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To kill or not to kill

A Pipe and a Keyboard Posted on by

I see it’s over 500 days since I posted anything here.

Ouch!

One of the main reasons I haven’t posted is that software of late has become remarkably stable and I just don’t seem to be coming up against problems these days.

I recently set up Matomo Web Analytics on a server. One of the many reasons I did this was to compare traffic over several sites. I run quite a few sites both for myself and for others and wanted to see if there were any sites that could be culled. To my surprise, this site is still getting visits: nothing hectic but it is still active, and is by no means bottom of the pile.

The majority of visits seem to be concerned about the Iomega iConnect which is a piece of kit which has long vanished off the market. It was always very problematic and my one is now gathering dust on a shelf somewhere. Obviously others are still using it and by the sound of it, still having problems.

The majority of other posts are mainly concerned with issues I had found in previous versions of Linux Mint or WordPress. Over time these issues seem to have been resolved, but presumably people are still running older versions of Mint (or WordPress) and are still coming across those problems.

So the question is whether or not to consign this site to history. I originally set it up as a sort of reference notebook for myself which I could refer to if a problem reoccurred. I haven’t used it for that purpose for a very long time.

Or maybe I’ll start posting again?

On second thoughts, I have enough on my plate.

Serving up media (Part 1)

A Pipe and a Keyboard Posted on by

A couple of weeks ago I embarked on a wee project.

I have a fairly large collection of LPs, CDs and even a few cassettes that have survived the years.  I decided it was time to digitise the lot onto one drive acting as a media server.

Why bother, you ask?  There are a few reasons why I am doing it.  The main reason is to create a central store for all my media, so at least I know where it all is.  Also the fact that it is all stored on a small box not much bigger than a paperback means the “hard copies” can be put away into storage.  As it is a media server, its contents can be accessed from anywhere in the house by using a laptop or television.

For my server, I am using my otherwise redundant Iomega iConnect box which has a built in media server.  The media is all stored on a 1Tb external drive plugged into the iConnect.

The media is accessed either on laptops or via an XBox which is connected both to the network and the main television in the house.  The software for the laptops was one of the areas where I did have some difficulty however.

As a Linux user, I had the option of using one of the main two packages – Banshee or VLC Media Player.  I had problems with each of these. where VLC took an age to connect and then had a nasty habit of duplicating everything, and Banshee was just plain flakey.

A good friend then recommended XBMC Media Center.  This is available for all the main platforms so I installed the PPA for Ubuntu and installed the package.

I was impressed.

XBMC is not just an application but can actually be installed as a standalone operating system.  To say it is graphically rich is an understatement.  It is also fairly intuitive and I had no problem in hooking it up to my server (it automatically recognises most protocols including UPnP which the iConnect uses). 

XBMC

So far I have only had a couple of minor problems with the programme.  The first is that it tends to just vanish if memory gets a bit tight (which just means I don’t run any memory intensive programs such as VirtualBox when I am running it).  The second was a little more problematic – I discovered that some skins, while claiming to be mouse enabled, in fact weren’t.  The problem then is that there is no way of changing the skin to one that works.  In the end I used brute force and attacked the XBMC configuration file (home/.xbmc/userdata/guisettings.xml).  I deliberately corrupted the skin entry (under <lookandfeel>) and then restarted the program.  As it couldn’t find the corrupted skin it defaulted back to the standard one.

Problems notwithstanding, this is now my media player of choice.