Ah, December 31, the year is about done, and there are some thoughts clanking around my head. Time to extract them before the temptation to eat myself into a coma wins the battle. Number 1 – Work It has been a good and busy year at work. I am currently in the certifications group at Cisco, and while it is product management, it is different from my prior roles. In many ways that is...
In the learning path for the population of my media collection as it transitions from disc based media to a disk drive, I have discovered a few truths that I will share. There are some useful tools to “rip” your media. These are the essential first step in the process, to get your media from the source into a format that can be worked with. The next topic is what sort of transcoding...
As I am assembling my Plex media server, I have been semi-seriously using Linux for this purpose for about 3 weeks now, and here are some more observations. First, I have been running it on two systems, an old desktop system with an Intel Core i7-920 CPU, 6 gigs of ram, and several disks (1 SSD for booting, and two quick 1TB WD drives, and a BD/DVD/CD rom drive), and the second system, an Intel...
Lately my wife has been terrified by an invader in the garage. After hours, and well after dark, out of the crevasses in the garage, arises a monster slug, that we have nicknamed Slurms MacKenzie, the party worm. It is pretty funny, she claims is has been chasing her around the garage. Once Slurms is out, she won’t go into the garage out of fear that it will hunt her down. Here is the little guy...
I have been goofing around with Linux on the desktop for a few weeks now. The prime reason is to build a media server for Plex, but there are a few other projects that it will get leveraged for, including hacking around with my Mojo board. the good Installation – it was a bit convoluted to initially install. The PC I set it up on was old enough that it didn’t support booting from a...
A follow-on to my last post. Having last fiddled with linux (on the desktop, not as a hosting solution) was a VM running under vmware workstation probably 7 years ago. Back then it was just a fancy, enough to get my feet wet. Last weekend, I resurrected an old PC (the one that I ran VMWare Workstation on, surprisingly), and the Windows 7 installation was borked. As good a time as any, I grabbed a...
In the way back, I built a PC for a very specific reason. I was working on a product that had several configuration options and to effectively understand how they worked together, I needed to build various scenarios and test them. To accommodate this, I built a pretty solid PC, with a beefy (for the time, 2009) Core i7 processor, a solid ASUS motherboard (my go-to brand), and three disks. One...
Once a year (at least), I make the trek to San Diego to visit my folks. This year, I did it for Thanksgiving (as I did last year). This time, I was traveling alone, as the boss (aka my wife) was staying in the Bay Area to be with her family. Knowing how awful traffic is on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, I made the decision to shift the travel days to avoid the crush leaving on Tuesday early...
I have a confession to make. I enjoy the Resident Evil movies. An adaptation of a 1990’s vintage video game, and an early vehicle for Milla Jovovich (who plays the key protagonist, “Alice”), the first episode in this series was released in 2002. Having never played the game, it was a new concept to me, and for some unexplainable reason, I just enjoy the movie. Having watched the...
Throughout 2015 and into 2016, I was evaluating the streaming music services, Spotify, Google Play, Amazon, and Apple. The result of that initial evaluation was that the then new Apple Music plan was the winner. The combination of all my music collection in their cloud, plus the access to their enormous library, and arguably at the time, the best streaming over wifi at home and on cellular data...