An OCD Guide to Tagging Your MP3's

Posted by hucker, Feb 13 2010, 03:24 AM

I put this PDF together to document my woes in dealing with MP3 tags, cover art and lyrics...

http://acrocad.net/pdf/An%20OCD%20Guide%20...3%20Library.pdf

Eye-Fi Wifi SD Card

Posted by hucker, Dec 6 2009, 02:02 PM

What is an eye-fi card? You can get the details here:

www.eye.fi

Basically it is a standard form factor SD card that knows about cameras. After you configure to let it know about your network (or others) you plug it into your camera and start taking pictures. When the camera is in range of your network it will wirelessly download them to your PC.

The eye-fi SD card comes with a little USB adapter that you can plug into a PC or a MAC. Installers for both types of computers are available on the SD card.

Here's what I did to install:

1) Stick the SD card in the USB adapter and plug it in the the PC
2) Navigate to the folder that says start here. (Mac and PC installs ... the Mac works too)
3) Run the installer
4) It prompts for a network to attach to, this is where you give it the password for your network.
5) You can over ride the default folder and do some other stuff that you probably don't care about.
6) Remove the SD card and blug into your camera.
7) Take a picture and watch it load to your PC seconds later.

The camera does not need to know anything about the SD card. It is smart and looks for new JPG files to be created. It will ONLY transmit jpg files. If you buy the pro version it will upload RAW files. The only tuning that is required is to set up your camera so it won't shut down automatically before the transfers are complete. My camera was setup to shut down after a minute which was fine. If you took a ton of pictures this might be an issue...but only in so far as you might need to turn your camera on to continue the transfer.

I wish it deleted the pictures after they transferred but it doesn't. You can configure to ONLY transfer images that you write protect. I bought the HOME version so it only allows works with my wifi. You can buy different versions that will jump on wifi and transmit the images to a web site. The pro version has the ability to transfer images using an adhoc network connection thus NOT requiring an access point.

This is a pretty cool product anyway you look at it! So far it just works!

Installing and Using WHS - A First Impression

Posted by hucker, Dec 4 2009, 07:09 AM

After a fair bit of review and study I built myself a windows home server machine from an old rack mount server with 4 hot swappable SATA drive bays.

I've had this thing running for a couple of weeks now and I couldn't be happier, I have all of the backups working for 5 machines in the house. I even have a mac backing up using time machine. Backups happen nightly and they just work.

The shared folders work very nicely (as they should!) and the drive duplication is a simple check box and it is done.

Installing the connector software on each client machine was easy. I used the web interface by going the http://my_whs_machine:55000 and things installed just fine.

I am running 2 NICs in the server and that is working fine though it isn't supported (did have some strangeness when I plugged things in differently)

It is running headless and the simple admin console lets you do everything you need with a few clicks.

MY Squeeze boxes are streaming off of it and my source safe version control runs fine from the new server.

The other day I added a second drive (total 2.5TB). Just plugged it in, clicked the add button on the server storage tab and 15 minutes or so later my storage was updated. Checked some boxes to make duplicated shares work.

The only thing that doesn't work is that my old Audiotron MP3 players are not able to log on. I've spent hours on this to no avail. Frustrating to no end but almost certainly a problem with the 8 year old Audiotron technology.

Had I a chance to do it over I probably would go out and buy one of those $300 acer machines as this server draws a bit more power than it needs to. The 1U rack server looks pretty cool though...

That is a pretty long list of things that just seemed to work. Though I'm pretty savvy when it comes to configuring networks and PC's this was a breeze. Truly a point and click process.

I probably shouldn't say this too loudly here but between WHS and Win7 I'm pretty impressed with Microsoft. It seems like they really listened to what users want on this go around.

Getting RRDTool up and Running with Brultech 1240

Posted by hucker, Apr 4 2009, 12:32 AM

I bit the bullet and decided I was going to learn how to use a reporting tool to generate nice graphs with the new Brultech 1240 monitor. After a bit of research I landed on rddtool an Open Source project that seems to do exactly what I'm looking for.

I had a .Net project I was playing with to learn about interfacing my HomeVision system to acquire long term data and control it via Google talk from my blackberry. It all sort of fell together. I have a tool that is generating time data for the variables I have access to with the various input sensors. Right now it is the HVPro and the Brultech and I suspect I'll get snmp running pretty soon. I saw my first small image on my blackberry tonight

It is still VERY preliminary but it's promising and of course I'll share the code, if anybody knows how to make the graphs look pretty for this energy usage stuff or has been involved integrating rrdtool 'stuff' with cacti PM me.

For those that are interested the plot in the gallery was generated with this 'simple' command line:

CODE

rrdtool.exe graph test.jpg --start -1h --end now
--height 200
--width 400  
-A
--vertical-label Watts
--title "Bass House Energy"
DEF:ch1=btech.rrd:CH1Watts:AVERAGE
DEF:ch2=btech.rrd:CH2Watts:AVERAGE
DEF:aux1=btech.rrd:Aux1Watts:AVERAGE
DEF:aux2=btech.rrd:Aux2Watts:AVERAGE
DEF:aux3=btech.rrd:Aux3Watts:AVERAGE
DEF:aux4=btech.rrd:Aux4Watts:AVERAGE
DEF:aux5=btech.rrd:Aux5Watts:AVERAGE
LINE1:ch1#ff0000:CT1Watts
LINE1:ch2#ffff00:CT2Watts
LINE1:aux1#ff00ff:FloorHeat
LINE1:aux2#00ff00:Furnace
LINE1:aux3#0000ff:Refridgerator
LINE1:aux4#000000:WashingMachine
LINE1:aux5#880088:Dishwasher

SmartUPS 1400 Effects on UPB Signal

Posted by hucker, Jan 21 2009, 05:52 PM

A while back I did some analysis of the impacts of a UPS on UPB signal. Here is a spreadsheet that shows the results, and here is the thread where the results are discussed:

Getting the Hobby-boards hub to work...

Posted by hucker, Dec 11 2008, 09:39 AM

A (long) while back I went through the arduous task of getting software to work with the HB hub. Here is a link to my description of the process:

Hobby Boards Hub Instructions