Cook That Data

And speaking of SMART, I did a cursory check of the health of the current Linux box’s drives, and discovered that they were running a little warm. Like, 49-52C warm. When the recommended temperature is around 40C.

I guess the ventilation in that box isn’t as good as I thought, so I’ve opened up the case to let it cool off a bit, even though it lets a bit more noise escape, too. It’s dropped the temperatures by a few degrees, at least.

Maybe I should start worrying about replacing it with a better system sooner than I thought…

This Drive is DUMB

Though I might not be about to overhaul my PC setup, I did wind up ordering an external drive enclosure, and it arrived today. Unfortunately it’s not quite working out as well as I’d hoped; it was a tight squeeze getting the drive in, and one of the plugs that had to be undone to remove the drive tray was quite stubborn.

But the disappointing part is that the chipset this enclosure uses doesn’t appear to support the SMART commands. I have three drives left over from the previous Linux box, but I know one of them was going bad, and without the SMART status I can’t tell which one it was. I tried booting up the old box since I still had it lying around, but it shuts off a couple seconds after turning it on. It might be a power supply short, or a motherboard problem, but I’m not going to waste my time troubleshooting an ancient Pentium II system.

Oh well, it was a cheap enclosure and it’ll still serve its purpose as a somewhat more portable drive for data and backups, including the PS3 now.

Daydreaming

I’m not really very happy with my current home theatre/HTPC setup right now, mainly because the HTPC is a big, ugly, noisy, power-hungry tower made out of leftover components of older systems (typically stuff gets ‘handed down’ from my gaming system to the Linux box).

What I sometimes think of doing is replacing the whole thing with a small form factor PC of some sort, like a Mac Mini, which would certainly be much smaller, quieter, and use less power. But, in order for it to fulfill the same duties, some other pieces are needed:

TV capture
Fortunately MythTV and the Linux drivers support some USB capture cards, so I don’t need it built-in to the base system or a free PCI slot.

Storage
I’m currently using a fair bit of storage, and part of the reason the tower works well is that there’s plenty of room for hard drives in it. I have a total of 1.25TB of disk space across three drives right now, which certainly isn’t going to fit inside the Mini or any other SFF box.

So, what am I actually using all that space for? About 350GB of it is ‘personal’ files (pictures, music, non-TV video, documents, archives, etc.), 470GB of it is MythTV recordings, 40GB is backup data, and the rest is mostly free space. That makes things a bit hard to split up, since although I have 500GB and 750GB drives I can reuse, they’re 3.5″ and the internal Mini drive is a 2.5″, which limits me for now to 320GB of internal space (looks like the only 500GB 2.5″ drives right now are slower 5400RPM ones). There are probably other SFF boxes that will take 3.5″ internal drives, but it would take a bit more research.

In any case even if I can fit the 750GB drive into the HTPC, that’s still not enough total space, so some external space would be needed as well. I could slap 4x1TB drives into a Drobo…if I were rich. Since I’m not, a standard USB/FW enclosure will have to do. A 500GB internal drive for the personal files and a 750GB external drive for the MythTV recordings would probably suffice for quite a while (or possibly a double-drive enclosure for the other 500GB drive or future expansion).

There’s still the issue of backups though. There might be enough free space to squeeze them onto one of the above drives, but having them on the same system makes me a bit nervous. It would be better if backups were kept separately, which leads me to…

Networking
My old Linksys router is working fine, but it’s missing gigabit ethernet and Wireless-N, which would be rather nice now that I have systems capable of them (the Wireless-N in particular, since there’s still a fair bit of 2.4GHz interference around here). Both would be provided by something like Apple’s Time Capsule, with the added bonus of being able to do Time Machine backups to it for the laptop, and the ability to add a USB drive to it for some network storage, which could be used for the aforementioned backups.

Audio
It would be nice to clean up the audio mess too, since right now I’m routing the audio through two PCs in order to mix in the consoles and get everything to a single set of PC speakers, which means that I have to have the gaming PC turned on just to get the audio from the PS3. And right now I actually have two sound cards in the HTPC since I want some audio output to go to the TV (i.e., MythTV), and some to go to the computer speakers (everything else). Since I hardly ever actually use the console of the HTPC, I could just let everything route to the TV, and a decent receiver and set of speakers should take care of that.

In the end, the gaming PC would be hooked up directly to the PC speakers, with a headphone switch, and everything else would go to the receiver.

Power
Unfortunately the change to using external components winds up adding three wall warts to the AC power requirements, and it often feels like I’ve got too damn many of the things already. At least total power consumption would still be a bit lower.

Television
And I still need a new TV of some sort. I still need to do more research here, but it doesn’t really affect anything else as long as it has enough inputs (at least one HDMI for the PS3, one VGA for the 360, one component for the Wii, one more DVI/HDMI/VGA for the HTPC, and one or more HDMI/component for a potential future digital cable box, TiVo, or whatever).

