A Weblog…Again

Future of Algorithms

Great TED video.  Well worth watching for 15 minutes:

Find My iPhone Service

Not sure why I didn’t do this earlier.  Apple’s Find My iPhone service is free and seems to work great.  It can locate a lost phone, make it play a sound, wipe it clean or lock it.  Very useful.  For all those with an iPhone 4, this should be a must have service.

Camping 101

For a while now, I’ve been wanting to go camping.  Last summer, I thought about it, but my wife got pregnant and roughing it in the wilderness with a pregnant woman is like oil and water; they don’t mix.  My son is nearly 6 years old and I figure that he and I should spend some time away from it all… meaning no Nintendo, Xbox, etc.  I only went camping a few times as a kid, but I found it enjoyable, plus I think if I introduce my son to it at an early age, he’ll grow up to be more appreciative of his creature comforts as well as be more comfortable "roughing it". 

So, the first order of business was to buy camping equipment.  I had a Marmot sleeping bag that I bought about 7 years ago that is still in good shape.  Aside from that, I needed to buy everything.  After conferring with a work colleague who does a lot of backcountry camping, I came up with this initial list of bigger ticket items that I needed to purchase:

• 2 person tent
• Sleeping bag for my son
• Backpacking stove
• 2 sleeping pads
• Backpack (Haven’t bought this yet)

After reading way too many reviews and 2 visits to REI, I ended up buying the following equipment:

Tent

Marmot Limelight 2.  This is a 2 person tent that includes the footprint and gear loft.  It has received favorable reviews and appears to be very easy setup.  The only 2 criticisms are that it only has 1 door and that it is not "D" style, namely when you unzip the door it folds downward instead of to the side.

Son’s Sleeping Bag

North Face Tigger +20 Sleeping Bag.  This seems like a great bag and should be good for my son for at least 5 years.  Its warmth rating, stylish looks and build quality are exceptional.  I was about to get him the REI KinderCone, which also is a great bag, but for $30 more, I thought I would splurge.

Backpacking Stove

I ended up buying the MSR Windpro.  It has favorable reviews and seems to have a stable base.  I’ll buy some fuel this weekend and give it a shot.

Sleeping Pads

My work colleague and others have told me that buying a good sleeping pad is a worthy investment.  I didn’t go all out, but based on the reviews, I think that the Therm-a-rest Trail Lite should be more than adequate for me and my son.  It is a self-inflating pad that should keep us warm and comfortable.  Not much to look at, but here it is.

Now that I have the bulk of the equipment, I plan on setting it up and sleeping in the backyard to see how it all works for us.  This weekend will be hot (in the 90s), so I may have to delay until it drops down to the 70s or so.  Once we have a dry-run in the backyard, I want to hit a couple of state parks before the winter arrives.  I don’t think we’ll do any true backcountry, but if we can just get out there and do a bit of hiking, cook out in the open, maybe build a small fire, etc., I’ll be quite happy.

More to come…

Matterhorn: Book Review

I just finished reading Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes.  At nearly 600 pages, when I first started reading it, I had my reservations about reading a novel about the Vietnam war.  After diving into it, I was engrossed.  I’ve never been a big war buff, but this novel is gritty and allegorical.  The character development was excellent and the author really uses the backdrop of Vietnam to highlight racial politics as well as our relationship to nature and the absurdity of war strategy.  This is certainly more than just a mere "war" novel.  I highly recommend it.

Fresh Baked Bread

A couple of weeks ago, I read this article "Better Bread With Less Kneading" in the New York Times and got it into my head to give it a go.  I found a recipe (which I can’t find anymore) that required no kneading and about 2 hours for the bread to rise.  After ordering an oven thermometer (I ordered the Taylor Oven Guide from Amazon) and buying some yeast and some bread flour, I combined the ingredients and let it rise for 2 hours.  I then simply placed to dough on to a cookie sheet and cooked for about 35 minutes at 350.  The result:  a fairly edible loaf of bread that was rather tasty with some butter and jam.  (Sorry no pictures)

This evening, I didn’t have quite that much time on my hands, but I needed some activity to keep Dhruv occupied.  So I found a great and easy recipe for Banana Bread at The Fresh Loaf.  Dhruv helped with the measuring and mixing and then it was in the oven for about 50 minutes.  The result:  warm and delicious banana nut bread.  Here are some pictures:

