Summer's Over

I know, that's obvious.......but what that means around here in an educator's household with young children is that the routines change majorly (to say the least)! Of course, we are gone every week day from 7am to somewhere between 5 and 6pm. When you throw in Scouts on Monday night, Gymnastics on Thursday nights, and Football games on Friday nights, it's obvious that any given week are pretty booked up till Saturday and Sunday. I generally grade papers or lesson plan on Sunday afternoon, so that leaves me with the first half of Saturday as "me time".

After successfully convincing the kids that they really wanted to watch cartoons from Momma & Daddy's bed, I now have the living room to myself to reap the benefits from the hard work of this summer. Meaning that I have the HTPC running Windows Media Center, pulling files from the WHS in the office, displaying on the big TV and playing through the main A/V system. I can't even express how satisfying this is to be able to access my growing cache of lossless music this way! I just realized that when I'm on the music part of the software that just hitting the letter key will take you to that part of the alphabet in the album list! Such a great way to peruse my media library. I had no idea that the "Os" were so great! Oleta Adams, followed by Orbital followed by Orchestral Manoeuvres In the Dark! All this while drinking my coffee and blogging! I do believe that convergence is within reach if not completely attained.

I do have a few little things on the frugal purchasing front though. The first is the addition of a couple of "backbone" devices that most people will never see. I picked up an 8-Port Gigabit Switch which will replace the 10/100 version on my desk. The other is a 4-Port Gigabit router which will pretty much allow my network to upgrade to Gigabit. I still need to pick up "N" WiFi cards to move the Z61ms to the faster wireless standard.

I also picked up a set of computer speakers. I know, I know; it sounds pretty pedestrian, but let me explain. Of course you guys know that I HATE spending lots of money, but although I demand nice peripherals, I'm almost psychotic in not spending money in that area! So, I've been struggling along with an old pair of IBM/Infinity computer speakers on my desktop workstation for some time. Lately though, I've been planning out a monitor shelve for my desk, obviously to lift the monitors, but also to give myself some extra space underneath. So I'm planning on moving the speakers to that location. Unfortunately, the rather big and tall (yet uninspiring) speakers won't fit, so........ of course this gave me an excuse to hunt down a replacement pair. The the parameters (other than cheap) were that they be small, sound good, which are contradictory requirements, and therefore left me with the option of satellite/subwoofer style. To make a long story short. I found a pair of Logitech Z-340s on eBay that I paid $16 after shipping. They were dirty and one speaker has a little hole in the grill, but they sound VERY good and cost $16!!!

Re: Digital House Cleaning

Really, its kind of Part 2 of my last post which discussed the new Microsoft applications that I've learned to really like a lot. However something that even us diehard gearheads have to admit; none of the cool shiny gear does anything without the software end of it. Part 1 was really about the applications themselves, this part I'll delves into the bane of our (at the very least, "my") existence......media files.

Like most people, particularly those close to my age, we've spent the better part of several decades accumulating media. Of course, some of it is in the form of obsolete medium such as vinyl records (or even shellac), cassette tapes and even 8-Tracks. In this post, I don't intend on discussing digitizing/archiving that media, but the other stuff that's been accumulating in our computers the last decade or more. We all have videos, mp3s, and photographs in digital files scattered all over one or more of our computers. I know this, because every time, I work on somebody's computer and have to move their hard drives, I come across files scattered all over the place. Quite often, the owners are even surprised by what I've found and put back in place for them. Furthermore, even if they're all in "My Documents", and in the "My Music"/"My Pictures" subfolders, they are generally just kind of thrown in there; much like our closets. What makes it more complex, is that over time, files of all different types have been thrown in there all together.

All good example are music files. In most cases, people will have some WAV files which are essentially the complete equivalent of what's on a CD, then there are MP3s of varying sizes dependent on the bitrate at which they were ripped (or downloaded), which is often dictated by the device on which they are intended to play. You add to that, the various other issues, like AAC for iTune/iPod users, WMA for Windows device users, OGG for those cool Linux guys or just people who want to be different, you can easily have chaos.

What, I decided to do was to consolidate and combine first, then secondly, move everything to the server. My thought process was as follows:

• I really want everything as universally readable as possible.
• I want as much in as high quality of format as possible.
• Everything as organized as possible.