Miscellaneous
I’d also probably need a new KVM so that I can continue to use a single keyboard and mouse for both the gaming box and the HTPC. I already have one, but it’s for PS/2 devices, and it’s about time to switch over to USB anyway.

Cost
At the bare minimum, just replacing the HTPC, I’d be looking at $650 for the Mini or comparable SFF box, $170 for the USB TV tuner, $60 for a decent enclosure, and $30 for a bare-bones VGA+USB KVM, for a total of $910. And that’s just to replace something that already works just fine with something that’s just quieter and smaller.

Then add on another $390 for a Time Capsule and another enclosure for the network and backup improvements, for a new total of $1300.

And then here’s where the daydreaming ends, since it would be nice. But not that nice…

Math Is Fun Part II

So, with one week of stats under the belt now, according to what I’ve been tracking at TDP I consumed 12,227 calories over the last week. At my weight at the time and ‘light’ activity level, I should have burned 22,337 calories (3191 x 7), for a difference of 10,060. Using the guideline that losing a pound of weight requires roughly a difference of 3500 calories, the expected weight loss should be 2.87 pounds. Actual weight loss over the last week was 1.0kg, or 2.2 pounds.

So it’s off by about 30%, which isn’t too bad for an inexact science like this. I suspected that the calorie counts on some days might be underreported a bit due to uncertainty about sizes and inexact matches in the database, and the physical activity level is very rough and leaves a lot of room for error.

If I assume that the calories consumed is correct, then the average number of calories I burn per day is actually closer to (12,227 + 2.2 x 3500) / 7 = 2847. If I assume that the calories burned is correct, then I’m actually consuming (22,337 – 2.2 x 3500) = 14,637 calories, about 20% higher than what I entered. But the reality is probably somewhere in the middle between the two.

Resetting Clocks Gets Annoying

For some reason the power has been a bit dodgy lately, with three brief outages at my place within the last week and a half, including one as I was getting ready for work this morning.

But on the plus side, I used the opportunity to figure out which breaker switch controls the computers without having to go the pull-it-and-see-if-they-suddenly-shut-off route…

Every Good Engineer Likes Hard Data

I finally got around to buying a scale, so I can start officially tracking with numbers. I was a bit depressed at the actual starting weight, though; it came out as a bit higher than what I guessed I was way back at the start of this, so I expected to be even lower than that. Oh well.

This scale also measures body fat, though that won’t really matter until towards the end (right now all it really needs to say is “too high”). It’s debatable how accurate these kinds of scales are for that, but it’s fine as long as I can actually see a difference occurring.

You’ll also be able to click on the “Change” field on the right for a graph of my progress. Well, once there’s more than one data point…

Progress

Well, I still have to buy a new scale to get specific numbers, but so far I’ve been able to move down one notch on my belt.

I’ve also been avoiding pop for the last couple weeks, as I used to drink a lot of diet colas but started to get worried about all the caffeine. The local Safeway has a lot of lightly-flavoured waters, but it’s tougher whenever I go to a local cafe for lunch or the food courts at the malls, as then it’s either pop, way-overpriced small bottles of water, or nothing.

So far I think it’s made me a bit more tired in the mornings, but that might be because it’s affected my sleep a bit. I’m getting to sleep more easily, but still waking up a bit tired; I’d been getting by on 6-7 hours of sleep before, but I seem to need a bit more now.

What They Call A “Mobile Chicane”

I just got back to the office, and my arms are sore enough that I can barely type.

We went to a nearby kart track for the afternoon as a “team-building exercise,” though the competition was pretty informal. Driving the karts was pretty fun, and a chance to exercise a bit of racing skills, but… a) it’s hell on your arms and wrists due to the grip and turning force you need to exert, so you don’t want to do too many laps at once, b) the track was rather bumpy, and c) based on the results, you definitely don’t want me on your team. Our team did manage to get second place, but it definitely wasn’t thanks to me.

Ah well, I do have a bit of a weight disadvantage… I’m just happy I didn’t spin out or crash.

Try, Try Again

I need to get back to losing weight again. Yeah, I was moderately successful at it once before, getting down to within 9 pounds of my target, but then some stress at the office and other things hit, I fell back into old habits, couldn’t exercise the way I’d gotten used to, etc., and eventually got right back to where I’d started.

But that was a couple years ago, and I’ve been moping around in my current condition for far too long, so it’s time to do something about it again. Roughly the same plan as before, as it was working fairly well (the main problem was psychological), with a couple twists:

1) I can’t really start out exercising like I did before, due to some complications, so I’ll be relying mostly on controlling food in order to kick off the weight loss until I reach a point where it’s more practical.

2) And in order to track food, I’m going to try using The Daily Plate, and you can even spy on what I’m eating here. It won’t be entirely accurate as you sometimes have to fudge or guess the numbers a bit (damned if I know the exact weight of the noodles in the Chinese food I had for lunch), or settle for a close match in their database, but it’s better than nothing.

