At one time, all of my 3000+ MP3 and AAC files had been tagged with ratings, album artwork, categories, etc. This was mainly done using iTunes over a long period of time. I started looking around and found a better tool to take care of the tagging and quickly identify witch files are missing specific tags. MediaMonkey is my new hero. Forget about iTunes. This software has the ability to fetch artwork, track names, artist, label, year, etc. direct from Amazon. I have a choice of many different amazon sites to choose from as well (UK, Germany, Japan, etc.) which comes in handy for imports. The manageability of my music within the product is great. I’m able to view music by album, artist, Composer, Genre, Year, etc. The one that I love is the ability to list music without album artwork. I have about 1644 files left to tag. It also has the ability to rename the files on my computer and network drives according to a format that I specify. I prefer <Album Artist>\<Album>\<Track#> – <Title>. The software is free, but a paid version gets you a bit more features. I’m debating on getting the lifetime membership so I’ll be privy to all future updates. The one thing that it seems to be missing is the ability to detect (or even host) media servers on my network. At this time, only the PS3 and Windows Media Player are able to detect the media server. Who knows… maybe sometime in the future that capability will be available.
Archive for the ‘Computers’ Category
Monkeying around with Tagging
Saturday, October 25th, 2008Free Antivirus Protection
Monday, October 20th, 2008After two months, I finally got virus protection setup on my computer. I was delaying the purchase of Norton Suite. I preferred McAfee, but the last time that I tried installing it on a 64 bit vista operating system, I got a big denied message and found out that it would have cost some big bucks for a business version of the same product that Comcast offers free. After helping my brother in-law setup his computers through his Comcast email address, I decided to give it a go again just in case. It’s been a year and a half now, and vista 64 bit is starting to become the norm in a lot of homes.
Thankfully, it paid off. Everything installed fine and was up and running. I am now fully protected with scheduled cleaning, defragging and backup tasks.
Memory Transfer
Saturday, September 27th, 2008Last week, I got a network storage system (NAS200). I have since set it up to be RAID 1 with mirroring. During the setup process, it asked if I wanted to enable journaling as well. I had no idea what journaling is and had to look it up. Apparently, journaling lets you do atomic transactions with file writing. If the power goes out or something happens in the middle of a transfer (or deleting a file), you are safe. The file does not fully transfer/delete. This is good because if you have partial data on a disk and the disk is only … partially aware of it, it could end up being overwritten, or simply not show up and not be available for writing over either. Naturally I turned it on.
Backing Up
I’ve been spending a lot of time organizing files on a lot of computers. I’ve been using DiskPie 2 and Sequoia View. Both are free programs, however DiskPie 3 (Pro) does cost a few dollars if you want to go with the latest program. The programs help me visually identify large files on my file system, as well as large directories and file types. Each has their own strengths allowing me to trim many gigabytes from my HDD’s.
After trimming the fat and organizing files, I then face the long backup process. I use a tool that I created for retrieving files from my old 250 GB HDD. It appears that it comes in handing going the other way too. Any time that the program fails, I simply restart it again. It recognizes files that were already transferred and skips over them. Really handy!
Problems Encountered
So the problems I’ve been running into are few. Wireless networks are also pretty slow. However, I use what I have to get the job done. Wireless networks appear to “forget” they are connected to a network. They seem to drop off every now and then. This results in me having to restart the copy process to ensure that all files are transferred. My little tool tells me when their is a problem such as a network path not being found. One computer kept knocking itself off so often that I had to continuously monitor it and check up on it every 15 to 30 minutes. Another computer wouldn’t stay connected at all and I had to physically migrate the thing near my router to connect over the LAN.
Old computers take a lot of time to use the other utilities (DiskPie/Sequoia). One of the older computers only had a 75 GB drive, and at the time of purchase, that was considered excessive. The majority of the drive is full of MP3’s that I ripped from most of my music collection. The tricky part of this is that collection has migrated over to my other computers that I backed up, so I have a lot of duplicate music. That music is mixed in with “protected” music as well, so I hadn’t tried separating the protected music from the original music. In addition, the original music has since been converted to AAC format to take up less space. On top of that, the newer AAC format has additional information such as ratings, completed information about each track, artist album, and album artwork. It took a lot of time to get all of that setup.
Eventually I’ll have to find the duplicated music and consolidate them into one complete library. For now, I’m making separate folders on the NAS to identify what computer that each backup came from.
Some computers contain backups of other computers. These are not simply just “My Documents” and “Desktop” files. I used software programs (such as Norton Ghost) to do full backups of hard drives. Although the computers are no longer operational, I need to find a file reader for those old backups and see if their is anything worth saving.
I’m only halfway through all of this. I’ve backed up seven computers (3 are virtual/non-existing). I have 3 more computers to backup. I then need to reorganize and consolidate those backups. I’ll also need to wipe out the old computers and set them up for “my master plan”.
