The Best Laid Plans of Mice and Men

So here is the plan. I am going to be building a whole new system for the home server. This system is going to be utilizing an AMD A6 Quad-Core APU. This is a 2.6 GHz chip with integrated graphics. The integrated graphics will be needed for the initial setup, but then will run headless. I will be pairing this with either 4GB or 8GB of DDR3 RAM. I plan on starting out with a 32GB SSD for the Ubuntu OS. A SSD is lower power, and lasts longer than a mechanical drive. The storage will be handled with two 2TB drives to start out with; I will have the option to add another 3 large capacity drives. One will be dedicated to tv shows, and another to movies. Music isn’t really a concern with services like Spotify and Pandora. Maybe a small portion will allow us to stream music if there is a large enough base to be worth the trouble of ripping CDs. All of this will be housed inside a case, and currently the front runner is the Rosewill R5 Mid-Tower case. This case holds 6 hard drives, with the capacity for 10 fans. I like the option of having fans that blow air directly over the hard drives. This will keep the hard drives cool under pressure. To keep the CPU cool, I am looking into the Cooler Master Hyper 212 [+ or EVO]. $30, high performance. Sold.

On the software side, Ubuntu 12 is the OS of choice. In here, Plex will be running 24/7. Why Plex? The Media Server side is compatible with Ubuntu. And the client software can be installed and stream media on Windows, OS X, Linux, Android, iOS, Windows Phone, and the Roku player. That covers everything in my planned future house. Sold. For the networking, I am going to be setting up a media network. I believe that the internet is coming with us, and I want to build off this. The main can be used for guests, and general browsing. I want to use a separate router, switches, and boat loads of cables to set it up. I want to dedicate this for the media server to minimize usage, and to maximize the bandwidth available for streaming. Plan is set.

I want to test out the combo of Ubuntu and Plex on a old system to work out all the bugs, and to learn about the setup and performance. This will make the final build and setup easy as ever.

Forearms, Tattoos, and a Shitty Screen Recorder

First things first. I am getting a tattoo. I have talked to the artist, and we came up with an idea. I need to take him a few things so he can get a better idea because I want some things to be as realistic as possible. I'm super excited. For those wondering, it will be a photography themed tattoo. It will be residing on my left forearm, and from the idea and sizes, it will take up most of my forearm, and maybe my entire arm. Awesome!

I have been trying to do another How-To. But this one is supposed to be a video one, because I want to add that to my blog. The problem is that the screen recorder is a little rough. I think I know audio issues. I need to speak louder. I just want you all to bear with me because I don't have the resources to edit the video to get rid of the rough patches. I might look into that so I can make it all shiney and pretty for you guys! The topic is ripping DVDs to your hard drive so you can watch them on your computer, or ship them off to your iPod, iPhone, Zune, Android, or Windows Mobile phone. If this is of interest to you, comment on it below.

Last but not least, I think it might be about time for making a few trips. I will be making the trip to Illinois first , maybe next month. Next up will be Pennsylvania, maybe in October. This will spread them out a little so I can recover from the financial hit. But it will all be worth it. I am hoping to surprise people for some sweet Ultimate and some drinking around town. I am giving the How-To another shot tomorrow before I resort to screen shots and maybe some Audio. You will have to wait and see.

Rainmeter has returned!

After a rocky few weeks, I have finally managed to get a stable installation of Windows up and running. I was working on other things, but have finally managed to get Rainmeter installed and configured the way that I want. I'm going to give you some screenshots and a concise walkthrough on how and why everything is set up the way it is. I would like to note that this setup is not concrete and I am currently looking for a Recycle Bin replacement and I am open to anything new and exciting. Here is what my desktop did look like. Simple, clean, with the programs that I used the most pinned to the Taskbar and Start Menu.

I changed the desktop wallpaper to something a little more colorful than what I'm used to. I found it in Lifehacker's Wallpaper Wednesday.

I added my trusty corner clock which not only has the time, but the date and day of the week. It is easy to read and can be changed to be in any corner of your screen. I used one of MaximumPC's Small But Powerful: 30 Useful Apps Under 2MB ColorCop (which can be found on page 2) to match the CornerClock to the color of the straws on the wallpaper. I added a little transparency to make it a little more visually appealing.

I added my iPhone like icons, Flurry by David Lanham. I chose these because there is a large amount available, and they are available as .png files in various sizes. I used IcoFX to select the size I wanted and so I could easily preview them. I used Microsoft's Paint application to create the black vertical bar, which is just to give a little separation and a little more visual interest. I positioned them to the right above the clock, which opens a large amount of white space to work on the left side.

I Pinned the same programs to the start menu, and I ordered them the same way as on the desktop. My next step is to program the Macro keys on my Microsoft Sidewinder X4 keyboard. I need to figure out my 6 most used programs from this list so I can program them a little later.

