So after a bit more Googling, I took another look at FUPPES. The “release” (SVN-578) seems quite a bit more stable. The version I was working with is SVN-634, which is the latest from the author’s subversion repository. It still has the mostly the same pros and cons. The stable version doesn’t automatically watch directories, though. So the pros and cons balance out again.
Continue ReadingAfter doing quite a bit of research on media players in 2007, I convinced Jessica to get me a D-Link DSM-520 for Christmas that year. Since then, I’ve made most of our DVD collection and all of our music “on-demand”. Well, sort of.
Things still have a long way to go in the whole “digital entertainment” arena. The focus of this post, however is the Media Servers that serve the content. Being geeks, we’ve acquired several media players in the house over the years. This includes my now aborted MP3 Box project as well as off the shelf products. We have a Netgear MP101, a MacSense HomePod and the aforementioned D-Link MediaLounge DSM-520. They each have their strengths and weaknesses.
Continue ReadingWoot! We finished Jessica’s room to the point where we moved her computer into it. We got the floor cleaned up and the baseboards put back on yesterday:
Its somewhat disturbing to note that my wife matches her room. Pink on the top and bottom, black in between (posted with her permission, lest I be killed):
Continue ReadingWe got the first coat of paint on the walls on Sunday and the room immediately transformed, still no appropriate adjectives -- Jessica says that her choices for colors escape description. Of course now she wants a theme song, too. Something that speaks to her personality. The Pinky and the Brain theme song comes closest for her, I think. While I was starting in on the first wall, this is of course what she was painting:
Continue ReadingSince we moved into our house back in early 2003, we’ve slowly but surely been redecorating rooms and fixing the place up. We’ve had a few people live with us in that time, and each time, Jessica has always sacrificed her space. The first time was her sister, who was escorted out by the Sheriff in handcuffs (thats another story though). After her sister *ahem* moved out, Jessica took over the back room to be her craft room. We redecorated my den before we did her room, and the room that was to be hers became a sort of holding room for stuff we didn’t have a place for yet. This is what it looked shortly after her sister moved out and before Jessica moved in the first time (ignore all the stuff, it has all since found a place to be put away):
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Well, a few days ago Jessica started having problems with it. The box started locking up. Took a bit of effort to get it back online again (since its headless), three or four reboots before everything came back in. Not happy.
My first guess is that it is heat related. The only fan in the unit is the CPU fan. The inside of the case is quite warm. I haven’t put a thermometer into it yet, so I can’t say exactly how warm. It first locked up when she was using it “locally” with MPD playing. This does require a bit more CPU power than streaming which is what she has been doing mostly since I gave it to her. In fact, it GMediaServer had been streaming to the HomePod for just about 12 hours a day for the prior two weeks. Simple disk reads and sending packets over the network, very little CPU power. This all started happening on the 22nd or 23rd.
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