I have a lot of things working well, gathered from a lot of resources. I tweaked some scripts to make them work better:

• I created an /ffp/ directory for my personal scripts.
• I have an rsync script that mirrors the ffp installation on the USB stick (/mnt/usb/ffp) to the primary hard drive (/mnt/HD_a2). This means I only have to maintain the USB-copy, but if the USB is not available, I'll still have working stuff on the regular drive.
• I have a few (small) scripts that I use for cron jobs, rather than putting it all directly into the cron task: has the advantage of being able to use logger to add syslog messages.

» Read More

After a long hiatus, I'm back to trying to finish customizing our NAS; life with kid means your extra time doesn't always get spent the way you'd like, and I've migrated to a new laptop running ubuntu en route, I should write about that, too.

» Read More

Want to get DVDs playing on the laptop that is running gentoo that I'll only have to use for a few more days before I get a new shiny (purple!) one. I know, makes no sense.. but hey, learning is good, right?

• Use xine-ui. It got the farthest first.
• Make sure your region is set
• Go through the few hoops you need to get raw i/o working. I pegged/tanked RAM w/o raw access -- every player segfaulted as a result (mplayer, xine, vlc). Use the raw device.
• If it's an encrypted DVD (and you have libdvdcss installed), I found that I needed to change something in my environment to get it to correctly decrypt the disk: export DVDCSS_METHOD=disc -- I did it on the command line since I was just testing. Setting this finally let the DVD play.. with dropped frames all over the place.. but still.. progress!
• And last, but not least, the simplest instruction from xine's help: change the niceness level of xine.. nice --5 xine

And poof! movie! with menu! rock on

I purchased (a shamefully long time ago, welcome to tech live as a mom with a toddler) a DNS-323 (and two 1T drives) with the hope of moving most of our shared files onto it. Now that we don't record TV shows anymore, having that box on all the time is just a power drain. So: the goal is a DNS-323 with all of our files (photos, music, finance stuff, some movies, etc.) onto the first volume of that drive, and then using an rsync shadow with hardlinks to do nightly backups to the second drive. Some RAID configurations have been reported as less than stable, and using a mirror configuration requires both drives to be active: a nightly rsync backup will do.

» Read More

How did I not know about this sooner?

Trying to build a particularly large maven project would consume so much CPU that my poor laptop would quit because it was sweating too much.

I used schedtool to set an affinity to only one of the two CPUs available on my dual-core laptop for the shell I used to launch the build, and voila! Things don't get as hot, and my system stays responsive. *phew!*

• schedtool