That's a tall order, so, how do I accomplish all this:

• Obviously, I want as much as possible in a "lossless" format as I can. That means, whenever I rip a CD, I want to set the application to save that way. Although, this uses quite a bit more space, than even 256bit, it give me essentially a perfect copy of everything. I plan on eventually ripping (actually reripping) my library that I haven't already done....which is most of it! On the server, I actually have a lossless folder, a standard bit-rate (128 or better), and a low bit-rate folder (for stuff that is horrible, but I don't have another copy of at the moment).
  
• I use Microsoft's included WMP to do this which gives me WMA files. Why that, says the Mac maven?!? It's the most universal. Pretty much anything can play and/or convert WMA, but the converse is not true of AAC.
  
• Organization is pretty standard; mean putting music in the WHS Music share, Photos in the WHS Photo share, etc. with a twist. That means that I use subfolders to help organized each of these categories. Although, Windows Media Center doesn't really care and just pulls everything in, as individual users, we need to find individual files for things like FaceBook, or my long neglected, high school and college favorites CDs project.

As far as a files system is concerned, the music side is pretty easy since I use the default, Artist, Album standard that most software is set up for. The only difference is that I separate the files in terms of resolution (lossless, standard bit, low bit). Its the photographs that are the headache.

What I've developed over time is a system of topic, sub-topic (as far down as is necessary), then date preceeding the lowest level of sub-topic which hold the individual files. These dates are created by last two digits of the year, so they'll stay in Chronological (and not numeric) order, the two digits for the month followed by underscore and the topic (most of which are recurring). The only picture files in the Photo share are the family ones since they're the only ones that need to be generally access by everyone as well as displayed through Windows Media Center for guests. Of course, 95% (or more) of our pictures files are of this one group, so this takes care of the bulk of files. Obviously, nobody else is interested in or needs to have access to the photos I use for items I'm selling or ones that I'm adding to my blogs so they go in my personal server folder. That way, I can grab them regardless of which machine I happen to be on at the time. This will become our standard, whenever my wife starts using the server for storage on a regular basis and the kids grow into that need in the future.

So basically; other than what I use on a "live" project, most of what I do resides on the server in a "replicated" folder (you can never be too safe). Its the same model that most corporations use because its convenient and safe.

Let me just say that it's been hard work....very hard work! I've spent the better part of the last week, where I'd estimate that I put in on average 3+ hours on file organization most days. So many files got moved and deleted that my main workstation running Windows 7, on 4Gb of RAM took 3 hours to completely defrag the 1Tb storage drive! Digital or not; "house cleaning" is no fun, but it needs to be done.

Love M$.....Kind of.......

I'm about to go into uncharted waters here; meaning I'm going to write about software today! I know, its not very sexy, but even the biggest "gearheads" of us has to depend on it, and have it running properly so that our shiny black boxes actually do something! Even I can only sit and admire them for so long. Now understand; that this is not a review I'll leave that to the far more qualified and lucid who get paid for such things, but really an essay as to how Windows 7, WHS and Windows Media Center has moved me and my "system" into the current century of computing.

I've gotta say, that I haven't been this happy with those Redmond money grubbers since Windows 2000, and I'm including XP here since that's really a prettied up version of W2K. It seems like every other OS release, they lay a rotten egg. Obviously, I'm talking about ME and Vista, where half-baked ideas, unfinished features are pushed on to the public because they needed to release something and make money.

However; as most of you have found, Windows 7 is a completely different animal; not in how it looks, but in how it functions. I've been on some version of W7 for about a year now and have progressively moved our stable of machines over to it during that time, but its really been in the last month that I've learned to really appreciate it. Why now? That would coincide with me bringing both a file server running Windows Home Server, and a HTPC up running Windows 7 Home Premium (which includes the current Windows Media Center). I've spend a good part of this week configuring this product as well as reloading both my main workstation and laptop on W7 Ultimate.....don't ask (thanks Jake)!

This has been a little a little more challenging than you might think (not because of what you might think either), due to the daily threat of "rolling blackouts", along with the 108-111 degree temps. Basically, I have to get everything done before about 1pm and then I shut down the big machines. Not only due to the "rolling blackout" issue, but it just gets too dang hot in the office with 2-3 machines, 2 printers, and 3 or more monitors running! The other issue, is that there was so much lossless music on the server that it took the clients quite a bit of time to index it all through the network (I'm definitely considering moving to gigabit soon). But once that got done.....WOW!!!

