Computers
XBMC
I’ve recently purchased an Acer Revo 3610 for use as a media centre. It came with Linpus Linux pre-installed although I promptly removed this to install XBMC Live. This was very easy to install. I created a bootable USB drive from the ISO file, installed it, and it worked. There was one small issue with the sound in the menus although creating a .asoundrc file in the home directory fixed this. I bought a Windows Media Centre remote control and once that arrived, I plugged it in and it worked straight away.
Then I decided I wanted to play around with it. I thought it would be a good idea to install Xubuntu with XBMC on top so that I could have a desktop as well if I should ever need it. I thought this would be just as easy to get running; I was wrong.
Installing Xubuntu was easy enough. I made a bootable USB drive again and installed it without any problems. I had to install the proprietory drivers for the NVidia Ion graphics, there was a lot of system updates to install. The wireless network didn’t work, and still doesn’t since I don’t need it. I’ve found how to fix it just haven’t done it yet. I added the PPA for XBMC-SVN so I could get the latest builds of 10.5 rather than the released 9.11 and installing it easy. Then I noticed, I had no sound. I had connected the Revo to my TV through HDMI and getting the sound to work through it wasn’t as easy.
In XBMC Live I had just selected HDMI as my sound output, under Xubuntu I didn’t have this option at all. Googling revealed this to be a common problem with a whole host of solutions, non of which seemed to work. I ended up breaking the sound completely to the point that it wouldn’t even detect sound cards anymore and for some reason the graphics drivers were broken so I could only run in “Low graphics mode”. I gave up and reinstalled Xubuntu again to get a clean slate. It only took about 25 minutes and I figured it was probably quicker. In the end it was a post on One Eye that fixed the issue, so a big thanks there. It was quite late by this point so I was glad to get it working.
Once sound and video were working it was simple enough to get everything else set up. The remote worked as soon as I installed lirc, then I just set it to login automatically into an XBMC session. Once this was done I rebooted and it all worked.
XBMC makes for a great media centre. I’ve used it previously on an old Xbox but this newer version running on a more powerful PC with HD support and all is a lot better. I never used to use the library because it would really slowly on my Xbox but now it runs smoothly. I’d recommend XBMC to anyone who wanted a media centre. I might try out some others now that I have Xubuntu working it shouldn’t be hard to install others without messing up XBMC but it would have to be something exceptional to get me to change. I was tempted to get a TV tuner card and try out MythTV but that might have to wait for the future. It wouldn’t fit in my Revo and I don’t have a spare computer to use as the server.
More Windows Home Server Problems
This morning I started the have some more problems with my Windows Home Server. It just seems to eat through hard drives like crazy. It wouldn’t boot so I booted a live CD of XP that I have. This couldn’t read the C drive saying that it was corrupt and unreadable.
I ran chkdsk /r C: and left it. This took quite a while but completed. Still couldn’t read C. I ran it again but still nothing. I tried to reboot anyway but still nothing.
I am now having to do a server re-installation. This will be quite annoying since I’ll lose all my settings and programs but at least I should still have my data drives.
The last time I did this it took me quite a while to get everything set up again. I am hoping that this will last until Easter when I will buy a new hard drive while back in England. I have a feeling that this one might be on the way out. Unless it is something that Windows did to break it.
Either way, assuming this re-install works, it will probably take me most of the afternoon to get it up and running again.
Backups
We live in a world now where everyone has data that is important and they don’t want to lose but, where all this data is on devices that aren’t perfect. Hard drives fail, pen drives are lost, discs get scratched and (for anyone still living 15 years ago) floppy drives get put on a box of magnets.
The point is, backup is very important, but it is something that no one really considers worth doing until after they need it, by then, it is too late. There are plenty of ways to back up all kinds of data now. Most of it depends on what kind of data it is, and where it is saved.
It is important to remember, it is not a backup if it is the only copy. This might seem obvious but I have seen people who have burned their photo collection to a DVD and then think the data is backed up so they delete the files from their computer. Then after 6 months of using the DVD as a coaster on their desk they want to show someone their holiday pictures and find the DVD doesn’t work anymore. They are then confused because it is a backup.
I’m a little paranoid when it comes to back ups. I don’t want to lose anything so I have at least 2 copies of irreplaceable data that I would be upset if I lost, and several copies of incredibly important data where I would be screwed completely if I lost it (such as my university work, data loss isn’t an excuse for a late assignment). The problem with all this is that I am really lazy. I don’t want to have to remember to back up everything all the time, I just want it to run automatically.
