience with them, btw … our use case just changed is all), they had basically one click install options for using dynmap, a popular dynamic mapping system for minecraft, and it basically auto-magically maintained the map for me, no maintenance or anything necessary. It would update reasonably quickly after you explored more of your world, and all was well in the world.
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So I need to prime the pump of this post with a bit of foreword. It should be noted that I am decidedly NOT a mac fanboi. I’ve used a fair portion of their kit over the years for a variety of purposes, both liesure and work related. From the technical perspective, I have evaluated their products on those basis, and am willing to state the following things about their products and mentality:
Ok, so now you know my stance on them. I own several of their products, and where I can rationalize the price, I may very well purchase them in the future as well. But at the moment, my general “one liner” about their current product set is “I’m kind of over them”.
Well, that was yesterday. This is today. And holy shit. If I really take a damn hard look at this, and try to noodle out what the real differences are between this product (that I’m about to link) and its competitors … the list is probably reasonably short, but not insignificant. However, maybe its just I’ve got that glossy sexy shiny thing making my eyes all blurry and all, but HOLY SHIT. Apple, I gotta hand it to you… you make some sexy stuff. Without further ado… please feast your eyes:
http://www.apple.com/mac-pro/
You’re welcome.
So thanks to my main man Mohtaram Eyang Kakung Signore Rhino-ji, I have a Raspberry Pi (model B). If you’re not familiar with what that is, clickie the linkie and go check it out.
When I first was thinking about rebuilding my media server, the RaspPi immediately came to mind. There are literally dozens of online blogs, readmes, tech sites, etc with details about how to set that up. And honestly, even if there weren’t, this was ridiculously simple to do. First step, figure out which version of xbmc to use. If you don’t know what that is, go take a look here. Essentially, it is a front end for media servers. In addition, it has several dedicated builds supporting the Raspberry Pi. Foremost among them are OpenELEC, RaspBMC and Xbian. You can do your own investigation around which of these (or others) is best, or you can just trust this guy. I ended up going with RaspBMC.
Ok, so after doing that reading, I still need a few things. The Pi doesn’t come with any “extras”. So in order to make this go, I needed a power supply, some kind of rudimentary case and a memory stick for it. I opted for the acrylic case from Adafruit. I also ordered a power supply from them as well. And finally, I ordered a 4GB SD (Class 10) from B&H Photo, my preferred site for all things camera related. Total cost, about $35. About a week later, everything arrived, and I was ready to rock. I snagged the Windows installer from the RaspBMC site, and that “burned” the image to the SD card. The installer also lets you manually set the ip address, instead of using DHCP. I want a fixed address so I can point tablet/phone based remote apps to it, so I set that as well. I popped in the freshly minted SD card, attached network and power, and up it came. Note that I did not attach it to the video or USB keybd/mouse yet. I was hoping to complete configuration through an SSH connection. This turned out to be less effective than I would have hoped. You can’t just use the web interface either. You can, however, avoid the keybd/mouse since the app remote called Yatse (check your droid store, not sure if there is an iOS version) has a remote keyboard function as well. It takes only a minute to point it to the right host, and you’re good to go for controlling it over the network.
It goes through a couple quick setup steps to pick locale and timezone. At this point, I needed to point it to my network storage where my Videos are, which is quick step as well. I have a Synology NAS that I’m sharing out Videos from (via NFS) and for each type (Movies or TV Shows) it “scrapes” your collection to gather info and locally cache that info. At this point, I just need to get it hooked up to the real TV and receiver and I’m good to go.
And therein lies the rub. Basically, I’m just out of HDMI ports. My receiver is an older SONY model that doesn’t have any, so the video signal is not going through the receiver. The TV has two inputs, currently occupied by the DVD player and DirecTV thinger. Also, since my A/V gear is in its own “closet” (read; the furnace room), I’m dependent on those long runs to get signal to the TV. So, I’m going to put an HDMI switch in my rack, push the HDMI outs from the Pi, DVD and DirecTV device to it, and just use one of the long runs to the TV. I picked out this model. Monoprice is my default vendor A/V gear and network cabling and supplies. They’ve always done right by me, orders big and small. Anyway, that should arrive sometime next week, at which point my install will be complete.
Oh, one final note. Since my receiver doesn’t use HDMI ins/outs, it also isn’t taking advantage of the HDMI audio signalling. I’m using digital coax or fiber connections from the various devices currently. I’m hoping that switch’s digital coax connection can be used to get the HDMI signal’s audio over to the receiver and that way I can take advantage of the full audio I’ll get from that instead of using the Pi’s 1/8″ audio jack. I’ll see how that works once I get it all hooked up. Worst case, though, I just use that jack.
I will follow up on this post once I get it hooked up and running and watch my first movie!
PS – might be time to consider getting a modern receiver. Ah well… something to add to the list.
PSS – I’m very pleased with the RaspPi performance thusfar. My testing using my HDMI monitor had really high quality output with no smearing. I can’t wait to see this on the big TV.
