Doug’s Blog

For many years I’ve had my own home file server tucked away in my basement serving all my home file needs. It is a Linux box with 2 Terabytes of storage that acts as:

• a NFS file server for other UNIX systems
• a Samba file server for Windows systems
• a LDAP server for keeping a single location of contacts
• an Apache web server for an internal website of links and other information (photos, etc)
• a Slimserver daemon that provides support to my Squeezebox
• a MediaTomb server that provides support to my DLINK DSM-520
• an internal Domain Name Server (DNS)

and more!

I use this setup to hold all my digital photos, audio (mp3) files, and I’m now in the process of scanning in my DVD library. So let me take a moment to say “Just say NO to piracy!”

I personally have found it to be cost effective to buy used CDs or DVDs and scan them in to get good quality recordings, and all my media stays only on my local server that is inaccessible from the Internet. Aside from the legal issues, who wants to clog up their Internet connection with unnecessary traffic for others?

I’ll pass along some things I found while building my setup. I never went the iTunes route because I’ve always used smaller mp3 players that were smaller and cheaper than the iPod. Plus, I want to use a generic format like mp3 and not be limited by what I can play it on. With mp3 I can play all my music on my computer, laptop, stereo (through Slimdevices Squeezebox) or even my DSM-520. It is simple enough to get your CDs into mp3 files so I won’t go into that.

Next, the video portion. I chose the DSM-520 because I wanted a cheap box that had no moving parts (i.e., no hard drive) that would talk nicely to my fileserver. Well, it turns out that it doesn’t just look for a fileserver using something like Samba — it requires a UPnP type server to be running. DLINK gives you one, but it is for Windows, and you can’t really have a Windows box on all the time to that purpose. At least, not reliably Seriously, I have linux boxes that have been up for 450 days with no problems. I can’t let a Windows box go for 3 weeks before all hell breaks loose.

So, I looked around for some UPnP server software I could use and chose MediaTomb which I could easily add using Yum. It is simple enough to run, and lets me add video/photos/music that puts references of those files into a MediaTomb database.

Now you need to scan your DVDs into your library! There are various free packages (like handbrake) which I looked at, but in the end I settled on CloneDVDMobile which is by SlySoft, a great little company that I’ve used for their AnyDVD software which allows me to watch my DVDs on my PC (believe it or not, some DVDs refuse to play nice on a PC).

When you use this software, you are given a whole slew of formats to choose from. I used the generic DivX one that produces AVI files. Most DVDs will offer me the 852×480 resolution, and I max out the quality which goes to 25-29 usually. I use 2-pass deinterlacing and prefer saving it as one big file.

The AVI files it produces look great on my win media player, and I had some trouble figuring out how to make it look nice on my DSM-520, and after much hair pulling it turned out that I just had to alter the aspect ratio in the DSM-520’s settings screen to 16:9 and then it was perfect!

So now I can kick back on my couch and flip through all my DVD titles and watch anything I want with a touch of a button!

Of course now my wife says, “There’s nothing here to watch! It’s all The Matrix and James Bond!”

So now I need to scan in a bunch of Julia Roberts movies.

I live near Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco, and for those of you who don’t know, “The Wharf” is one of the most visited tourist area anywhere in the world. And as such, it is filled with all sorts of products and services that a tourist would be drawn towards, such as Alcatraz T-Shirts, Golden Gate Bridge snow globes, and, yes, you guessed it — Segway tours.

Every now and then I can spy a group of around 20 tourists in single file segwaying around the streets of San Francisco. On this particular day I watched as five of them got into a big pileup and fell over on top of each other in the middle of an intersection! These things are supposed to be easy to ride, but apparently not too easy.

I couldn’t get my camera out in time to catch the tourists flailing around with their segways on top of them, but here they are trying to drag these things up and out of the way of traffic.

Everyone knows how much of a ruckus the Olympic Torch is causing this year as it traipses its way across the world. Well here in San Francisco the officials did not want the same silliness that ensued in Paris so they are doing a variety of things, which apparently include helicopters, motorcycle police, police running, police on bicycles, buses full of police that pour out fresh policemen when the running ones get tired, police on horseback, and a big yellow car shaped like a boat.

Just over my house alone I spotted 10 helicopters, I assume a bunch of them are the media. But who knows? They could be packed with SWAT police ready to rappel down and save the torch. Photos below, click for larger versions.

The crowd was excited and peaceful, I did not see anyone charging the torch with a fire extinguisher or any other fire-intimidating device. Which is great, because, really, why protest the torch for crying out loud! The torch didn’t hurt anyone. And certainly the 80 year-old man carrying the torch in one hand, and his cane in the other, doesn’t need anyone yelling at him for the block or two he gets to participate. You want to protest China? Here’s an idea — go to the embassy. Trust me, you don’t want to cross the San Francisco police.

I love my iPhone! Don’t you love yours? I was what you might call an early adopter however, since I got mine in 1996. That’s right, the original iPhone. Luxurious large touch screen, full keyboard, speakerphone, and … 14.4k modem!

Yep, this thing was around a while back, spawned from the labs at National Semiconductor, launched by a startup I worked for, and then sold to Cisco Systems before they kindly gave up the domain name for an undisclosed sum. That domain name used to be registered in my name — I rue the day I assigned it over to Cisco

My friend Steve threw a party a few weeks back and one of his uninvited guests left him this voicemail the day after. Wait for the image below and click it to hear:

Think you know what the hell this guy is saying? Feel free to comment.