Ha Ha, You Can’t Read This (Yet)

You never really realize how much you’ve come to depend on the Internet until you lose it for a while. It’s been really dodgy all weekend for me now, even as I write this (yay for hosting your own server).

So, maybe I should play a game. My current Diablo 2 character is level 26 on the USWest realm and OH WAIT. Well, I could play single-player. I don’t really want to build a character from scratch again though, so maybe I should go download the Atma editor and OH WAIT. Well, maybe I could play a class I haven’t really used much before, and see how it plays from the start. I’ll just check for a decent skill build on the Arreat Summit site and OH WAIT.

I can still watch TV though MythTV, at least. Some of the channel listing entries look a bit out of sync though. I should check that the lineup is right at schedulesdirect.org and OH WAIT. Oh well, I wonder what the other F1 thread guys thought about the race OH WAIT.

There is still some network activity getting through, but not enough to reliably connect to web sites and such. I’m curious as to what kind of traffic there is, so I could sniff it by getting the ‘tcpdump’ package, and Ubuntu will even download and install OH WAIT.

I even popped over to the office for a little while just to check some of my regular sites. Good thing it’s only a quick trip away. 99% of the time these problems resolve themselves, since they tend to affect large blocks of customers, but I’m not so sure this time.

Edit: Well, it seems to be partly working again, or at least some sites load (albeit slowly), though I still can’t get to some others. Only took 36 hours…

Edit Edit: And it’s dodgy again as of the morning. Woo.

We Like Movies Too, Eh?

Apple announced recently that movies were now available online via iTunes in Canada, and I figured I’d try one out of curiosity since I’ve never done any kind of online rental before, and so I picked THX 1138.

The download went without problems, and I could even start playing it while it was still downloading, but the playback of it was rather no-frills, with a lot of the usual controls missing. No subtitles (which I occasionally like to use for muddy or quiet dialogue), no chapter marks, no stream info, no extras… The picture quality was about on par with a DVD, but HD was not an option, since you specifically need an Apple TV box before you’re allowed to rent those.

Overall, it worked well enough, but I think the price was a bit high ($4 rental, $15 to purchase, but most are even higher) for what you get, and I probably won’t be making a habit of it.

An Expected Surprise

While passing through downtown today, I was surprised to notice that an arcade along the LRT line had closed down. I actually shouldn’t have been so surprised, though; it had been there for years, but I had often wondered just how it stayed in business, as there was never anyone in it whenever I went by. And yet, it persisted like that for a good ten years or so, at least. I was starting to wonder if it was just a mob front, or something…

Automated Isn’t Always Better

The Safeway near me has introduced four of those new self-service checkout counters, and despite some initial hesitation, they’re pretty easy to use and good for a quick trip when you’re only picking up a few things.

Of course, they also save the company some money by reducing cashier staffing, but that can come back to bite them in the ass. Tonight, all four self-service machines were out of order, and they’d cut all of the express cashiers for the evening, leaving the usual busy Sunday night crowd to build up in extremely long lines behind the few tills actually open.

Whoops.

So Far The Home Team Is Up By 2 Gigs

Right now, MythTV is recording an episode of Rome for me. But at the same time, a transcode job is in the middle of converting some other shows to MPEG-4 to free up some disk space.

I don’t know what’s wrong with me that my idea of amusement is to keep checking the amount of free disk space every few minutes just to see which task is ‘winning’…

I Guess It’s Not Possessed After All

Having installed a few games to the Windows partition (already down to only 20 gigs free!), it was time to pop back to OS X.

Performance is definitely much better than the old iBook, of course, and I no longer feel as constrained about what I can run at the same time. It’s nice not having to worry about whether Firefox is chewing up too much memory or CPU to launch MythTV reliably, or if VLC is going to be choppy because of swapping. I should also now be able to run more things at the same time that I wouldn’t have bothered with before, like Skype.

There are still some hardware quirks I’m running into, too. The space bar is a bit insensitive in that presses on the very ends of it often don’t register, so I have to make sure I give it a good hard tap a little further in. Gaming might be a bit less feasible now that I’ve experienced it running at full load for a while; the fans aren’t too bad, and could be drowned out by the game’s sounds or by wearing headphones, but the CPU quickly makes my lap just a little warm…

I also had a weird time figuring out what was ‘wrong’ with the LCD’s backlight. It seemed like its intensity would fluctuate a bit, often noticed just out of the corner of my eye while typing, but if I sat there and stared directly at the screen for a while, nothing would happen. There were other weird cases too, where I would have the backlight at half-intensity, pick it up and carry it a bit, and the backlight would suddenly be set at full. What I didn’t realize though, is that the ambient light sensors on the Pro units aren’t just for the keyboard backlight; the LCD backlight is by default set to automatically adjust as well. I guess the ambient light in my living room and the typing of my hands were enough to make it a bit erratic, and it’s now stable after disabling the option in the system preferences.