My New Leap (Chair)

For the past 10 years, I’ve been a telecommuter working for East/West coast technology companies.  I have been very fortunate in this regard and am thankful for this work/life arrangement.  About 5 years ago, I was in the market for a new office chair.  At that time, Herman Miller Aeron chairs were still well over $500.  I remember reading about the Steelcase Leap chair that had just been introduced into the market.  It was much more of a traditional looking chair, but from an ergonomic point of view, it received accolades from many reviewers.  Unfortunately, the Leap was in the $800 – $1200 range.  So, I ended up settling for a $200 Aeron knock-off.  This was a bad move.  Over the past 5 years, I’ve probably spent anywhere between 8000 – 10,000 hours in that chair.  I can say with some degree of confidence that my posture along with my productivity has paid the price.

Over the past few weeks, the chair started falling apart.  I noticed a screw on the ground.  It creaked incessantly everytime I would swivel or lean back.  The armrest padding came undone.  It was time for a new chair.

After a bit of research, I pulled the trigger on a Steelcase Leap.  It has only been 2 days, but the difference is night and day.  The chair enforces good posture; no more slouching for me.  With all of the adjustments on this chair, it can truly be customized to my sitting style.  It is a great chair and a worthy investment that should easily last me for the next 5 years.

The Steelcase Leap

Blog Updated

I just upgraded to the latest (2.9.2) version of WordPress for my blog.  I also added integration with Facebook, which in turn required upgrading to PHP5.  Using SimpleScripts this was trivial.  Let’s see if this actually posts to Facebook or not.  Hopefully, I can get back on to the blogging bandwagon.

CD Ripping: Done

Finally finished ripping all of my CDs in both FLAC and MP3 format.  Here is what I ended up with:

Artists:   688
Albums: 645
Songs:    7700

Disk Usage:  245 GB

Right now, with the help of mpd and MPoD, I’m listening to a random selection of 100 songs across my whole music collection just with a shake of my iPhone.  Very pleased with the outcome!

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A NAS + a DAC = bye bye CDs

It has been a busy summer, but I finally got some time over the past few weeks to work on making the most of the NAS that I had built a few months ago.  There were 2 reasons why I built the NAS:  1) to have lots of local storage, which I accomplished since it is 2 TB; 2) have some redundancy, since it is in a RAID 5 configuration; and 3) migrate my CD collection to it.  So the NAS has been running rock-solid for the past few months, therefore I felt pretty comfortable in taking it to the next step.

Since my end goal was to be able to listen to all of my music through my 2-channel, Naim system, I needed to insure that the quality of the source material was lossless.  Obviously, this meant that I had to choose from one of many lossless formats.  After doing some research, I decided to go with FLAC, since it is non-proprietary and widely supported.  I then used the Mac based ripper called Max, which allows you to rip to both FLAC and MP3 formats at the same time.  I needed to rip to MP3 in addition to FLAC, because iPods and iPhones do not understand FLAC.

Once I had all of my CDs ripped, I then needed to consider how to convert the digital content to an audio input for my amplifier.  This is the purpose of a DAC (digital to audio converter).  Every soundcard has a DAC, albeit lousy, built into it, which is why you can hear music via the headphone jack.  But in order to extract as much detail and musicality from the source material, you really need a dedicated, high-quality DAC.  Since this was my first foray into the world of DACs, I didn’t want to spend a lot of money on a DAC, but I also wanted to ensure that the DAC was on par with or better than the sound of the Naim system.  After a bit of research and based on the recommendations in the Head-Fi forums, I decided to order the VALAB DAC for $200.  It is a non-oversampling DAC that has a very vinyl sound to it.  It also has the benefit of being amenable to significant modding, which is why I also purchased a soldering iron.

The next thing I needed to consider was the software that I would use to play the music and what type of user interface would I use.  I was loathe to use a laptop for this, because I really wanted the ability to have a remote in hand and browse the catalog and change music.  A Mac Mini was overkill and too expensive.  The solution to this came in the form of the Music Player Daemon (MPD), which is a client server based music player.  Basically, the server contains the player and will play whatever it is told to by the client.  The client can be another computer or any IP based networked device, for example, an iPhone.  In order to get this solution to work, I needed to have a small computer that was fanless, silent, consumed very little energy and was of a small form factor.  I discovered this blog post called the Cheap Silent USB Linux Server that matched my needs exactly.  I followed the directions to a tee and am very pleased.  I had to order a Alix 2D2 motherboard and case for about $140.  I then threw in a 1 GB compact flash card into and installed Voyage Linux as the OS.  With this setup, I can view and play my complete music collection from my iPhone using MPoD and it will automagically start playing out of the Naim system.

