Today was absolutely beautiful. Not too hot, not too cold, no bugs or snakes. Kinsee loves to go for walks, but in town they get real boring, with the same old sidewalks. Out in the stick it’s completely different. We logged roughly two miles up in virgin old growth forest. To tell the truth, I saw things (and parts of the property) that I had never seen before.
There’s one ridge that is covered in Karst topography (sinkholes), with a couple that would swallow a basketball court. And tons of dolomite outcrops that I really want to run my Axial crawler on. We hiked that ridge all the way to one of the property lines, then headed back on the road from the gate. Kinsee was stoked all the way, but I could tell she was getting hot and tired. When we got to the creek, she just laid down in it and got cooled off enough to make it back tot he house.
After that, I cut and split some firewood and rode over to the neighbors’ to chat a while and see if hunting season was still in (which it isn’t for the most part).
Kinsee then decided that another walk was in order, so we walked the loop. Up to the cabin, barn, through the wood trail, to the old house and back to the main house. That was the second mile. I know she’s wrecked, she’s down stairs now nodding off. She should be good for the rest of the week.
Finding new ground won’t be hard, but what will be is the terrain. Most of the farm is on the side of a mountain. I guess it’ll be short jaunts till she (and I) get used to climbing mountains to get new ground to put boots on.
Ok, so living out in the sticks isn’t the most high tech, but I think I got a couple things worked out. Number 1 on the list, TV. I really hate paying for a ton of channels that I never watch, and well, I get all of two over the air, what’s a guy to do?
Leverage some damned tech, that’s what. I had a Vista media center PC (note the past tense, see previous post about WD drives). Well, it’s got some new drives and is sporting 7. In a nutshell, I like it. I put both of my USB tuners on it and it now records two channels at once (freakin spiffy). Ok, so now I have some bigassed .wtv files, wtf is a wtv file you ask. It’s a new flavor of the old dvr-ms format. There are tools on the market that convert the latter to other formats, but that’s pedestrian and very ‘hands on’. Remember that Archos pmp? It doesn’t play wtv or dvr-ms files. So…
I got this idea, yeah, dangerous at times. If’ I’m going to be DVRing TV at Mom’s, why not boost her tech level and redo the whole media thing for her. She recently remodeled a room upstairs into a den. I ended up donating a 26” LCD TV and two 360’s, as well as the DVR PC. Now she’s got media extenders in the den and down in the living room. I had to relocate the router to the basement so I could get ethernet to the living room, but that wasn’t a big issue. The den 360 is riding G wireless. Not the best for streaming video, but it does a good job at any rate. But what about those wtv files?
Well, it just so happens that MS put out a product that is kind of odd for them. It does a number of things amazingly well, but is relatively inexpensive (stupidly inexpensive is more like it). Windows Home Server. Yeah, a server OS that runs on old hardware (and screams on server hardware), that does workstation backups, web hosting, and media archiving. This is where it gets juicy. When you tell media center to archive recorded TV, you can also tell it to convert the wtv files directly to wmv for the Zune (yup, the Archos plays wmv files like a champ).
Now, every night my DVR PC gets backed up, and the recorded tv gets converted to a file type I can simply copy to my Archos, take home, dock with my TV and enjoy my fav shows out in the boonies. Problem freakin solved. Oh, WHS can be had for $85 from amazon. If you’re interested in WHS, google it. HP and Acer also sell out of the box WHServers. I put it on my Dell PowerEdge SC440. I’m going to get a non-eval copy next week.
Well, that’s about it for now. Have a great holiday season.
38 Years and counting.
This is just a test of Windows Live Writer. Nothing special, so just move along, nothing to see here.
I know about rule 1, but this shit is rediculous.
AVOID these PoSs at all costs:
Yeah, I got my hate on for some WD crapware. In the past month, I’ve had two of these enclosures simply die (did pull the 250Gb working drives), one WD 500Gb developed the click of death (no data recovery, was also a boot drive) and another 500Gb that the SMART freaked out on (barely got data off it), and now another MyBook 500 where the drive won’t spool up. That’s 5, yes FIVE, separate pieces of shit that have gone tits up, and all are Western Digital.
DO NOT TRUST THESE DRIVES!
I used to despise IBM drives for the same reason, but this by far exceeds that level of craptacular failure rate. All told it’s looking like 1.5Tb of dead drive space, with a measly 500Gb of salvageable drives pulled frm two of the enclosures. I will be Ghosting those two over to some Seagate upgrades very soon, just to be sure.
Woot! This thing rocks. One drawback was having to pony up for the H265 codec to play all my mp4 movies. Still, pretty badass with a 5″ screen, 250Gb HD, and the helmet cam & DVR snapon. And yes, I am writing this using an Opera widget.