VHS to DVD Conversion

Published on March 8, 2013 in Home IT. 1 Comment Tags: , , .

A while back, maybe a few years back, Kristin said that I should convert our tapes to DVDs and get rid of them.

She may have said this a few times.

Then it made it onto my official “to-do” list, and I am pleased to say that I am now taking this seriously and have acquired the means to do so.

At one point I thought I would just use Windows Media Center and record from the TV setting.  This seemed simple and genius – I have TV tuners to spare.

It also doesn’t work.  Sigh.  Some technical reasons that I don’t really get prevent this from happening.

From there I was stuck, but the Internet is full of information.   I found this article and promptly picked the worst, cheapest converter on the list.  Reviews at both Amazon and NewEgg convinced me that with a little perseverance I could make this work.  I’ve modified drivers, spun up Linux VMs to repackage installers, etc. so I hoped that I could make it work.

Turns out I didn’t need to hope.  This Kworld USB converter works fine with Windows 7.

The important bits were covered by this NewEgg review:

Here’s how it works. You plug the USB into your computer. You plug the audio cable into your computer input as well. You install the driver from the driver disk, then you install the two porgrams from the program disk which are both included in the box. You then hook your VCR up to the RCA or S-Video jack. You attach your audio cable from the VCR to the RCA Jacks. If you only have one audio cable, use the left channel. Open the Power Director program and use the capture tab on the upper left side of the screen. It should then look for the signal, and then show you what your VCR is doing on the little screen. To record, DO NOT use the red button on the program. I keep getting copyright protected errors. Instead, press the button on the kworld device (it’s oval and should have a green light lit next to it). It will start recording the video. Make sure you have it going into the file you want and in the proper format. It works, but could use much better instructions.

One brief stumbling block that I had was that I wasn’t getting any video.  Messing with the VCR, it appears that the front outputs are no longer working – ore are secretly inputs?  No idea, but plugging the cables into the back of the VCR brought up the image fine.  Issue number two is that there wasn’t any audio during the capture so the only way I could judge audio sync was by stopping the recording and watching the preview.  Not good.  Googling it led me to this forum entry and this answer:

You can always monitor the output audio of your VCR (headphone) or video camera speaker while playing back the video to be captured, or also use the windows recording mixer to monitor, so you can know if your material have audio or your audio channel is having any problem. But if you can find out how to monitor the audio level during capturing on PD9, please let me know.

It was really that easy, I opened up the “Recording Devices” control panel by right clicking on the little speaker system icon by the clock.  Then I checked this box:

ListenLineIn

Check this box!

Now I can hear the capture audio while it is in flight over my PC speakers and have a good idea of the incoming volume.

Next up – re-encoding the files in Handbrake for portability.

–Nat

 

Apple Muffins

Published on March 1, 2013 in Recipes. 0 Comments Tags: .

This is about feeling better about eating “bad” food by making some “good” food.

As I ate leftovers for lunch last Saturday – delicious reheated take out Chinese – I got into a bit of a funk. What is in that food? How much MSG had I just eaten for the second day in a row?

So I decided to make some muffins. Apple muffins, made from things in the fridge and the pantry. I won’t claim that they are “healthy” as they are made with whole milk and butter, but at least I know what’s going on.

Delicious Muffins

Delicious Muffins

There is also a loaf of Honey Wheat bread made from my recipe doing its thing in the bread maker. I feel a little better now…

And I really hope that Gabe enjoys his afternoon snack!

Recipe:

2 cups flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 cup sugar
1/4 teaspoon freshly ground nutmeg
1/4 teaspoon freshly ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon salt
---
1 cup milk
1 egg
1/4 cup vegetable oil or butter, melted
---
1 cup sweet-tart medium to large apple, cored, peeled and chopped

Preheat oven to 400 degrees F. Grease 12-cup muffin tin or use paper liners. With a wire whisk combine first set of ingredients. In another bowl, combine wet ingredients. Add chopped apple and wet ingredients to dry ingredients. Stir only until moistened. Spoon into prepared muffin pan. Bake for 20 minutes or until tested done with tester.  Credit goes to baking.about.com for having this simple recipe that had a lot less going on than many of the others I looked at.

I added 1/8 tsp course “in the raw” sugar to each muffin before baking.  I think I’ll double that for the next batch.  Added a good touch of sweetness and little desirable texture.  I also used whole wheat flour – today I bought some non-bread white flour for another go at these and will probably do one cup wheat, one cup white to “lighten” them up a bit.

