Summertime Update

Delicious Library via the MacHeist 3 event a few months ago. I hadn’t done too much with it, but I did input a few items into the library. I found using the laptop’s built-in iSight camera to be fairly lacking and stopped playing with the application altogether. Well, about a week or so ago. I figured I’d pull out my external iSight firewire webcam and give it a shot. Man, the difference was night and day. Even when I had the thing sitting on top of one of my Dell monitors, it was MUCH easier to use to scan the barcodes from my CDs, DVDs, BluRay Discs, and books. I found out that I have over 530 CDs, 170 movies on DVD & BluRay, and 20 PS2 & PS3 games. The only thing left to do now is find a home for all my CDs – preferably organized and all on the same shelving unit. I will get to this very soon, I promise. If you’re interested in seeing the fruits of my labor, I’ve set up a web representation of my library here and here. The first link is the default template, and the second link is the secondary template. Before I left on my trip back east, I bought an eSATA drive enclosure and a 620 gig Western Digital hard drive, with the intention of plugging it into my TiVoHD and using it to expand the storage so I wouldn’t miss any shows. Unfortunately at the time, my TiVo decided that it was an incompatible device and decided it didn’t want to play well with it. I put it aside and left on my trip, to be forgotten about halfway through and not even considered until several days after I returned. I figured it would make a nice addition to my file server, whenever I got it set back up. (My VMware ESXi server crashed before I went on the trip too and needed to be reinstalled.) I was going to use it for external storage and share the music with my Apple AirPort Express, but unfortunately that poor device succumbed to old age and stopped holding a configuration. Fortunately, my recently-acquired Sony PlayStation 3 will connect to a media server. When I did my initial search, I found out that Windows Media Player would work out of the box with the PS3 – all I needed to do was import my music into the WMP media library and share it out. Unfortunately, WMP sucks for sharing music with the PS3. It’s very S… L… O… W…. The other night, I was booted into Linux on my desktop machine and decided to see if there was an app that would serve music to the PS3, and that’s when I found out about FUPPES. It took a small amount of fiddling on the Ubuntu 9.04 installation, but I found a HOWTO blog entry (here) that had a link to a precompiled binary which worked very well on my home linux server. Here comes the part where the bit about the hard drive becomes relevant. I hooked up the external drive to the Linux desktop, formatted it, and proceeded to copy all my music from the windows music store over to it. Then I mounted the drive on the linux server and configured FUPPES to serve music. It’s been a bit of trial and error (because I tried compiling it first, and not using the binary package), but I believe I’ve got it all worked out now. I’ve been reading Anne McCaffrey’s The Rowan all day today and listening to my music on the living room stereo thanks to the PlayStation 3. The only downside that I’ve seen so far is that the PS3 won’t play the music I’ve purchased via the Apple iTunes Music Store. This is easily resolved though because iTunes lets you convert the M4A files to MP3. Eventually I’ll find all my M4A files and do just that. Then I’ll be able to update the FUPPES DB and get everything all synced. One of the other cool things about having my music on the linux server: Firefly Media Server. This service uses the DAAP protocol to share music libraries with iTunes on multiple computers. This is cool because I can store my music in one place and listen to it either on my laptop or my desktop machines. I’ve used it in the past, but because the drive I was sharing the music from was a USB 2.5″ drive, I decided not to keep it in constant use. It was also formatted for Mac, and I’d rather not have HFS+ formatted disks connected to my linux box for long periods of time. Now for the rest of the not-so-geeky news. I’m once again working for the environmental consultant – the same firm I worked for before I went to work at FriendFinder Networks. This is a short-term summer gig, but it’ll help me extend my unemployment benefits for another month or two. Hopefully I’ll be able to get through until the start of the Fall semester on the Unemployment benefits before getting my financial aid. Of course, I need to actually cough up the dough for my first semester of classes before I’ll qualify for the aid, but that shouldn’t be too much of a problem. I just need to actually get the funds and then I can do that. Anyway… I’ve been very verbose this evening. I’m going to get back to my book now. Thanks for visiting and Keep Coming Back!!!]]>