[UPDATE]:I would like to make a quick update to my previous post "How-To: Media Organization". I was thinking about this while on my way home from work last night. One great reason to have a different folder to each movie is that we live in a digital age. We all have mobile devices that support. The single movie title per folder is great if you have multiple versions of the same movie. I personally have versions for my Zune, Desktop, and my DEVOUR. This just helps keep all the video files organized and easy to find.

How To: Media Organization

I would just like to welcome you to the first of my How To series. I have decided to start with something simple, yet at the same time can make all the difference in the world. I know that we all have videos, music, and photos all over our hard drive(s). Windows 7 does a pretty damn good job by default organizing all these different libraries that we accumulate throughout the years. Now, I will tell you something that you may not want to hear: not every computer is ideal for media storage/usage. Here is a cold fact about it: Media content takes up a lot of storage. This screenshot of the Windows File Manager tells us a lot of things that are important: The movie "No Strings Attached" takes up 1.25GB of space. It tells us to where and from where I am moving the file. For moving a large amount of files, the time remaining and progress bar will be more useful; but for me, when I see the 112 MB/second speed, that is all I need to know. That is the transfer speed from my 1TB drive to my 2TB drive. That is pretty fast for mechanical storage, on a SATA 3 Gb/s port. This next image to the left is just a quick screenshot of my entire desktop. This is what was filing my monitor and what I was seeing at the time. The window on the right is the My Computer window. This gives us access to all of my hard drives, libraries, and many other things. Naming your hard drives (if you have multiples) will help keep everything organized and easier to access at a glance. Let's break down my hard drive situation: I have my C:\Windows drive which is just for my Windows installation, and my programs. I also have my D:\Storage drive, which is just a mostly empty 1TB hard drive, which will soon house all my Steam games (Cause those take up a lot of space). Finally, I have my F:\Media drive, which is a 2TB drive that houses my media on this computer. Once I open my Media folder, you see the screen on the left. I have subfolders for Documents, Movies, Music, Photos, Television, Unsorted, and Video on Demand. Each contains what it is titled. The Unsorted is a temporary home folder to video files before I am able to sort and properly name the files. This keeps them in one place and easy to find and organize. In case you were wondering, I have unsorted video files due to the fact that I encode all my video files on this computer due to the speediness of my Core i5-760. It takes about 20 minutes for a movie, even less for a television show. Then I will upload them to the HTPC, which also has a 2TB hard drive waiting to be filed to the brim of breaking. Now let's explore the main folders that reside on my Media drive. First up: Movies.

Above is a screenshot of my Movies folder. Each movie gets its own sub-folder. This makes for a large amount of folders, but makes it easier to organize. This is especially important if you are using a media center program such as XBMC which allows for additional content. Media Managers such as Ember Media Manager "scrape" your movies and then match them up with detailed information from online databases; such as imdb.com. Then it will store information for each movie within its folder. This information can contain plot details, ratings, actors, production crew, summaries, genres, etc.. Windows 7 comes with Windows Media Center, which when set up correctly, can be a powerful Media Center program. Unfortunately, it does not support the files and information found during a scrape. So it all depends on your choice of media center program. I would recommend Windows Media Center to beginners due to the fact that on first run, it helps you set up the program. Also, it taps directly into your Libraries, so assuming you have them pointing to your media content, you will be set to go. If you do not have the Windows 7 incarnation of Windows Media Center, then XBMC is your best option. It is free, lightweight, and highly customizable. It is simple to use yet powerful. It supports all the information files, movie stills, and fanart. This is great if you like to be able to choose how the content is presented, and you can see a summary of the movie or television show. To the right is a screenshot of the inside of the Transformers movie folder. As you can see, it is empty except for the movie file itself, which is fine by me. I would rather have a large amount of folders within folders because I feel it is a lot cleaner and more organized. Next up is the television folder. Once again, opening this folder reveals more folders. Each sub0folder here contains a single television show. This helps separate video files so if you want to watch just a certain season of Show X, you can be sure that you are only getting those episodes.
And before you ask, yes there are separate folders for each season of the television show within their main folder. Now this is not as important to have, it is just something I like to do. This also holds much more weight when you are using XMBC and media scraper to add extra curricular information to your content. In all reality, you can have all the information and more than you would find on TV guide or the Guide program on DishNetwork or DirectTV. If you so happen to record television shows onto your computer, you might as well have all the information that you would be able to find from a guide program on your television. Now once again, this file system can differ from person to person. I am just showing you how I organize all my media content. The next screenshot shows the Season 3 folder of the show The Big Bang Theory. As you can see, I have a uniform naming scheme in this folder. Note: this is my old naming scheme. I am working on updating all the file names to be homogeneous throughout my media, especially the television folder. You can also see that in the list of episodes, there is a change in the icon about 2/3 of the way down. This is because I have two different file formats in this folder. I am working on converting all the videos to .m4v files. This is the iTunes, Zune, Windows Media Center, and Android friendly file format for visual media. The .mkv file format is an open source file format, but it is not supported by Windows Media Center, iTunes and Zune. This makes it kind of a strange fight: Open source software and formats are much better in theory, but I also want the formats that are widely supported. Once again, we fall back to the Law of Averages. The next screenshot shows how a final and more polished folder will look once finished. This season of The Big Bang Theory has my new naming scheme, all the files are homogeneous, and this makes for a better looking and more organized file system. I chose to use extra large thumbnails so that we can actually see the preview thumbnail. This makes it a little more visually interesting, in my opinion.

