Ramblings of a Mad-Lunatic

With the re-encoding of my music collection something strange started to occur, for some reason a number of folders were displayed garbled in Vista in a format such as this example:

TFNZPF~F

Something was definitely afoot. Mystified a google quest began. In the end I discovered a tip to use the easily forgotten "ls -Q" option (which shows file names between double quotes). And lo and behold, it turns out that some of my folders had a ... trailing space. Apparently abcde doesn't clean them up if they exist in the CDDB entry, so they're written in the folder name and the album tags, another thing to keep in mind I guess.

One quick:

ls -QR | grep " \"" | grep ./

from the root folder of the abcde tree at least gave me a short list of impacted folder names, which was easily fixed by a simple rename ...

One other thing to keep in mind is that folders with trailing dots shows the same behavior as well.

:: Using Samba Chapter 5.4: Name Mangling and Case ::

For a while now I have been thinking to add a new "Play Machine" to the collection, with the following specifications in mind:

- Small footprint
- Reasonably Quiet
- Low Power Usage
- Low Price

After an extensive online search featuring the still somewhat overpriced Epia based systems and some cute and interesting embedded setups I finally settled for the current wave of Atom-based computers.

The Atom enables you to build low-power setups while maintaining x86 compatibility. It's not the fastest chip out there, but I felt it would do the job well enough, and there are a few motherboards available if you want to build your own.

As luck turns out a local computer store offered the MSI Wind PC for just 299 Euro, and I couldn't resist grabbing one as a birthday present to myself

:: Darksaber, Mark III ::
:: MSI Wind PC 120 ::
:: MSI Wind News and Reviews ::

In the past week my trusty SN25P was experiencing some stability issues, and this right after the hard disk upgrade!

However, a quick investigation turned up the culprit: the original nvidia 40x40x10 North Bridge cooler decided it had enough.

Local computer stores didn't have the part available, so I turned to eBay and found a UK reseller who did not charge an arm and a leg for s/h.

Today the part arrived, and after a lengthy surgery (the downside of this little cooler is that it sits right in the middle of the box, so a near-full disassemble is required) everything is peachy again

One little part, but it makes a lot of difference ...

"ABCDE (A Better CD Encoder) is a CD ripper for Linux and UNIX-like operating systems, operated entirely from the command line. Starting the program without either command line switches or a config file will query FreeDB for the CD currently in the drive, display a list of possible matches to choose from, then rip, encode, and tag the files. As of version 2.3.0, ABCDE can rip to Vorbis, FLAC, MP3, Wav, and others. ABCDE can also normalise the extracted audio."

I've decided to re-encode my Music Collection to FLAC and VBR MP3s with this wonderful CLI tool.

read on to find my .abcde.conf file

:: A Better CD Encoder ::
:: Project details for abcde ::
:: abcde: Command Line Music CD Ripping for Linux ::
:: FLAC - Free Lossless Audio Codec ::
:: LAME - Hydrogenaudio Knowledgebase ::

Tydirium, my shuttle SN25P based system, is now 3 years old and I figured it was time for a little upgrade. Out went the 2x 300GB Western Digital Disks, in went 2 shiny new Seagate Barracuda 1TB Hard Drives.

As I am planning to convert my music collection to FLAC (more on that later!) I needed the extra disk space, and dual drives are required as my linux rig is set up in RAID1.

On the old setup only a 200GB "data" partition was mirrored, but with the removal of Windows XP from the system it was time to go fully mirrored. My initial plan was to migrate to a mirrored LVM setup, but it turns out you need three devices for this to work (two data, one log) and the documentation is not clear on whether this log device can be a separate physical volume on an existing disk, and if so how much disk space needs to be reserved for it.

So I decided to settle for the tried and tested mdraid - read on how I migrated my system.

:: Tydirium Specifications ::
:: ST31000340AS - Barracuda 7200.11 SATA 3Gb/s 1-TB Hard Drive ::
:: LVM Administrator's Guide for RHEL 4.6 ::
:: How to install Gentoo on a Software Raid Mirror with LVM2 on top ::
:: How to install Gentoo on Software Raid ::
:: How to migrate Gentoo to Software Raid ::

Recently I stumbled on a cheap Headphone Amplifier: the FiiO E3, and the price on eBay (Hong Kong) was low enough to give it a try.

The idea of the E3 is to take the load off your MP3 player by adding a battery-powered amplifier to the loop, it supposedly increases battery life and improves the quality of the sound.

Does it deliver ? I think so, sound quality is definitely better when pairing the E3 to my Sennheiser HD555s, though it seems only minimal when coupled to the portable Sennheiser MXL-51 set. As usual ymmv, but it looks like a nice add-on for an audio enthusiast

The downside of the device is that it lives on AAA batteries, though I guess a rechargeable set would fix that.

:: Headphone Amplifier E3 ::
:: FiiO E3 Headphone Amplifier Review ::
:: FiiO E3 headphone amp is therapy for your MP3 player ::

Probably not a surprise, but it looks like this thing is now defunct ... I guess facebook is easier to occasionally add stuff to.

In the past week or so I've been using primarily Vista Home Premium on my laptop to see what it's like to live with windows these days. I must admit that so far things are going well. Vista's UAC is a bit of a b*tch, true, but once you turn that off the functionality is pretty much as expected. The hardware is more than adequate, and with the addition of 23" of 1920x1200 screen real estate things look very nice indeed.

Of course, I still use firefox as a browser and x-chat/pidgin for my messenging needs. And yes, I miss the "keep window on top" feature KDE provides and Media Player truly is no alternative for Amarok.
But things seem to work, and that's what count I guess.

I was very happy to learn that vista includes something called the "Sync Center" and hoped to use the application to synchronize a folder on my laptop with a samba share from my Gentoo workstation ... only to find that, as usual, the functionality is crippled if you do not have the best version of windows. While it seems to be able to play with media devices it will not keep 2 folder synchronized, you need business or ultimate for it. It's a bit hard to understand why ... Microsoft has plenty of software to emulate this functionality, so I went ahead and downloaded SyncToy from the Microsoft Download site. Which does exactly that. For free. And so far it seems to do exactly what I need: synchronize one weasely folder with a samba share ...

:: Windows Vista Help: Sync Center: frequently asked questions ::
:: Microsoft Download details: SyncToy v2.0 Beta ::