Master Plan
I primarily want to setup a development environment. I would like to setup the following services: email, MS SQL, MySQL, Oracle, PHP, ASP.Net + Remoting on a second tier, and SVN. Many of the services could be consolidated to run on the same machine. Perhaps all of them. In addition, I would also like to have a dedicated server for OpenSIM.
Master Database Restoration
Wednesday, September 20th, 2006I’ve been learning quite a bit lately about restoring databases from a complete database failure. Although rite now, I’m am working with a test to verify we can restore from one. I’m not involved in all the steps such as tape restoration, but I am involved in one of the most critical parts. The restoration of the Master database.
It turns out that you can’t just restore a master database in SQL Servers normal operation mode (multi-user). I had to start the service in single-user mode from the command line. From there on out, you can go into enterprise manager and restore the master database.
Why is the master database so important that it needs single-user mode? Because it contains all the data that the server itself uses for its own operation. Everything from maintenance plans, other databases in the ssystem, user accounts, etcetera.
Just make sure if you restore a master database, that the version of SQL server is the same that it was backed up from. This includes having the same service pack installed as well. SQL Server SP3 master database can not be restored on SQL Server SP4.
Dude, I want a mac. again?
Saturday, August 5th, 2006So a long time ago, I got an old used Mac G3 off of eBay for under $200. It was great for an intro to the Mac world. I learned how to communicate between windows and mac computers over my network. I was able to remotely see my Mac desktop from my windows PC. I even set it up with SETI to search for aliens. However, there were problems.
First, the OS version that was loaded was a bit old. I couldn’t install Mono so that I could run programs built on the .Net platform. In my real life every day job, I program software and websites using the .Net platform, which mono emulates. I really wanted to be able to create programs that run on both Mac, Linux, and Windows platforms just to be able to understand the basics of how that could be done.
There were many other problems, but the most recent was devestating. For some reason, I can’t get anything to work. It’s weird. With windows, something like this would just result in me reinstalling the operating system. The problem is that I don’t have any disc’s to do this on the Mac G3. It came with no software at all.
So let’s fast forward to today. My computer, is getting old. I just recently got a bonus in my paycheck that puts a new computer rite in reach.
The new Mac’s now run on the Intel Core Duo chips. Not only are these chips cheaper then the old Mac chips, but they are faster, and … you can run Windows on the same machine using something called Boot Camp. The MacBooks have my eye. They are very thin, have most of everything i want built into them. There is the built-in camera, cd burner, wireless network, blue tooth, etc.
I’ve been talking with other people within SecondLife who are Mac users. People say to wait until after the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC). Steve Jobs is expected to get up and announce a few new gadgets and this could include a new line of MacBooks. In fact, earlier this week, Intel announced its new line of Intel Core 2 Duo Processors. Maybe some new MacBooks will come out with the new processors.
My main beef with Apple is that I can’t install Mac OS X on a intel-based PC. The computer itself has to be from Apple. I’ve heard of rumors where people have successfully installed Mac OS X Tiger on a PC, but they had some tough constraints. One person had to match a motherboard with chips close to the ones found on the Apple computers. Also, each time Apple releases updates and patches, you have to worry that they’ll add something that makes it impossible to use the OS on your PC until a hack is found for the updates.
If Apple just allowed there operating system to run on any PC, I imagine they would get out a few more sales. I would be one of them, wanting to install it on a few more computers I have along with Boot Camp.
So anyway … I’m just waiting for Monday to see what is announced.
WS-200S Digital Audio Recorder
Friday, May 5th, 2006Today my Digital Audio Recorder came in the mail. It was still in its original packaging. It was a little smaller then I had thought and very light in its weight. I’m loving this new little device. Here are some initial observations that matter to me:
- Microphone Recording Quality
- Device Playback Quality
- Transfer Quality
- Transfer Speed
- Drag & Drop Files in Explorer
- Storage Capacity
- Easy to use in the dark
- Less work to do before posting as MP3 file
- No unnecessary software
The quality in both recording and playback on the device itself is great. Transferring to the computer was easy and fast over USB 2.0. Windows recognized it as a USB mass storage device without the need of any additional software.
Playback on the computer was great. There were not any scratching sounds or thwaps at all. This was a common problem on my old W-10 recorder. I no longer need to use Audacity to remove those annoying sounds. It’s a good thing to as Audacity doesn’t support the WMA format that it records in. I did find a small utility (called switch) to convert between many audio formats including MP3 and WMA. I even found out that it can convert to both CBR and VBR bitrates. This is something that I needed to have for a small project of mine for reading MP3 files.
The buttons are easier to get a handle on. I can sense where the record button is in the dark much easier. It also has a red LED that lights up to let me know that I’m recording. It has a longer rope on the end that I could let it hang from my neck. I usually just hang the old one on my bed post and fumble to unhook it before I start recording. This new one lets me record without taking it off the post. It also detatches with a quick release by squeezing a plastic piece together. Talk about convenience.