–Nat

Now with better performance…

Published on November 27, 2012 in Home IT and IT. 0 Comments Tags: .

We’ve been trying to make Magento perform better – and one of the most simple things to do is have your php code cached. APC is a package that does this…

Since Ubuntu VM is of an ancient distribution (8.04LTS) I couldn’t do it the super easy Zend Framework way, but this blog got me through.

http://www.mcdruid.co.uk/content/installing-apc-on-ubuntu-linux-and-benchmarking-drupal-6-performance-improvement

Down in the comments there is a helpful post about using wget and compiling it – worked like a charm! Then just move the apc.php file into your wordpress directory and bam, off you go!

Probably should secure that somehow…

–Nat

Furniture

Published on November 16, 2012 in House Work. 0 Comments Tags: .

We are doing some “Gabifying” of the basement and need an 8′ long barrier and toy holder.

Thinking of this:

http://www.instructables.com/id/Cheap-easy-low-waste-bookshelves/#step1

Painted like this:

http://www.thenester.com/2010/08/painting-pine-furniture.html

might be a good fit.

Any thoughts out there?

–Nat

Crashing Crashplan

Published on September 24, 2012 in IT. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

I’ve recently started to use Crashplan to back up a rather large file server. It was crashing repeatedly around ~1.1TB and ~300k files.

The error message we were seeing on our remote host was “target lost” which led us to many hours troubleshooting disk performance and network connectivity. After attaching a “local” disk to the VM for local backups, waiting the ~12-14 hours for the initial backup to get to the same spot – and then fail – it appeared that it was something more systemic.

Contacting Crashplan support yielded this very helpful response:

Crashplan Rep Response:
It appears that the CrashPlan backup engine is running out of memory.

Running Notepad or any other text-editor as an Admin, edit the CrashPlan engine’s CrashPlanService.ini file to allow it to use more java memory:

1. Stop the backup engine: http://support.crashplan.com/doku.php/how_to/stop_and_start_engine

2. Locate the Notepad program, right-click and Launch as Administrator

3. Go to File > Open, and navigate to C:\Program Files\CrashPlan\CrashPlanService.ini

4. Find the following line in the file:

-Xmx512m

5. Edit to something larger such as 640, 768, 896, or 1024. E.g.:

-Xmx1024m

This sets the maximum amount of memory that CrashPlan can use. CrashPlan will not use that much until it needs it. I would recommend starting out setting it to 768, and go higher only if you continue experiencing problems. You can set it as high as 2048 on 32-bit systems, or even higher on 64-bit systems.

6. Start the backup engine.

Outcome:
We set it to -Xmx1024m after increasing the memory allocation by 1GB as well. The server is running like a top and backups are consistently running successfully.

Troubleshooting backups, especially mulit-TB datasets, can be a huge pain as they take so long to redo and reproduce. Props to Crashplan for getting back to me within two hours on our free trial, which has since been converted to their family unlimited plan for two years. *thumbs up*

–Nat

The Wonders of Communication

Published on September 6, 2012 in TJ Expansion. 0 Comments

Just a couple nights ago, Gabe and I were chilling out on the main floor while Kristin was upstairs. Just before going upstairs, she had decided that we would try to keep our pantry, full height cupboard closed with the rings that snap together as the velcro loop was a slight PITA.

Doing his thing, Gabe walked over there and pulled down on the rings, causing them to come off. You are supposed to pick you battles with your toddler according to the Internet, so I just followed him and stood a couple feet away, observing. He pulled out of the pantry a big bag of candy that we had purchased after Halloween either last year or the year before, inside it had a jumble of mini-bags of Skittles, double packs of Starbursts and then a variety of other candy that had been consolidated into it.

He loves this bag, it is always the first thing he takes out if he opens the right hand door. Pulling it out for the umpteenth time, he sat down with his legs sprawled out on either side of the bag. He reached in and grabbed a bag of Swedish Fish, which he carefully laid on the ground beside him. Next up was a bag of Skittles. I asked him if I could have it, and he held it out for me. I took it, and that’s when a little magic happened.

He made the “more” sign to me, he eyes asking the question. I said yes, I would like more, and made the sign back to him. He proceeded to hand me five or six more bags of Skittles until he hit gold, a Starburst. He put the Swedish Fish back in the bag, picked the bag back up and put it back in the pantry. Then he shut the pantry door and went off, Starburst clutched tightly in his fist.

Maybe it was a little thing, but that bit of back and forth communication, and him wondering what I wanted, well, it was very special couple of minutes.

