End of the CDs

Well it's finally time to start to decorate the living room and there is nowhere for the 300 odd CDs so I'm investigating streaming music. The Squeezebox touch turned up last week, the output was good but not great compared to my NAD C 541 so it's now plug it into a Music Fidelity M1 DAC via a coax. The sound is pretty awesome.

The music server was a problem. I'd rather spend my dosh on hi-fi then more computer bits and I don't want a PC running 24 hours a day. My original Asus EEE PC 701 came to the rescue. It's meagre 4 Gb drive is only really big enough for the OS (Ubuntu) so a USB 250 Gb external hard drive was added. Installed Samba to share the drive and copy songs and the Squeezebox server. Playing either FLAC or Apple Lossless consumes about 40% of the CPU. (It can cope with 192kHz FLACs by the way.)

The first problem was I don't want the automout system, so the drive needs to be added to /etc/fstab. Its also vital to get the permission correct or the Squeezeboxserver user can't read the drive. The drive was formatted VFAT and the whole thing networked via 85 Mbs Homeplug.

iTunes on a Mac has been used to rip, all Apple Lossless of course. There are also a few FLACs around. I would of used FLAC throughout but I like the automation that I got from iTunes. It can be set to automatically rip and eject the CD afterwards. (I know other programmes must do this as well but I was too eager to get going.)

I've used DirSyncPro to incrementally copy the music to the server as I rip it. This process has caused (and is still causing) a few headaches since it uses the file's time stamp to control the syncing. The problem here is the Mac's filesystem is HFS+ and the FAT filesystem don't get on 100%. FAT for reasons only known to Bill Gates and his cronies rounds the time to an even number of seconds. DirectSyncPro has options to get around this (and daylight saving time problems).

The next step is upgrade the server to a HP ProLiant Microserver so I can increase the harddrive space (and back-up!).

Richard Stallman Talk in Brighton

Copyright vs Community in the Age of Computer Networks

http://www.theiet.org/local/uk/southeast/sussex/rs-soft-pat.cfm

Aliens 'already exist on earth', Bulgarian scientists claim - Telegraph

Aliens 'already exist on earth', Bulgarian scientists claim - Telegraph

It seems if the telegraph can't find real news they print drivel. If aliens are here why do they chose crop circles to communicate? In fact only wheat crops. Never in paddy or maize field (which feed more of the population).

Starsuckers celebrity hoax dupes tabloids | Media | guardian.co.uk

Starsuckers celebrity hoax dupes tabloids | Media | guardian.co.uk

I knew it! Apparently Madonna was never even married to Guy Richie.

Victorian 'ghost' picked up by Google Street View - Telegraph

Victorian 'ghost' picked up by Google Street View - Telegraph

Who are the experts that have been called in? Who called them in?

Science doesn't make good comedy? You must be joking . . . - Telegraph

Science doesn't make good comedy? You must be joking . . . - Telegraph

Drop box and TrueCrypt

I've been using Dropbox for a few months now. For those of you that don't know, its a cross-platform multi-PC sync tool. Essentially, there is a folder on your PC and its contents are constantly in sync with Dropbox's server database. The result is when I use multiple PCs, such as at work and home, the content of the dropbox folder is always in sync. You get 2GB of storage for free and I've got to say it works perfectly.

My only problem when I use it with TrueCrypt. This creates an encrypted filesystem within my dropbox folder. Its all very nice but TrueCrypt locks the file. The result is if I forget to unmount the encrypted filesystem before I close my PC, dropbox can't sync it in time. Nothing is lost, since dropbox will store the data as a conflicted file, but it won't be synced with other computers until I restart that PC.