Head aches, taxes, and little giants
Thursday, April 20th, 2006It’s been a while since I blogged. I tend to keep forgetting to do it. I just don’t surf the internet much since I started playing SecondLife. Anyhow, a few things have been going on.
Today, I had (still have) a migrain head ache and chills. I feel a bit weak all over. I may be comming down with something. Hopefully it passes quick. One item I noticed is that I didn’t get the flu this year. I get the flu every year and it is severe (way past Robotussin). I usually take about 2 weeks to get over it, and I still have symptoms for a few weeks after, but nothing major. This year I got myself a flu shot and boy, was it worth it. I had felt a little bad about someone not being able to get it who may have needed it more then I did, as flu shots are very limited. I just never realized how much that “I” needed it.
Tax Blowout
Tuesday was tax day. I had done my Federal taxes very, very early. I didn’t do state, though because I couldn’t afford it at the time of filing. The procrastinator that I am just kept putting it off. Between then and now, I had gotten a new hard drive and reinstalled my operating system. I tried to hook the other hard drive up and boot up my computer, but the power supply had died (another thing I have been putting off). I ran to two wallmarts, best buy, and comp usa. The thing is, it was after 9pm. Wall-mart doesn’t sell power supplies, and the other two stores were closed.
I was able to hook the hard drive up to a spare computer I had as a secondary drive. I had to take ownership of all the files since the file system was NTFS. Otherwise I couldn’t read the files. I found my tax file and was in luck. I didn’t know where my TaxCut disc was, so I ran over to the site and purchased both the federal and state versions. I was just hoping that it would be able to read my old file and as luck would have it, it did. Things were pretty simple from there and I got my state taxes filed a little after 11 pm.
The next day I upgraded my old power supply from 340 watts to 500 watts. I am hoping that the wattage is the main reason why my supply had burnt out. Around here, power supplies go up left and right. At least the hard disc’s don’t burn out like they used to on my older computers.
A little giant ladder
Easter had come this past weekend. I played a bit with my nephew and neice during there visit. We played hide and go seek, and just played a bit in the back yard. My mother in-law came over and helped me look at some ladders that I saw at SAM’s club. My eye was on a pretty tall one that would support 300 lbs. The problem was that it was a bit too large for the van. The step ladder next to it was just not high enough. She looked at a third ladder there that looked like the Giant Little Ladder.
This ladder folds and unfolds into 5 different positions including a step ladder and a 17 foot high ladder. I passed it over earlier that day due to the face that I couldn’t find its maximum load cappacity. She found it and it was also 300 lbs. The thing was very compact and fit rite in our shopping cart. I was debating on buying the original Giant Little Ladder earlier this year with my tax return, but it was expensive for how often I would use it (over $300). This little ladder was just over $100. Someone even stopped us in the store to ask where we found the ladder.
I was finally able to replace two flood lights on the highest part of the house. I am not a fan of heights. Perhaps it may be the part where you hit the ground that I may be afraid of. Anyhow, my hands were gripping that ladder so tight that it was hard to let go of one bar and grab the next. Meanwhile, I’m trying to hold a lightbulb in the other hand.
Hard Drives and Movies
Tuesday, February 28th, 2006Originally I was offered a small hard drive a few months back. Today I received two. They are both 20 GB in size and handy for backing up files. I need to learn a thing or two about Norton Ghost.
I got an email today that Wal-Mart is allowing us to pre-order Harry Poter and the Goblet of Fire on DVD. It comes out on March 7th. I figured that I would go ahead and preorder. Unfortunately my Wal-Mart card couldn’t be processed. I called up the 800 number and found that I still had a credited balance of $1500. I’ll have to wait until tomorrow to speak with a human and figure out what the problem is.
The Chronicles of Narnia is due to come out on April 4th and can also be preordered too. Both Harry Potter and Narnia were running around the same time and I unfortunately missed them both in the theater. At least the DVD’s cost less then a trip for two at the movies.
Software Installation
Wednesday, February 22nd, 2006I’ve been installing the basics for my computer. Here is a quick rundown of the software in my toolbox.
- Web browser: Firefox
- Image Editor: GIMP
- Document Editor: OpenOffice.org
- Media: iTunes + QuickTime
- Entertainment: SecondLife
- Programming: Visual Studio 2005
Along with these come a slew of device drivers and the like. I’m sure I’ll remember a thing or two in the upcomming weeks that I forgot as I need them. For now, this is a lot to get me up and running just fine.
I got VS.Net 2k5 a while back when I went to the launch party by Microsoft. I have been waiting for the rite moment to get a new hard drive for a few months now. When I got the software, I decided I would wait until I got a new hard drive. I would rather start with a clean slate and have everything working fine. I was much impressed by the installation. It still took a few hours like the previous versions, but I didn’t have to reboot my machine at all. Amazing.
