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Went to go see Ironman today.  I have always had an affinity towards Ironman.  He has always been the epitome of how a normal guy could become a super hero.  Plus his behavior  has always been akin to how I am.  Kinda wild, loves the girls, and a drinker. (well, I am not a drinker anymore but I still love to have fun)

It was a good movie.  One of the better comic-turned-movie realization so far.   Favreau did a great job directing and being the bodyguard.  The ending was classic. (not tellin, go see it!) Anyways, I recommend this flick to any and all.  Had great pacing, no real slow moments.  Good Stuff!

Also, lately I have been playing with the Camfrog software.  This is a video chat room software.  Thanks to my buddy Nightline for turning me on to this.  I have been hanging out in the _FaLleN_AnGeLs_ room.  Interesting stuff.  You’ll have to go check it out for yourself.

This video chat stuff has given me ideas on what to do with the HappyFornicator.com domain.  Looks like I’ll be setting up another social/video site soon.

Technochubby is coming along.  I am working on the servers and will get the site up in the next week or two at the latest.  Good Stuff!

I have been searching for the ultimate home office router/firewall. I would like the following:

1. Gigabit
2. VPN Endpoint
3. QOS

Those are the main points I want in a router/firewall solution. I have been doing a lot of stuff on the road of late. I would like to access my net at home with a reliable commercial solution. (no offense open source)

I am now starting to do some research. I am looking at some possible sonicwall, watchguard, or juniper solution. However, I would like a less pricey solution. Preferably D-Link or Netgear. If anyone out there knows of anything, please reply.

Apparently, I am not the only one looking for these things. Greg Hughes seems to be searching for this as well. (I Have a dream the Perfect gigabit wireless router with vpn and QOS)

The Search is on!

Back in January, we started working on a Home Media Center/Home Server configuration. I started moving some of the equipment that was normally found in my home office to the living room.

We started to build this monster machine that I thought would handle everything. Theoretically, it would and could but when it came to practice, it just didn’t work out. Here’s the YouTube of where we started with this thing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqcJ45XRNDM

I decided to turn that computer to our media editing machine and it worked fine, but not great. From my perspective, Vista was just not ready to handle the larger demands we were placing on this machine. So, we decided to throw OS X on it. We were quite surprised at how well it worked. So much so that we have decided to move to the Mac platform throughout our household. (As some of you have been reading)

Moving forward, we decided to look into the feasibility of using the Mac platform as our main Media Center that is connected to the living room television. We’re gonna re-configure our big black quad core and set it up and test it. If this works out for us, we’re planning on getting a full Mac Pro and do the same.

Here is the configuration:

Motherboard: Asus Maximus Formula
Processor: Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600
Memory: 8 Gigabytes of Corsair DDR2 (4 x 2GB sticks)
Boot Drive: 500 Gigabyte Seagate
Data Drive: 1 Terabyte Seagate
Video: xFx nVidia GeForce 8800GT w/ 512 MB DDR3
NAS: ReadyNAS NV+ w/ 4 x 750 Gigabyte Seagate drives

Operating System: Leopard OS X 10.5.2 via Leo4All (See NOTE)

“Server” Capabilities:

We will configure the DATA drive to do sharing via bonjour and smb to share our data throughout the house computers.

The ReadyNAS NV+ will be set up as our Time Machine backup drive over the network.

We are still looking into several DLNA/uPNP solutions.

This machine will have iTunes library sharing enabled as well.

Software to be installed and configuration:

VMWare Fusion

We will use VMWare Fusion to run various linux and windows VM’s for our needs. The main Windows VM will be running Vista Ultimate and will provide extender capabilities to our Xbox 360’s.

Toast 9 Titanium

We will use Toast with it’s Tivo functionality to pull and archive our favorite TV shows. We will also set up automatic conversion for use on our iphones.

That’s about it. We’re gonna try to do a full video of this when we do it and will add it to the technochubby stuff on YouTube.

Wish us Luck!

NOTE: Yes, we own a full copy of Leopard. We’d also like to point out that this machine is purely for testing. If this meets our wants/needs we will be purchasing a full Mac Pro. (Just like I just finished purchasing a MacBook Pro once I decided the platform was for me)

Also we do own licenses for all the commercial software that we install on our computers.

I have almost got my new MacBook Pro set up the way I like it. I have VMWare installed with Vista 32 in a VM. I run vista in Unity mode which allows the windows applications to seem directly integrated into the OS X desktop.

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

I call it “MacVista - Mac on top, Vista on the bottom.” Plus, I am trying out Skitch, a new screen grabber that looks like it has promise.

Now all I need is some sort of Unity mode for Linux in a VM and I can call my machine MacVistux  lol.

So, we’re back from the Apple store.   I returned the MacBook Air and got the MacBook Pro.  17 inch jobby at 1920×1200 resolution and 200 Gig 7200 RPM hard drive.  It’s got 2 Gigabytes of Ram but I have some good ol’ 4 GB corsair memory that I can pop in it.

We’ll be shooting the video today on the un-boxing and some video of our current set-up.

Thanks to Heather and Jared at the Apple Store!