Music is the final folder I want to discuss. But I am not going to provide a detailed structure here due to the fact that which ever program you use to rip your audio CDs will make the structure for you. A basic structure goes like this: Artist>Albums>Songs. Everyone names their files differently. You don't need to have the artist and album in the song file name due to its tagging and metadata. These will provide all the information needed to properly organize the music in their respective programs. One thing I would suggest to anyone is to use a Lossless codec when ripping their audio. The files will take up more space, but will have a higher audio quality. This is if you have the space to do so, like an external hard drive, or a separate drive in your computer just for music. If not, then the standard MP3 format will do just fine. I say this because you probably do not have a high end sound system or pair of headphones that you use with your computer. Not many do. Music files are also heading the way of the Dodo due to new programs and services such as Pandora and Spotify. Google Music is also a great way to offload your music collection so you can free up some hard drive space. The options are endless, and now is the time to buy in and try everything.

Well, I hope that you enjoyed my little tour/How To. This is a test run, so this may continue, and it may not. It all depends upon you, the reader. Let me know what you are interested in seeing in the comments.

How-To: Blog.

I have a day off. It feels great knowing that I don't have any other obligations today except the usual, which is taking Jayme to work. It didn't help that I dodn't sleep worth shit last night, and I apparently I had a conversation that I don't really remember. But apparently it was a good one...And I woke up to find all my text messages deleted from my phone. So there is some voodoo magic at work here in our house. Either that or I am pretty damn coordinated while asleep. Either way.

One of my friends recently was dumped by her boyfriend (now ex-boyfriend). It had been a while since we had really talked, and it is nice getting the chance to have conversations like our old ones. It is difficult because I am trying to help her get over the bastard, but at the same trying not to make it seem like I am just hitting on her cause I know that she is single. I am trying to find a middle ground, and it is diffcult. I will admit it, I asked her out on a date. But I was doing in this manner: I don't mean for it to be a romantic date. I meant it more as a friend date, and a way for her to be able to say "Yes, I went out on a date with someone other than bastard". But maybe I am going about it the wrong way. Or maybe I'm just fucking insane. Who knows. I am what I am. I have issues, yes. I don't care if you know it or not, and the 3 people who might read this already know of those issues. I am not backing down from that.

I still don't understand females. I was having this discussion with a friend, and she said that she didn't know what to wear out to a bar because she didn't know if there would be hot guys there. I just had this reaction: What the fuck? Who cares what you wear. Why is there so much emphasis on what girls wear? And why do they always have to go out and spend sooo much money on clothes to look "hot"? I don't know if this holds true to other guys, but I have this straight attitude about it: just be comfortable. I was hanging out with a friend, and she asked me what she should wear. I told her to be comfortable, and then she replied "I think I'm going to dress up for you". Why? I don't want you to. I told her that. There is not reason to spend so much time and effort to try and look "hot". If I like you, then I don't give a fuck what you wear. I'm not going to lie; there are some styles that I like a lot more than others. But I will NEVER tell a girl how to dress. I don't see the point of being with a girl if you want to try to change her. Maybe I'm strange or whatever, but it is how I am.

I had something bad happen to my beloved desktop. My hard drive containing my windows install died on me. I took this as a sign that it was time to upgrade my baby. I decided on an SSD, which is a hard drive that is made up of flash memory modules, much like the storage of an iPod, iPad, iPhone, ZuneHD, flash drives, and Android phones. It offers a shit load of performance over the traditional 7,200 RPM hard drives. I love it. In other technology news, my phone is being fucking stupid again. I used to enjoy being able to see everyone's pretty face with their contact name due to it using their facebook photos for their contact photos. But sometime it decided to stop doing so. So I'm not so sure how I am going to remedy this, or if I ever want to try to spend all the time to try to fix it. It is whatever. I would like to fix it, if it will be easy because I like my phone actually doing what it is billed to do. But maybe I am just wanting too much from the piece of technology. I will try to fix it later and see what happens.

Expect an update later on tonight. I'm thinking of doing a small screenshot tour of my desktop and how I use it daily. I'm also thinking of doing some How-To's, but that all depends on if my readers would like me to try that. Leave me a comment and let me know what you think and if you want me to, what would you like me to cover? If I know how to do what you request, I will post. If not, then expect some reseach so then I can pass on the info to you.