Every time I come back to make an entrance in this thing I end up reading so old posts. And I'm always surprised in what they say. It seems given the number of entries I can't always actually remember the whole entry so it's almost like reading some blog I've never seen before.

I have actually successfully re-arranged my room so I can use the Ethernet-over-power adapters I bought. It doesn't disconnect randomly anymore. I don't know that it's as fast as plugging the desktop directly into the router but then that's not going to happen anyway. I'm getting at least a half megabit per second which doesn't sound like much but it at least it isn't cutting out.

I wanted to start this project: namely a "FreeNAS" computer that would act as my storage. That would both save storage space on my local drive and provide a use my all these extra hard drives I have laying around. And the extra feature of a redundant backup would just an added bonus.

I had thought I had it all setup: ya see if you create a virtual machine with VMWare or [the free] VirtualPC and set something up the way you want you can then "raw write" that virtual machine's virtual hard drive to an actual device like say a USB thumb drive.

This a terrific method for something like say an embedded application like a FreeNAS application that seems to detect hardware every time it is booted and is designed to do the one function and nothing else.

So I set everything up in VirtualPC and did the raw-write to a thumb drive. I thought everything was going well until I tried to boot my chosen PC for the project with the thumb drive. I seem to get nothing but errors of one sort or another. I may be because said chosen PC only has choices like "USB Zip" in the CMOS and not specifically "USB Drive" or whatever. I don't know what the hell is going on. All I know is that the thing I have set up works in a virtual machine, it works with my main PC but does not work on the spare one I want to use as the FreeNAS device. It's really, really annoying. I know little to nothing about FreeBSD (or how to point it to its kernel) but I'm really not supposed to have to know.

The only thing I haven't tried is hooking up an optical drive and actually installing directly to a thumb drive on that actual computer. I have already tried installing the OS to a thumb drive on my main PC then moving the thumb drive to the spare PC and booting but even that doesn't work. So either it is in fact hardware-specific enough it can't handle a hardware swap like that or the CMOS/USB-Zip setting is just too confused to know what the hell it's supposed to be doing.

And just so anyone reading knows, dd for Windows, assuming you can figure out that UNIX way of doing CLI applications, is really a fun application when it does something you really need.


I found have myself watching a lot of videos lately. Not so much TV, but rather the downloaded kind. For instance the series Damages is a fairly good one. I'm not sure if they release episodes on iTunes really late or really early. I just received one today from iTunes ya see. It airs on Tuesdays and a new one has aired in weeks. So either I got this Tuesdays early or am just now getting one from weeks ago.

I have also come across a new program called Miro: it "borrows" a lot of interface choices from iTunes and provide a way to choose "channels" or different TV shows that auto-magically download upon first availability via RSS feeds and BitTorrent. Which is good because I think I have given up on building a DVR and all NBC and NBC subsidiaries (e.g. Sci-Fi channel) have been removed from iTunes. I guess they don't want my money. I'm certainly not going to be buying the shows for any MORE then what iTunes could provide me. So the hell with it. Just have to keep my eye on my hard drive space.

Yes, I'm still watching Buff the Vampire Slayer on DVD. I'm on about disc 3 of Season 6. And almost every disc I rip and and re-encode as a friendly file for media players and later viewing. Which takes quite a while but that's alright. This also means I end up with 80 GBs of VOB files left my HDD just taking up space. Pah. Whatever.

So I usually have only 150 free GBs on my [reportedly] 400 GB storage drive. Thus the good reason to set up a FreeNAS box and store videos there as opposed to my own storage location.

I was also trying to figure how to set up some kind of ghost storage system where in I could boot into Windows9x via USB thumb drive and ghost my drives to the NAS. Sure, I could some Windows PE solution for that, or possibly some version of Linux, but I would much rather do it my way.

But perahps I'm getting distracted. Buffy? Remember? Right. I just saw the now apparently famous musical episode. Okay if you don't like musicals I don't know if that episode would change your mind but it's still a rather fun episode. At least, I like it. I don't know if I would put it on the same level as Restless, but still...I like it quite a lot. Joss Weden really is a genius and deserves a lot more credit then he gets.

I guess I had a lot to get out. I was typing like mad for a while there. And there's probably stuff left to discuss. But I will leave that for another time.  ¶ 3:03 PM 0 Comments