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Finally launched my racing site this week. Took a little over 15 hours total to build, most of which was selecting content, sizing/fixing photos, and integrating w/ the third party tools. Building the site itself in Dreamweaver was trivial as was hacking around to get Movable Type and Gallery integrated.
Plus, it's super easy for me to update/add content, particularly news and photos while I'm at races.
Mary was out of town this weekend and I ended up working on tons of projects. One of them being finally re-converged my old Sony RPTV after almost a year of needing to (I lived on Sony's Flash Focus button which did an ok job). While I was at it I also disassembled and cleaned each CRT lens, following info found on KeohiTV.
What an amazing difference. I've only completed converging 1080i mode and need to revisit 480p (since that's the mode that's used when I watch 4:3).
Another significant improvement recently was purchasing the iScan HD scalar. While quite expensive (almost $1k), it killed many birds with one stone:
Comcast is coming on Tuesday to install HDTV alonst with their new HDTV PVR box based on Microsoft media technology. Has dual HDTV tuners which should be great for dealing w/ those times I always had conflicts w/ TiVo. Another bonus is no more monthly fees to TiVo. This will be the first device to bypass the iScan (for at least the HDTV feeds), I might not have bought the iScan at the time had I known Comcast was coming out w/ a reasonable solution (just was released in Seattle only this weekend). Regardless it still improves DVD movies, race videos, video games, etc.
"All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible" - T.E Lawrence in the Seven Pillars of Wisdom
Downloaded Mozilla Thunderbird as my replacement IMAP client due to several reviews which rate it way better than Outlook Express (and Outlook which is absolutely terrible).
I've been doing massive infrastructure updates the last week or so, including:
http://www.mikerubel.org/computers/rsync_snapshots/
http://www.rsnapshot.org/
Windows
http://sync2nas.sourceforge.net/
I've wanted to have off-site backups for some time, the first inclination months ago was to burn DVDs and keep them in a safety deposit box. Good idea, but I never overcame the time hurdle to actually organize and burn the DVDs, especially since I'd have to repeat burning every month or so. I only backup sporadically.
Yesterday I realized I have a perfect offsite solution. My family's Colorado house has a cable modem w/ unlimited bandwidth. I could easily take one of my old PCs that I'm no longer using and put it into service there as a secure remote NAS.
First I looked into a few NAS Linux distributions since it would be nice to have something out of the box rather than configuring an existing distribution for my needs:
Desired features:
Features nice to have, but not required:
Others have built the same w/ RedHat 9 w/ XFS 1.3, LVM, etc. and having to customize the RH install.
Also ran across some other interesting tools:
I've wanted to put together a personal racing site for some time, mainly to increase the chance of someone contacting me about a ride opportunity (even if that is unlikely). I finally had the urge to at least try out archiving our NayKid Racing press releases for the last year in a blog. Seems like the perfect mechanism since it handles archiving, calendering, and adding new items can be done via an easy web editing interface. Actually worked out surprisingly well.
Now I'm digging through other driver sites to find a simple layouts that look good but are easily implemented so I spend as little time as possible doing my own design.