Windows Home Server helps with this a lot, it can automatically backup the computers on your network everyday. It will turn it on at 2 am and backup the entire hard drive. This doesn’t take long since it only does an incremental backup. Some of the important data I keep on the server such as my photos are saved in a share with folder duplication enabled. This makes sure that everything in that shared folder is stored on 2 hard drives so if one fails, the data isn’t lost. Obviously this needs twice as much space so I can’t have it for everything.
I’m a little more paranoid than that though. I have a program running on the server that will download a complete backup of this website every night over FTP, and I have a plugin installed that emails me a database backup every night. The programs I use for this are FullSync and the plugin WP-DB-Backup. I realise that my hosting company probably keeps backups, but I don’t want to have to rely on it only to find that they only do it once a month. I don’t think that it is a good idea to rely on someone else to back up your data.
To stop my inbox getting filled with backups I use a useful Gmail feature, you can have + and then anything you want after the username and it will still arrive in your inbox, e.g. username+backups@gmail.com. This then lets you set a filter on incoming email to that address. I have these are automatically marked as read, achieved to skip the inbox, and labeled as backups. This stops them being in the way of my normal email but I still have them.
However, I don’t trust Gmail. A couple of years ago I logged in to find that every email was gone. Gmail never responded to my support request and I still don’t know what happened. That is why I backup my emails as well now. I have a program call Gmail Backup that I run on a scheduled task every day to download all my emails into a zip file. It is possible to run from command line so I wrote a batch script to do it and have that run daily on a scheduled task. This is on my Windows Home Server as well so everything gets downloaded into my backups folder that has folder duplication on.
I also use Dropbox. This is more for convenience of synchronizing my work between my PC and laptop but it doubles up as an extra backup. You can set a folder as being your Dropbox folder. Everything in the folder is automatically synchronized to their servers. If you install it on multiple computers then it will automatically download changes as well so it can keep several computers synchronized. You get 2GB of space on a free account.
I recently started using Subversion for all my version controlling of code. I didn’t use anything before. The SVN server is running on my Windows Home Server and the repositories are in a share with folder duplication. For an extra level of backup, there is the latest revision of everything in the share as well. ‘svn update’ executes every night on a scheduled task. I never change the code in that folder so there should never be any problems with merging.
Finally, and again more of a convenience than a backup, I keep a copy of most important things on my pen drive just so I have them when I’m not on my computer. I have a portable version of Dropbox installed on it and the latest revision of my SVN repository so that is another backup as well.
I don’t expect most people are as thorough as me about backup but I think that everyone should have a system in place, an automatic one is even better because you can just set up and forget.
It is important to make sure that your backups are in a format that is easily restorable. Before I stared using WP-DB-Backup I was running a script I had written myself to back up to the database. It worked perfectly except the backup didn’t contain any SQL to create tables so it wouldn’t have been very easy to restore. There was also no compression on the file so they were starting to get quite big. I ran it on a cron on my hosting and it was starting to fill up my web space.
Google Reader
I’ve been a long time user of Google Reader but I never thought to write about it before. I spent a long time looking for an RSS reader with little success. My requirements were simple. I want to add multiple RSS feeds and then it would download them, sort them by date and let me read through them, discard them as I read them. I tried a few different systems but I can’t remember what they are now.
Then I came across Google Reader and it did everything that I needed. It is quick and easy to use. Downloads all my feeds while I’m offline so I don’t have to wait for them to download like I would with a desktop application. This also means I don’t miss things if I don’t logon for a couple of days. Some high volume feeds that only show the most recent wouldn’t have the items after a while.
My only complaint is that it doesn’t find duplicates. For example, I have the BBC’s front page and technology feeds, often there is an article that published to both and I get it twice. Hardly the end of the world though.
I also like that I can add all the blogs I read to it and then don’t need to worry about checking them anymore. Prior to using Reader I would have to remember to check every so often for new posts. A lot of the blogs I read only post once a week or less so I would usually forget about it. Now I don’t have to remember, it just pops up with 1 unread item when I want it.
It’s not really Reader’s fault but it is annoying when I don’t go on for a while and the number of unread items get silly. I have a few high volume news site feeds and I will get about 200/day in total. After not going on very often during the Christmas break, I came back to 1,000+ unread items. Fortunately you can mark as read all items older than a day, week or two 2 weeks so that is what I did.
I like the new features they have recently added, such as the recommended items and recommended feeds. Often they are a bit off but then maybe I don’t click the ‘Like’ button often enough to give it anything to work with. I have found a couple of new feeds through it.
Overall, I am happy with it and can’t see why, for now at least, I will ever need another feed reader.