Category Archives: Computer

Setting up a FreeNAS Box Part 1: The Install

FreeNAS is a task specific operating system designed to be used in Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices. It’s built using FreeBSD as the underlying OS which lets it have some fairly low power hardware requirements. For example the Dell I used is an old Pentium 4 1.7 GHz with 512 MB of RAM and it runs like a charm, granted I don’t put a lot of demand on the box in the way of concurrent transfers or running processes. It’s worth mentioning that the recommended way to install FreeNAS is to install to, and boot from a USB thumb drive. This is the recommended method so it can save as much hard drive space for data storage, but even though it looked like I could boot from the thumb drive like a hard drive in the BIOS I had trouble getting it to boot so I installed the OS to the 160 GB hard drive with partitions for the OS and data. Here’s the parts list with some specifics after the jump.

Parts List:

  1. Old Dell Dimension 4400 – bought at university surplus sale, $5
  2. Various old IDE hard drives I had sitting around – two ~20 GB; one 160 GB, probably cost me something at some point…
  3. USB thumb drive – “borrowed” from family, free

Continue reading Setting up a FreeNAS Box Part 1: The Install

My DD-WRT setup

I upgraded my Linksys WRT54GL with the DD-WRT firmware a while ago and used it as a wireless bridge for internet access in my bedroom where there aren’t any ports (yet). I was using an old D-Link wireless router as the main router, but wanted the upgrade in functionality that DD-WRT provided. So I reset it back to “Factory” default and set it up as my main wireless router. This is mostly for my reference if needed later, but if it helps anyone who happens to stumble upon it later than even better. Continue reading My DD-WRT setup

Gaming with what you’ve got…

I was wanting to get more use out of my current library of video games, as part of a personal justification to buy a new game system (why do I need an X-box 360 when I have a stack of games for my current systems that I haven’t even played though yet). So I’ve been slowly but surely making my way though some of the games that I already own with the intention of selling/trading them when I’ve finished. Now granted this approach doesn’t work for everyone; for example, I have a friend who plays through an older Zelda game about once a year, by his account, because he likes the story. I’m the kind of gamer that usually plays through games once and then I can be on to the next one. Video games that I keep around are more of the high re-playability games and group “party” games like, for me, the guitar hero series, Mario Kart, Wii Sports, etc… So I will make a page with this list that I will hopefully keep updated with my progress, but for now check below the fold for the current list of systems/games and where they all stand.

Continue reading Gaming with what you’ve got…

Change of Direction

I’ve decided I’m going to take this site in a new direction. Instead of trying to strictly work on write ups for here I’m going to use this more as a kind of status report for my many ongoing projects that I always seem to be working on. I’m thinking that this will hopefully motivate me to work on them more often and maybe even bring some of them to completion. Doing status reports at work usually gets me to work on tasks more often, so I’m hoping that blog posts here will have the same affects on my personal projects. I still haven’t decided on a file structure of what I’m going to do specifically; break everything down by pages, use just posts, or a combination of the two. I also might do another more personal site with another of my domains I have I’ll have to wait and see.

DH

Whip your music meta-data into shape with the MusicBrainz and MediaMonkey one-two punch.

I like most people have quite a few music files laying around on various places on my hard drive, and not all of it is in what could be called the best “shape.” After doing some playing around trying to get things fixed up, I think the best solution that I’ve come across so far is to use a combination of MusicBrainz and MediaMonkey. First things first, the two biggest requirements I wanted to get out of this project was to 1) clean up my meta-data for all of my songs and 2) display the album art in the best “cross-platform” way possible. For requirement number two, the best way is to embed the art into the music file itself, this works with all the media players I use as well as displays very nicely in Windows Vista explorer.

MusicBrainz is one of the better tools I’ve used to clean up meta-data, especially if it doesn’t even exist for some files. It has an ability to scan files to generate an “audio fingerprint” and match that against it’s database to come up with possible matches. The two weaknesses I’ve run into using it so far is that it’s database is entirely community driven, which isn’t itself a bad thing but it seems that there’s not a good way to remove invalid data from their database. You’ll understand once you search their database and get 4 album results with the exact same name but 4 different number of tracks for each, or a slightly different capitalization scheme. The only other weakness i’ve run into is probably with the software i’m using, but the Picard tagger doesn’t have the ability to play music while you work (a must if you are using it’s scan functionality). Here is the documentation page for the Picard tagger which is the one i’m currently working with. From there start with the Getting started guide or go to the more in depth documentation.

MediaMonkey is the album art heavy weight that I’ve seen. it’s one of the few that will embed album art into the music file if it can, and flexible enough to save it to a file if it can’t. MediaMonkey will also tag files, but doesn’t have the scan feature of MusicBrainz. By default will will use Amazon to find album art, although that can be changed with various plugins. another great thing is that it has a built in player so you can play music while you’re working on your music (seems kinda obvious, right) which makes the work go by so much quicker. One of the better write ups I’ve seen so far is an older write up in Lifehacker with step-by-step instructions for embedding album art using MediaMonkey, even though it’s old, everything they’ve written still holds true.

Now go forth and rid the world of bad meta-data and album-artless music files…

Easy way to add a second monitor.

There are a ton of good reasons to have your computer as a dual-monitor setup, there’s the added productivity of being able to have applications open in each monitor to work with at the same time. You could also have one monitor dedicated to goofing off, but we won’t tell the boss about that one… There also the fact that they are cool and get plenty of attention, if you’re like me you will have to explain almost daily how just because you have two monitors you don’t have two computers.

Continue reading Easy way to add a second monitor.