Wednesday, April 25, 2007

Spring Geeking

It is a busy time this spring. The days are flying past, and I have projects and business galore.

And it is also the time of Spring Cleaning. I hate cleaning, especially when it comes to my hard drives. I have a tendency to collect a massive amount of clutter. I also collect a lot of good data. Which means organizing it takes a lot of time. I have to come up with an organization method, naming conventions, and space to put everything. Then I have to sit down and slog through the raw data entry needed to get everything all neat an tidy.

What a chore. No wonder I only wind up leaving it for so long.

It's a good thing that I have a compelling reason to get my little duckies in a row right away: New Toys.

I recently purchased a new Network Attached Storage server. I've been hard pressed for space lately, and my MP3s aren't getting any smaller. No worries now. I threw a 500GB HD into my shiny new Synology DS-107e and I'm all set to store data f0r the next year.

It also gives me an excuse to spend a few evening with my MP3 collection adding album art, tweaking the tags, and re-normalizing the whole lot of them. And I can go through and add some better organization to the growing photo library. And maybe even clean up my sparsely updated collection of Apps and Utilities.

The Media has to be done soon though so that when I mod my Xbox, I'll have access to everything right away.

Yup, I get to be the first guy in my particular circle of friends to own a modded Xbox. The reason I want to Mod is so I can use Xbox Media Center. XBMC will simplifying streaming from Server to TV/Stereo without having to fight with my current setup. Right now I'm using a 7+ year old computer as server (running 24/7), and a 4+ year old laptop connected to the TV/Stereo, getting it's data over a wireless connector. Both server and laptop are getting unreliable. This is causing no end of frustration. It's also clunky, as I have problems streaming, so video files have to be copied over to the laptop first. Then I have to swap a bunch of settings, get up and flip the laptop to TV out, start the video, full screen it, then adjust the volume on the stereo.

But back to the Xbox mod. I personally think this a great way for me to extend the life of this hardware. I'm going to be expanding it's capabilities by a huge amount for a minimal price. All told, the whole network upgrade cost way less than a Multimedia PC would have.

Oh, and I'll probably blog the mod process, as it will be the first project like this that I've done. Is anyone interesting in seen how it's done? Let me know.

But I've got more cobwebs to clear off my data. Spring is a busy time!

1 comment:

  1. The best part of totally reorganizing everything is that you get to look at all the old stuff you did way long ago with new eyes. I just recently found of my first programs that I wrote in QBasic and I laughed at the memories of writing those things. I dunno, I always enjoy a good trip down Memory Lane. Good luck in your reorganization efforts!

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