Conversion efforts and this week's story

No, I didn't post a story on Friday. Yes, I'm still working on it. Turns out that this "Oh, I'll have to patch up a few entries here and there" logic is flawed. I don't know why I'm surprised, but Google is slowly crawling the entire (old) site so I keep getting emails about the 404's to MT-style links. It had been 2-3 a day from Google but then yesterday it got all excited and sent me 54 missing links. I sat down planning to work on the story, but just spent a couple of hours writing the .htaccess file to fix them all. Still hundreds left I suppose, but a lot more entries work now. The CityDesk archives are available, though there's no sidebar link yet. Random pre-Flickr pictures are available as well.
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What The?

So, it turned out that I didn't convert my web server from Linux to the Mac Mini as quickly as I would have thought. You might ask why, and this is part of the answer. I had been wanting to do a redesign of the site for a while, and more recently had decided I wanted to switch from MovableType to WordPress. We can talk more about why I wanted do that later, but this post needs to be all about business. So there's several things that are still wrong on this version of the Post, but it's good enough to cut over. I'm missing the archives of Pic_A_Day and of the original CityDesk blog, but I'll move them later. I'm missing the BoardGameGeek and Twitter feeds (plus I want to add a Flickr feed in the sidebar.) I'm sure there's other stuff I've forgotten, but I'll move things over as I have time. The comment system is slightly different than MovableType, users have to "register" now. That account is only on my server, so don't be super worried about any of it. I won't share your email address with anyone :-) The last point: although all of the content came over from MovableType, the links are not the same. There's a table I can make to redirect from the old links to the new links, but it's right on the cusp of not being worth automating, or hacking WordPress to happen automatically. What currently happens is that if you hit a old MovableType link you get a 404 message and I get an email. I'll go through the emails and fix up magic redirection so the old links still work. So if you have a bookmark to something from the old site, please hit it soonish so I can get it working again. Ideally I'd like for people to start using the NEW links, but I don't see any reason to expire the old format. Anyway, welcome to the new blog. Help me kick the tires a bit and I'll slowly get things customized the way I want!
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Another room repainted!

We managed to get the guest bedroom repainted right before Christmas and finished up some touch-up and trim issues in time for the room to be done when Karin's parents arrived. I took some "before" and after shots and put them up on Flickr. Before Right corner before repainting After Right corner after painting Also, the wall where the window got dropped by a foot or so. This is the before shot, I didn't really bother with the after, I'll just note you can't see the difference anymore. Window edge

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Mac Mini as a Media Center

A few weeks ago we managed to accidentally fill up the HDTiVo. It's a combination of two things. One was that the Home Repair Project From Hell(tm) ate up a lot of free time and TV time decreased in response. The other was that I was deliberately dragging my feet to build up a backlog in case the writer's strike meant no real new TV in January. Unfortunately, I forgot to watch it and so the drive got full. We lost a few shows. None of them are available on iTunes or via the 360 so I turned to . . . alternative means of acquiring them. And as you may know Bob, if you acquire shows via the internet they tend to be in DiVX or XViD format. Historically I've hooked up my laptop via SVideo, but A ) that sucks image-quality-wise (who uses SVideo anymore? OK, other than Nintendo ;-) ) and B ) it's a minor pain in the rear to do. Well, the 360 got a fall update and is supposed to be able to stream DiVX these days, so I thought I'd try that out. As far as I can tell it's a vile canard. There's a new version of Connect360 that supports streaming such files to the 360 so I installed it. Had a couple of go-rounds on making sure that the *Mac* could play the files, then had to reinstall the "Optional Media" download on the 360, but ultimately it all worked out. Or so I thought. Everything worked OK in my tests, but it turned out that I could only play about 3 to 5 minutes of a file and then something on the Mac would crash (either Connect360Helper or ffmpeg) and the 360 would freeze. I found even audio streaming didn't work right Ultimately I rolled Connect360 back to the spring version. Still a recommended product and I'm sure they'll get this sorted eventually, but right now I personally found using Connect360 3.1 is the way to go. OK, I decided, let's try Windows. First in the virtual machine, and then rebooting via Boot Camp into "real Windows" and all the various patching and tweaking that Windows requires. Nothing. It worked for audio, but the 360 kept saying there were no video files on the Windows box. Just in case I wasn't annoyed at Windows I tried to shut down my firewall (Zone Alarm - the built-in Windows firewall isn't trustworthy). Guess what? If you turn off your firewall Windows Media Player automatically and silently disables file sharing. I guess otherwise you might accidentally share a file across the internet. Teh h0rr0rz! Thanks Microsoft for saving me from myself! This is about the point where I said to myself "OK, screw this. I have a Mac Mini sitting around, it might as well sit in the living room. Heck, that would give me some desk space back!" I needed to buy a DVI to HDMI cable, but no big whoop - Amazon sells those. Ideally you want the cord that converts from regular audio mini-jack to optical as well, so you can get digital audio from the Mini. I have one of those already (I used it when the Airport Express was connected to my receiver), so I'm pretty much set. Last night I moved Horton to on top of the TV. It's running Leopard, so it already has Front Row, and all Mac Mini's have an IR port and come with the little Apple remote, so it pretty much just worked out of the box. Or so I thought. First issue was that I had to teach the remote commands to the Harmony 880. I expected the Harmony software to have the Apple commands in the database, but it didn't. Annoying, but solvable with the learning function. The more subtle problem was this: when I turned off the display device connected to Horton, the machine went to sleep. You can wake it up if you hit a Bluetooth mouse or keyboard to wake it, but that's not very useful for the remote situation. Turns out there is freeware called InsomniaX that fixes the problem like a charm. Run it and the Mini stays awake even with the TV off. Front Row is pretty cool, I have to say. The remote is minimalist but you can play pretty much anything that iTunes or Quicktime can play. You can access iPhoto albums, and you can even browse shared content on other Macs. So if I have a video podcast on TinyGod (where I do all my podcast downloading) I can stream it to Horton and play it on my TV with no problem. Oh, and it plays DiVX/XVid files just fine. I don't know that I'll use this a lot, but it's pretty cool. If anybody has any specific questions about how it works let me know.

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