For a long time now, I have wanted to run an Internet radio station.  Since I have been back in Entropia Universe, I have been hanging out on Club Neverdie a lot.  They have a live music stream that goes into the virtual world.  

Recently, they opened their stream for rental.  This interested me, so I am going to rent the stream during an event I will be hosting on Club Neverdie.  I found out they use SAM Broadcaster and Windows Media Services for their stream.  I’ve been a user SAM Broadcaster for a bit, but it was always one of those things that got pushed aside for other projects. I decided to take another look and set up some stuff with my servers.

First off, I set up one of my servers in my Data-center as a streaming audio server.  For this, I used the Icecast2 server for Linux.  Fairly straight forward set-up.  I installed Centos 5, then did an install of Icecast and edited the config files to the settings I liked.

I then installed SAM Broadcaster on one of my laptops and plugged in one of my portable HD’s with a copy of my MP3 collection and had SAM catalog it.  This too was fairly straightforward.  After the install and cataloging of my mp3’s, I set up a stream to my Icecast2 server and I was broadcasting on the Internet.  Good stuff.

This config is all fine and dandy for most people that just want to broadcast occaisionally.  For people that require constant or continuous 24/7 streams, I saw a slight flaw, your internet connection would be constantly used in sending the broadcast out to the server.  So, I came up with a plan.  Read on…

Read the complete Post.

For some time now, I had been migrating data and stuff off of our large server at the data-center.  It had a couple failing drives and I was going to have the company re-do the machine.  To prepare for this, several months ago, we moved most of the sites off that box.  One of these was the Order of Z guild website.  (a guild I run that covers several games and is many years old)

In the migration process (a few months back)  I had issues with the database transfer, so I kept the pointer and old database running to the old box.  Now, normally I am very careful about taking notes and notating what I have done with what.  For some reason, I did not flag this in my server configuration notes that I keep.

Fast forward to present day,  a couple weeks ago, I started disabling services on the box to be re-done.  I double checked everything.  This machine had several virtual machines running on it, and I turned each down one at a time and waited a day before proceeding. (to ensure no customer/client services were not interrupted) I did do the double check on the host server (which was also the main DB server).  I saw the OZ database and just assumed that it was the old one. (part of the reason for this was that I had created the new DB on the new box, when I was attempting transfer, it had data so I assumed it was being used)

So, I flag the support team and let them know that that box is ready for re-doing.  They confirm with me that it will loose all it’s data.  I say “Yep! Go for it!”.

About four hours later.  I go to the Order of Z site, I get this error message.  Long story short, I figure we got hacked.  NOPE,  I had them wipe the database remember!  DOH! 

Anyways, I do have a few back ups, I will be looking through them to see which is the most recent.  I will get the site back up and running.   I will probably take the time this time to do some of the upgrades I wanted to do.

 In the mean time, the teamspeak server is still up.  I am still working on my new guild in Entropia Universe, www.zoku.euyou guys are all welcome to come join us. (Janu and Thor have been in-game)  We have some interesting people, you guys are also welcome to join the forum if you miss shooting the shit.

If you’re an Order of Z member and have any thoughts on the matter, please comment.

Recently I gave away/sold most of my computers (desktops and old laptops).  I needed to make way for the new.  One slight problem, I don’t have any systems that I can test software/OS’s on not in a VM.  I found a sale at Fry’s recently and bought a Toshiba A215-S7407, nice little machine, runs linux and Entropia Universe.  It’s my “test box” now. 

However much I like Linux, I still need to keep a native windows partition on the box to do various things.  I hate that when you buy a laptop/computer pre-built or from a major manufacturer, it comes with all this friggen software and the system runs slower than you expect, or you get all these crazy pop-ups.  GEEZ people,  I just want a base OS with nothing major installed, just the drivers.

These “companies” are concerned with spam and what not, that to me, they are putting spam on these computers when you buy them. I think there are a lot of people out there now-a-days that know what they want on their systems.  What, these computer manufacturers might be making what, an extra 20 bux tops on loading these machines.  I’d gladly pay the 20 dollars extra just to have a machine with a bare OS and all the correct driver’s installed.

Ok, rant off.

Just playing around with DSL Reports last night. I got some good download speeds considering I am only supposed to have 5 to 7 megabit download.

For years, one of my pet projects has been to create a low cost (below $20K) central solution to store and serve my massive media collection. I have thousands of DVD’s, Video, Audio, Pictures, etc. ( Click to see about 2/3 of my DVD collection )

I also want a central location to serve up my TV/Satellite feeds etc. I have played with probably every possible combination of OS, Hardware, Embedded, Software, etc that I could get my hands on.

Lately, you all know that I have been on a Linux kick (yet again). I was beginning to play with MythTV but that would just solve the issue of serving the media to MythTV frontends. I was playing with several DLNA servers but the issues I ran into with those was one of transcoding, most linux DLNA servers don’t transcode. (transcoding is taking media of one type, say WMV and serving it up another type, say MP4, so your device can play it properly) So for now, I kinda put DLNA on the back burner. Read the complete Post.