Eddie's Fancy

After setting up the NSLU2 as my backup machine, I freed up the old ShuttleX box I had original bought as a media controller. I wasn’t happy with the results at the time, but it’s been a few years so I thought I’d give it another go.

The latest Mythbuntu release worked well right out of the box, and I picked up a MCE Remote on the cheap at Directron for very nice media playback solution. I need to tweak the color balance but other than that everything is going like gangbusters.

I had been trying out Netflix’s instant viewing using a laptop, so I decided to install XP onto a separate partition for dedicated use. I used hooked up a LCD panel to the main VGA out and a small TV to the S-Video out for test purposes. All worked well and I connected it to our primary TV. I didn’t have a primary display connected, since the S-Video channel should show a clone of the primary display it should just word, instead I got a C000D11B1 error from Netflix and a recommendation to reset all of the DRM licenses.

After several hours of mucking about, on a lark I connected a LCD panel, and everything worked again. For some reason, the DRM on the Netflix movies kicks in when the TV is the only display. I had heard about this when using HD monitors, but it never occurred to me that a regular TV would also trigger it.

For now I’ll just connect a display when we want to use Netflix, but I’d like to find a small 7″-8″ display to use permanently.

Charlies Stross is another author on my “to look for list” when I go trolling through used bookstores. This one I picked up cheap, but wasn’t impressed by the first couple chapters. Luckily, it quickly picked up and I enjoyed the heck out of them. It’s really two long novellas combined, mixing British spy novels with H.P. Lovecraft and a good bit of geek humor thrown in for good measure.

I’m glad to see there’s a sequel out, The Jennifer Morgue, that I need to track down.

Yeah, a new Dresden book, happy days. I was going to try to make it to the Jim Butcher book signing at Murder by the Book, but I would have had to make an early trip to get a number and go back the next week for the signing. Never mind.

A good read, fast read like the others, if a bit crammed with characters. Many old faces were brought back and as a result each one didn’t have that much to do. But I couldn’t put it down once I started and enjoyed the heck out of it.

I keep a small box running linux in my office to act as an off site backup and local music server. Yes, I know how pathetic that sounds. It’s an older ShuttleX box and way to loud, it was becoming a distraction. So last week I picked up a Linksys/Cisco NSLU2 from newegg.com and installed Debian on it. It’s hard to tell from this photo but it’s about the size of my open hand.

I had a spare 320GB hard drive sitting around so I used that as the root partition and primary storage drive. I’ve got mt-daapd and samba running on it, plus every night it connects to my home server via rsync to backup my critical data.

So far the only negative is that the initial connection to mt-daapd from iTunes is slower than my original server. Other than it seems to work fine. I’m going to let it run for a week or so before retasking my old box.

I ran into a sticky problem today and was pleased at the solution. I’m trying to install Debian on a little NSLU2 box I bought. It’s a linux-based network attached storage device I’m hoping to replace my spare boy in the office with. It obtains and IP address using DHCP but doesn’t have an attached monitor, so short of assigned a static IP I had no way knowing what address was assigned.

Enter ettercap which is mainly used to simulate man in the middle attacks and act as a general network sniffer. Using it I was able to scan all machines on my local subnet and get the MAC to IP address mappings. Neat, but not something to try on a very large network.

I’ve been meaning to read Philip Pullman’s trilogy for a few years now, but it was until the first movie was released (which I still haven’t seen) that I finally got around to it. It was surprisingly good, much more adult than I expect. Given the double crossings, murders, and bad parents it’s definitely not a set of books for younger children.

I loved the universe(s) he created and the mythology that went with it, and I was surprised at his anti-church stand.