How does it sound, you may ask?  I am simply astonished!  There is so much more detail revealed and the soundstaging is expansive and this is all attributable to the DAC.  This setup has truly re-invigorated my ear for music and I’m listening to music from my collection as if it is brand new and completely different than what I had listened to before.  This was a real shocker to me, since my CD player, the Naim CD 3.5, was purchased for $2000 about 10 years ago.  I need to spend many more hours listening to music to get a better sense of what other improvements and tweaks I can make.  I know for a fact that I need to either make or purchase some acoustic treatments, since the room is very bright.

So, to summarize, this is what I ended up with:

• Music is stored on the NAS in FLAC format
• It is streamed over ethernet to a small, AMD Geode based device, which is running MPD
• The music is outputted in FLAC format over the USB port to the VALAB DAC
• The DAC converts the digital input to analog output and sends it out over RCA connectors
• The RCA cable then connects to my Naim amplifier
• I control what is being played from my iPhone using MPoD

This is a networked diagram of the final result.

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NAS: Move Over FreeNAS, Here Comes Ubuntu

A couple of months ago, I embarked on building a NAS with 3 x 1 Terabyte drives in a RAID 5 configuration (see here).  I used an old server that I had lying around.  I thought I had it working, but after several hours of use, the drives would heat up and sometimes they would go offline.  I would then have to reboot the server.  So, obviously, this was not a very stable solution.  I had put really silent fans inside of the server, since it was in my office, but that was probably not providing enough ventilation, thus the overheating hard-drives.

Now that I’ve run Cat 5e cable from my office into the basement, I can put the server into the utility room in the basement and voila sound is no longer a constraint.  In the meantime, the stability of the system was deteriorating.  I also didn’t like the inflexibility of using FreeNAS.  Sure, it is nice to have it all pre-packaged, but I think FreeNAS is really for those who aren’t technical enough to roll their own NAS and enable the appropriate services.  Don’t get me wrong, FreeNAS is good if you just want to get a NAS running with minimal technical know how.  But one of the issues with FreeNAS is that it appears that it only has a sole developer behind it, so releases are infrequent.  Also, the forums aren’t as active as they could be.  All of this, along with the fact that one of my drives went kaputt, has led me to build a NAS based on Ubuntu.  With very little effort, I was able to build an Ubuntu based NAS using RAID 10 with 2 x 1 Terabyte drives.  I am just playing around with RAID 10  right now as I only have 2 drives and I’ll switch to RAID 5 when my 3rd drive gets shipped back to me.  Using mdadm and some simple instructions, it was a cinch to get RAID 10 working.  I used a separate 40 GB drive for the OS install.  Once I got the system up and running, I installed the excellent web-based administration tool called Webmin.  From the looks of Webmin, it appears that you can perform RAID configurations from within it, so there really isn’t much command line expertise even required.

Since I wanted to mimic a lot of the functionality of FreeNAS, I also installed Fuppes so that I could stream media from the NAS to my XBox 360.  These instructions were invaluable for installing Fuppes.

I also wanted to configure the server allow AFP (Apple Filing Protocol), so that the Apple computers in the house could use that instead of NFS, which would be more inefficient.  These excellent instructions for configuring AFP on Ubuntu worked flawlessly. 

Once I get my replacement drive back, I’ll work on the following:

1. Put all 3 x 1 Terabyte drives into a RAID 5 configuration
2. Enable the server to act as an iSCSI target.  This is important, because my personal Macbook can then read data from the iSCSI target, which will be treated as a local drive, which means that Mozy (the online backup service I use) will back up the data.
3. Burn (once again) my complete CD collection to the NAS.  Unfortunately, with the last disk failure I lost all of the MP3′s that I had burned.  In any case, I want to now burn them in a lossless format.
4. Configure the NAS to act as an iTunes/DAAP server so that music could be streamed to any device in the house.
5. Move this server into the basement, because it sounds like a rocket engine in my office.