Archive for April, 2006

ACSII Art

Sunday, April 30th, 2006

http://www.text-image.com

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It’s hard to tell, but this is a picture of my car. The CSS settings in WordPress won’t let me reduce the spacing in between the lines of text. So this picture looks taller than it should.

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Cobain Backup

Saturday, April 8th, 2006

I just automated all my backups using a FREE backup program called Cobain Backup.  I used an XP machine with a few hundred free gigabytes of hard drive space.  It’s the same machine I use to stream TV to the rest of the house.  From this one machine I backup my desktop machine, my server and my laptop.  The backup task is scheduled for the wee hours of the night (Cobain runs as a service).  On the first night it does a full backup and for the next six days it does incremental backups.  The next week, it starts fresh with a full backup.

On top of copying all my files to this XP machine, Cobain also zip’s the files into password protected archives using strong encryption (Blowfish, Rijndael or DES).  Each archive is also chopped into 4.7 GB pieces so they will each fit on one DVD.  There are also filters to include/exclude certain file types in the archive.  For instance, I didn’t want all the podcast files on my computer to be backed up, so I filtered out all files with the MP3 extension.

It’s pretty slick for free software.

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XBox - Alive Again

Thursday, April 6th, 2006

xboxmediacenter.jpg

I have an original XBox purchased at Christmas time in 2001.  It’s long out of warrantee.  Something happened to the operating system and it stopped working.  I looked around the Internet and found there were many modifications and replacement OS’s for the XBox.  I figured anything was worth a shot because the old thing was just collecting dust.

I found this thing called the XBox Media Center and it has made my old XBox the most useful thing I have ever connected to my TV.  I now have a media center.  Since the XBox has an ethernet connection, and the ability to connect to the Internet and other devices in my house, I can access everything from the TV and play it through the surround sound system.

All of my music is MP3′ed on my home server.  Now I can connect to the server via the XBox and play all that music on the good stereo.  I can also capture live television with my streaming server (that was a project from a few years ago) and watch the digitized video through the XBox.

All my pictures are on the home server.  The XBox can do a slide presentation of those right on the TV as well.

It even has an RSS feed that picks up news and the weather… right on the TV.  The picture was captured by pressing the left thumb stick on the XBox controller.  It has a build-in screen capture utility.  The backend permits FTP connection so anything can be retrieved from the XBox.

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Jogging Distance

Thursday, April 6th, 2006

This one is for Kara. It’s 650 yards to the creek.
 The Creek

Click the picture for the large version of the graphic. Note the scale and the red line corresponding to 100 yards.  It takes six and a half of these lines to make it to the creek.  So a jog to the creek and back would be roughly 3/4 of a mile.

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