Micks' Musings

Recently an update to Microsoft Windows caused some PCs to bluescreen on reboot. The other day my Fedora Core 11 File server installed some updates and afterwards my music share was empty of all our music. Fortunately it was caused by a security update which stopped the soft links working until I added "wide links=yes" to the smb.conf (samba file server software configuration file). The moral of the story? Sometimes shit happens and you have to clean it up.

The kind people at the Australian Media Centre Community offered some advice on the use of the Microsoft Codec for AVIs and the use of Media Control for subtitles. As a result I have enabled the ffdshow codec and I now have subtitles and Media Control working properly.

We have been using a PC to play music, movies, TV shows and games on the lounge room TV for years. We started with Windows 98, flirted with Linux (briefly), moved on to Windows XP, Windows XP Media Centre Edition, Windows Vista and finally on to Windows 7. The hardware started as the PC that was left over after upgrading and finally became a PC built from the ground up to be the Media Centre. Nowadays you need powerful computer hardware for your media centre PC. The ability to play High Definition content and to record multiple high definition digital TV channels means that the PC that drops of the end of the line is not going to cut it any more. Our Media centre has a dual core CPU, 4GB of RAM, a good video card, four digital TV tuners, Blu-Ray drive and lots of disk space for recording TV. To be able to play blu-ray you need a good video card and lots of processing power. To avoid problems at least 4GB of memory is a minimum as you don't want your Media Centre swapping program me...

Who needs backups? My parents went on a holiday to Europe last year. My father had a new Digital SLR and on the last day in Italy, just before they were about to return to Australia, it was stolen. If he had backed up his photos on to a laptop, for example, he would have them now. The camera is replaceable but the photos were not. I am sure everyone has a story about lost data. Everyone needs backups. So how can you backup a file server when the amount of data far exceeds any backup media you can afford? Get a second file server? In my case I make sure the stuff I do not want to lose is backed up. Pictures, media that would be hard to replace or take a lot of effort and time to reproduce (I spent nearly a year converting LPs - vinyl - to digital form) and scanned documents are all backed up to external disks and onto DVDs. I think my family have the message now. One of my sisters has bought a 1TB external drive and a 320GB portable disk for off site backups. My mother has a 500GB ex...

In the Big W Christmas Catalogue is a TV Zapper. Imagine a device that you can use to turn off any TV in the world! Imagine what will happen if you use it in a bar to turn off the football or basketball! TV Rage!!! Perhaps it just mutes the sound? Unlikely but if true it may save a few lives!! I must be missing something. If you do not like the TV being on in a bar why don't you just move further away or go to another bar which doesn't have a TV. Here is a hint which will help some people to live a little longer - most of the people at the bar want the TV on!!! Here is another helpful hint - some of those people have been drinking and get violent when they are drunk!!

This is not a reference to The Who song "mama's got a squeezebox", it is a hands on account of the Logitech Squeezebox Boom and Classic (or Squeezebox 3). The Logitech Squeezebox (originally by Slim Devices but Logitech knows a good thing when it buys it) is a Network Streaming Music Player. There are a few models but I will only be commenting on the Boom and Classic. The Boom has speakers and the Classic connects to your stereo so the two devices have two different purposes. Both can connect to your home network using wireless or Ethernet. You will need to set up a Squeezebox Server or use the online storage option. I have a computer that is on all the time so I installed the server software on that. Both squeezeboxes, once configured with the Network details, found the squeezebox server and can then be configured using the web interface. The Boom is located in the main bedroom and has been set up as an alarm clock, it displays the time when not playing music and i...

I have been using Windows Vista Media Centre as a Home Theatre PC for several years. In that time the Music Library has been polished, album art and track information cleaned up so all albums have the correct information associated with them and nothing shows up as unknown in the artist view. I can tolerate some things, such as podcasts , without album names. With Windows 7 this was not the case. After adding the music folders to the Music library there were 74 tracks listed as unknown. This brings us to the first recommendation - if you can you should create a readonly network share for your music so that Windows Media Player cannot change anything. If Windows Media Player does not like your tags it can end up removing them - I ended up with over a thousand tracks with the carefully crafted album information removed. Luckily I had a backup (and had not overwritten it). This was probably caused by the lookup of album information that Windows Media Player does. I have turned off every...