–Nat

Editing DNS in Ubuntu 12.04 Server

Published on August 20, 2012 in IT. 0 Comments Tags: , .

http://askubuntu.com/questions/130452/how-do-i-add-a-dns-server-via-resolv-conf

That link really helped me out.  Essentially you just follow through this example:

Edit the /etc/network/interfaces file. The same configurations that you would have written to resolv.conf can now be in the same file as your network adapter configurations like the example below:

# The loopback network interface
auto lo iface lo inet loopback

# The primary network interface
auto eth0 iface eth0 inet static
address 192.168.1.2
netmask 255.255.255.0 
network 192.168.0.0 
broadcast 192.168.1.255 
gateway 192.168.1.1

dns-nameservers 75.75.75.75, 75.75.76.76
dns-search local
dns-domain local.domain

I found this sample very handy in setting up a 12.04 Server instance. So many posts are about the network manager, but that isn’t available with out installing many other packages, etc.

–Nat

Steam & Your Small SSD

Published on July 31, 2012 in Gaming, Home IT and IT. 0 Comments Tags: , .

I just finished “upgrading” my main PC for the first time in almost two years, and this is the first mainboard and CPU upgrade in nearly four.  For those of you reading familiar with my PC upgrade habits you know that is like having and Ice Age occur, having the glaciers come and retreat and the Earth turning green again between upgrades.  In truth, this is fairly minor upgrade in that I bought nothing new, save a $30 case in order to pull it off.

Well, in truth I did buy a shiny, new 180GB Intel Solid State Drive.  Yes, it is Sandforce based, which I vowed never to buy… but it is also Intel, which I always promise to buy but then shrink back from the cost… *shrug*  I had completely grown out of the 40GB Gen2 Intel SSD however, and so this purchase was completely spousal approved.  I am typing from the very machine which I put together, fancy water cooling kit and all.  It’s a little louder than I would prefer, but the big upgrade comes a year from now and I’ll save the money and trouble until that time…

ANYWAY – the main event.  I put Steam and all of my Steam games on a Western Digital Black 640GB 7200 RPM drive.  It is plenty speedy for the load times for games, but Steam annoyingly always took a while to launch and the UI was painfully laggy compared to the apps installed onto the SSD boot drive.  A bigger SSD makes this all better, right?  Well, at any given time I have over 200GB of Steam games installed, not too mention the ~30GB of Blizzard games sitting on the hard drive.  There wasn’t room in the budget for a 512GB or 600GB SSD (I paid $130 for 180GB, a 512 is at least $350 if not $4-500), especially given the minimal increase games gain by being installed to an SSD.

Simple solution, right?  Install Steam to the SSD, install the games to the spinning cheap drive, call it a day!

If only it were that easy!  Steam installs all of the games you manage through it in the same directory that you install the Steam application into.  Remember, I have only a 180GB drive and 200+GB of games installed.

Enter “symbolic links” and easy apps like http://www.traynier.com/software/steammover/ that allow you to move installed games to a secondary drive by using a clever trick of NTFS.   This means you can have your cake and eat it too – a minority of your games are on the SSD, along with the core Steam files, meaning the best possible performance while the games you aren’t actively playing or are too big are more economically stored on spinning disk.  I started using this tool, which meant I copied my downloaded games from the steamapps/common directory from my old Steam install (the same secondary disk was in my old system, carried it over to the new system) over to the SSD, then the handy tool moved the data back to the secondary directory on the spinning drive.

This took a while, even at ~100+MB a second.  Plus, writing data to an SSD wears it out, so it should be minimized if possible.  I got to Rage, the newest game from Id that is ~21GB on disk and decided there had to be a better way.

I found a great work around.  Now, I create the same directory in the SSD steamapps/common directory and copy the .exe and other miscellaneous top level files from the spinning drive, which is about 30-50MB depending on the game, which takes less than a second.  Next, I use the tool to “move” the game from the SSD to the secondary drive.  Finally, I cut the massive files out of the original steamapps/common/game directory and paste them into the new directory on the same drive and partition.  Since this is a simple modification of the file system tree and no data gets moved, it is essentially instantaneous.

Win for me!  Hopefully a win for you!

Note – the Valve games put their darn big files right in the root of the steamapps directory, so this relocation trick doesn’t even work on them.  If you are planning on playing TF:2, L4D, CS:S, etc you are going to need a decent amount of room on the SSD to pull this off.  I wouldn’t do it with less than an 80GB SSD.