This may not be news to some of you, but its just like the magazine articles have been saying; once you've experienced online/connected media, you really wonder why you didn't do it before. At the core of what makes it possible (at least for not software guru, me) is the networking simplicity of W7 with the pretty much seamless integration of WHS combined through the new Windows Media Center! Side-note here is that I'm still going to be working on getting XBMC (X-Box Media Center) up and running, but the fact of the matter is that WMC has been very simple to set up. I've even been able to get it to recognize and use the cheapo NTSC/ATSC-Tuner-capture card in my workstation to work, when all the forums had said that it wouldn't. So at this point, I can have most any of the computers that has WMC set up to record a program, then archive it to the servers public "recorded TV" folder to be watched by any other computer in the house!

What's so cool about it? Other than the DVR function that I wanted, I found that I'm hooked on Internet TV. I knew it was out there; I'd been watch Revision 3 (the old TechTV) on and off through a browser for some time, but this makes that stuff work just like regular TV with a channel guide and everything. Some of the "over-the-air" stations (notably CBS) has some complete shows on it. I've watched a few NCISs so far. Plus there are other channels that I didn't even know existed like Smithsonian Channel which has some very interesting shows on it....at least for me. I found myself in bed last night watch TV wishing I could just surf the stuff other than what the cable provider had available.

So, there has been grunt work involved of course. Hours of uploading files to the server to that our photos, and music is available anywhere. Turning all the pictures so that they show up right when the computers pull them for the screen saver slideshow: YES, W7 does go out over the network and do that! Which lead me to another great W7 thing: you can turn pictures (even big ones) right from Windows Explorer! Then, there's the organizing, tagging, sorting, and selectively editing the music files to get rid of stuff that we don't like and won't listen to, that came from who knows where. Then there'll be the laborious ripping of the rest of my library into WMA Lossless to come. Let me tell ya, watching the software have the tuner search through the seemingly hundreds of channels of both analog as well as digital is mind-numbing as well, since you know that you'll have to go back and get rid of half the digital channels since they are in a foreign language or are for shopping.

There was some hardware involved (that I haven't already talked about). The most important has been the 2 tuners that I bought. I picked up an off-brand tuner on eBay for about $25 mostly for its capture capabilities, but I've watched a surprising amount of TV on it already. Then there's the well thought of Hauppauge one with 2 internal tuners, so it has the capability to record 2 or watch 1 and record another which is in the HTPC. I found that on Craig's List for $50. Then the "unsung" hero; which was the 12' optical cable that I picked up from Monoprice (if you haven't used them, you should at least look), which has allowed me to send the digital stream directly from the HTPC motherboard to the far superior DAC in my home theater system. Those lossless music files streamed from the server SOUND GOOD!!!

So, I've largely reached my home network goal of being able to do what I want from anywhere and watch/listen to the results from anywhere as well. Most of this was accomplished with the use of free (or at least included in the price) Microsoft software. Amazingly, it works as advertised and the costs has been very affordable! This is no small thing! I know that a lot of guys out there have been able to do all this for some time, but I'm kind of software-phobic/lazy, so if its not easy, I won't do it.

As an addendum: I do have a hardware purchase bulletin to report. I found a ThinkPad Z60t listed on Craig's List on Monday night for $40. The add said that the seller needed to sell it immediately and had a August 4th deadline (yesterday). I figured that it was either garbage or he'd already sold it, but I emailed anyway. Low and behold I got a reply back saying that he still had it, but need to meet and get it done quickly which sounded suspicious. Turns out that he's a medical school student down at UT Southwestern, has just graduated and leaving to go back to China this weekend! He had tried to sell it for the last 2 weeks (needed it for school till then), but had a hard time doing so. He had dropped the price twice (I found the other ads), but had trouble selling it, since he didn't clean it up, his kids had pulled off 2 keys (I fixed them in 5 minutes), and the battery was dead.

The lesson here is that, if you intend to be frugal, you pretty much have to do the homework or you miss opportunities like this! This isn't a smoking hot, almost-new computer by any stretch of the imagination, but its worth at least $150-175, cleaned up! Plus I also spied a Salvation Army store across the street from the hospital complex. You think that they might have some interesting stuff that all those future (and present) doctors have donated!?!

Gotta run; the office is heating up!