Here is a redacted cut/paste of a conversation I just had with Quicken Tech Support. I’ve redacted the name of the support person because I have no interest in throwing anyone under the bus. My initial question was to find out if there was any special/upgrade pricing as a long time user, and what the new features were. I will leave you to make your own conclusions…
XXXXX: Hi, my name is XXXXX. Thank you for contacting Quicken, please allow me a moment to read your question.
XXXXX: Hi Mark, how are you doing today?
me: very well, thanks. Happy New Years.
XXXXX: Thank you and happy new year to you to.
XXXXX: I would like to inform you that there is no update price available while upgrading from 2010 to 2013, however as you are a valuable customer, I am providing you with a link to get $20 discount.
me: that would be great, thank you.
XXXXX: http://quicken.intuit.com/blahblahblah
me: that is for the rental property manager
me: is there one for home and business?
XXXXX: You can scroll down, you will see it at the bottom of that page…
me: ah, nevermind, I just switched products, and the discount is still there.
me: Excellent.
me: so. final question… are the new features worth the upgrade? Last year, I was told there wasn’t anything significant changed
me: (by support)
XXXXX: Yes, there are many new feature plus the Mobile app.
XXXXX: Are you satisfied with the support I provided today and my efforts to help? If not, how else can I help you?
me: ok, thank you, I’ll look into it. Actually, I do have one final support type question
me: I’m trying hard to reduce the size of the file I work with.
me: its currently 40Meg + and the performance of quicken is suffering as a result
me: I’m trying to do a year-end copy to get rid of pre-2006 data
me: and after I do that, the file size is STILL over 40M (no reduction in size)
me: what am I doing wrong?
XXXXX: I would like to inform you that Year end feature is not working currently you can try the copy option to archive your file
XXXXX: Are you satisfied with the support I provided today and my efforts to help? If not, how else can I help you?
me: does it work better in 2013?
me: or work at all?
XXXXX: It is not working in 2013 as well.
me: thank you. Yes, I’m satisfied with your support.
me: have a great day
So once upon a time there was a guy. And over the course of his childhood and adolescence, he was in the habit of acquiring model trains for he and his brothers to play with. Nowadays, these would be referred to as “old school” trains, with the fancy switches, electricity to power them, little reservoirs that you can fill with dry ice or something so that the little smokestacks really spit out smoke, everything mounted to big swaths of plywood with fake grass, dirt, mountains, matchbox cars, and 1 inch high people strewn about. This guy, as he got older, thought to himself… you know, wouldn’t it be cool if I could have a couple boys (or, I suppose, girls) and when they’re old enough, they can play with this stuff too. We’ll be able to make it a father/son (or, I suppose, daughter) project and they can learn all about electricity, being responsible with potentially dangerous stuff, and so on. I should also note that this guy would have been thinking and saying these things in German, since he was my Dad, and was in Austria at the time those thoughts would have been percolating.
I should maybe take a moment here, and note that some of this story I’m telling second hand, I was either not there yet or too young to remember when some of these details were happening. I’m also not quite sure of the sequence of events, but it isn’t that important. I suspect there was some embellishment on the part of story-teller, but it still makes for a good yarn, so just bear with me.
Anyway, so let us fast forward a few years now, and now that guy is married, and has two kids, aged 4 and 2. Still in Vienna at this point, but already planning to move over the good ol’ US of A, where the lovely lady has most of her family, and of course, misses them terribly. At some point here, this guy’s stepmother decides that she is going to take that whole train set and all of its associated trimmings and trappings, and send them off to one of her nephews. Dad was apparently not consulted on this, nor was anyone else that might have had some relevant input to the decision. If I’m conveying a bit of bitterness, it is because there was some. I’ll leave it at that, since, again… this predates me, and it is hard for me to feel a lot of emotion about something that couldn’t possibly have mattered to me at that point in my life.
Ok, so there was some animosity, regret, sadness, opportunity missed for some quality Dad/son time there, and life went on.
Another fast forward, and here I am, now a Dad myself. Two kids, 4 and almost 2. And lo, check it out. Opa David (my Dad-in-Law) decides to send us his trains. Once again, these are the old school variety. I haven’t done a complete inventory yet. I do know that there are at least there are two locomotives, at least 3 cars, and a whole mess of track. There are two of the “transformer” boxes that let you regulate the speed and direction of the train. There will need to be some cleaning, probably a few parts that need to be replaced, but even with the very limited stuff we set up today, we were able to get a functioning oval of track around the Christmas tree with one of the locomotives and two cars hanging off behind. It throws off a few sparks here and there, lights flicker on some particular rusty bits of track, but it runs!
This will be a long project, spanning a bunch of years, especially since the kids are pretty young still. This kind of thing, I believe, is a labor of love, with long hours spent with sandpaper, modelling glue, and linear miles of wire so that the little streetlights will all turn on when the room gets dark. Perhaps I’m letting my imagination get away from me a bit here, but … well, what good is that darn thing for anyway, if not to close your eyes and let it run a bit wild the possibilities.
So thank you Opa David. Someday, Madeline and Nicholas will come to appreciate what I already know… just how special a gift this is.
Happy Holidays to all!