–Nat

(also, not shut out in July! :) )

VMware Technology Network Subscription – Bring it Back!

Published on June 28, 2012 in Home IT, IT and VMware. 0 Comments Tags: , .

One of the biggest beefs I’ve had with VMware over the last few years, and I apologize to everyone to whom I’ve already ranted about this to, is that they don’t have program that is like Microsoft’s TechNet.

What’s so great about TechNet, you might ask?

With the TechNet subscription you get access to everything that Microsoft offers  - with full retail keys.  This isn’t some time bombed trial, this is the real deal.  You get access to all of their software from the distant past right up through early release betas of their software – like the upcoming Windows 8 and Server 2012.  This is essential for long term test VMs and testing software with what can be complicated, involving installs like Active Directory and Exchange, for example.  Also, you get access to the creme of their productivity software crop like Project and Visio.  Best of all its “only” $200 to start and $150 to renew.  If that sounds expensive, remember that a single Server 2008 R2 license can  run you $700 alone, and the productivity software can also run hundreds of dollars.

Why might Microsoft sell this subscription if they could get so much more money for each project by forcing you to buy real licenses for real products?  It’s pretty simple, really. As individuals, we are not going to buy this software at these prices, and would then turn to free or cheaper alternatives.  Microsoft must know that  TechNet sub is something a very technical person is going to buy – like IT Professionals.  What IT Professionals use at home directly influences what they use at work – and business purchases are Microsoft’s bread and butter, they’ll tell you this to your face no matter how much it seems like they are about conquering the home PC.  Having your home PCs run Windows and Office is just another way to keep business running what their employees know and can be efficient with.

Back to the VMware Technology Network Subscription (VMTN).  They used to have a similar program that let you use full versions of their software in your home and labs and many attribute this program with the rapid adoption of VMware in the Enterprise space – since you could play with it on the cheap and gain confidence in it, then it made sense to champion it within your organization.  VMware discontinued it about five years ago (or so…) when they made clear that Windows GSX Server (VMware Server) and VMware player were free products that could be used.  GSX has totally gone the way of the dinosaur now, and while VMware player is immensely useful in some tasks, it doesn’t allow you to play with the Enterprise features that you might actually want from VMware.

VMware does offer a free version of their bare metal hypervisor, ESXi.  The problem?  This Hypervisor also does not allow you to experiment/implement any of the Enterprise features that differentiate VMware from the rest – and it doesn’t even allow for any scripting automation, another of VMware’s strengths.  This very much limits the usefulness of the platform.  It should be noted that you can get sixty day trials of just about everything VMware offers easily online, but the issue there is that the “big” offerings like SRM and VDI are so intricate in their setup that it can take easily longer than sixty days to get them fully off the ground if you are just doing it in your free time.  You also have to completely scrap the entire setup, from ESXi to vCenter to these addons as they are all tied to that same sixty day time frame.  Want to do it again?  You need a new email address to sign up for the trial again!

The elephant in the room is this – Microsoft is very serious about taking VMware’s ball and going home with it.  Virtualization was the #1 focus of Server 2008 R2 SP1 and it appears that Server 2012 will continue the trend.  IT Professionals that are using TechNet will have easy access to using Hyper-V in all of its glory (and 2012 is looking much easier/sweeter than 2008 R2 SP1) already.

Even with my VCP and years of VMware experience along with a fairly sizable investment in specialized RAID hardware for native disk redundancy in my home lab, Server 2012 looks mighty attractive for my home platform.  It doesn’t need to be this way, VMware.

I am not the only one who thinks so.

Agree?  Raise your voice.  VMware is missing a big opportunity here and anyone invested in VMware from a technical expertise level or from a shareholder level knows the dangers of competing with Microsoft (just ask Novell or the other companies they have left bloodied in their wake.)  Do the right thing, VMware.  Let me pay you a little money so I can recommend your products to those with the big checkbooks.

–Nat

50/50

Published on May 27, 2012 in Movies. 0 Comments
5050image

Kristin picked out a movie at Redbox as a surprise, and she picked a movie that I hadn’t really heard of, 50/50.

Wow, it was really good.

It’s a “comedy” about dealing with cancer, and I was really impressed with the way it took a serious topic, worked it for some laughs, but at the same time had complex, flawed characters and made us care about them.  I have never watched such an up/down (laugh one minute, cry the next) movie before.

You should just pick it up, it’ll be better if you don’t read about it too much first.

Good pick, Kristin!

– Nat