The Music Anywhere Project

Thought I would post about my 'Music Anywhere' project... I've been thinking for a long time that I would get jungle disk or something similar working, and maybe setup backups, but primarily just upload all my music, and use it as my music repository. Well, last weekend I decided to take the plunge.

JungleDisk is pretty impressive. I tried it out shortly after S3 launched, and it wasn't too great back then. In fact, I couldn't get it working on either my Mac laptop or my windows pc at home. I abandoned the project at that point... Last weekend, though I just downloaded jungledisk and was off and running.

Getting jungle disk up and running (even with automated, versioned, backups) was very very easy, jungle disk is well worth the $20 (+ $1/month for "plus" service that lets you access your files via the web). The hard part was actually getting all the data uploaded. Evidently my modem or comcast or something destroys my connection with very much upload at all. I was able to get some of it uploaded, but it was basically powercycling my modem every hour to do that. So I just waited until monday and started the very long process of uploading 32gigs of music/video to s3.

Following the advice of another blog post, I actually used the "consolidate library" feature of iTunes to move the files... Which would theoretically allow me to upload files and have itunes change their location in its database to the network drive location. This was a bad idea... iTunes frequently crashed, I had to restart the laptop about twice a day to keep the upload going, and at the end of it, though all my music was uploaded (I wrote a couple of scripts to check that), itunes only had the right location for about half of it.

I tried modifying the itunes library files to point to the correct location (there are XML files sitting in the base directory), but taht didn't work. It turns out that iTunes actually uses a binary flat file for its db, and those XML files just get re-written about every time anything changes (more on that later). Eventually I gave up, started a new library (which lived on the network drive itself, so that I would have a backup) and just re-imported my old library + playlists.

This worked, to an extent. Unfrotunately iTunes still felt like re-writing its db quite a bit, and it caused jungle disk to re-pull every single file, since itunes had to analyze each file for gapless playback. This ate through a good chunk of outgoing bandwidth. Additionally, I still had the crashing issues, though that was old hat by this point.

The final tweak to the setup came when I tried to get my phone to sync to my "new" itunes library... evidently iTunes doesn't deal well with slow I/O (like a s3 network drive) and mobile applications for the iPhone. So I moved the library files back to the harddrive, and things are working well now. (BTW, hold down the 'option' key to select a different library from your default startup library).

Most of this would've been able to be avoided if iTunes let me fix up its DB manually, or if I used something other than iTunes for playback (but I'm still tied to iTunes' DRM until this summer at least). But, I did get backups for my home computer, which will ensure that I won't loose a passel of RPG notes, characters, and systems like I did about a year or so ago, again, which is a great thing.

If anyone wants to attempt this here are my suggestions:

1. Have a high-speed uplink, doing this at work still took 3 or so days, and they have a fantastic uplink
   
2. Just copy the files over, use rsync or something so you can resume easily (don't let it md5 sum the files)
   
3. Export your current playlists using itunes, then start a new library and import the file, after using sed or something to fix up all of the file locations.
   
4. Give jungle disk a file cache size large enough for your entire collection, its a lot better when jungle disk doesn't have to re-pull files from s3
   

BTW, as of right now, this whole project has cost me about $16 in s3 fees, and about $21 dollars for jungledisk, I estimated about $5 per month in storage / bandwidth fees for s3, we'll see how accurate that is!

GPS Tracking at last....

So, I finally got real-time GPS tracking up and working... It took a little bit of effort, and some interesting tweaks to get my iphone to update things, but now you can see it:



If it's working correctly you should see a little google map insert with my current position (and my recent previous positions.

Soon-ish this url should work: https://where.benjaminbernard.com (DNS servers have to be updated first)

So how does this work? 4 things combine to make this a functioning system.

1. GPS Tracker - a free app store iphone app that uploads your data to instamapper.com. They also provide the actual map display.
   
2. FastMac iV - Extended battery - Though it looks like a tumor on my phone and makes things awkward, I really enjoy the extra battery life, and you need it if your gps is going to be on all the time.
   
3. Insomnia - an app that keeps your phone from suspending, which allows apps in the background to keep running and using things like the network (this is a jailbroken app only)
   
4. Backgrounder - a jailbroken app that lets you background programs individually
   

This all this lets me run GPS Tracker in the background with enough battery power (hopefully) to get me through the day.

I've been wanting to do this for quite some time, and was the main reason I bought my first GPS-enabled smart phone. I always meant to write this system myself, but never got around to it... I'm actually pretty excited about doing the whole lifehacker thing... If there were a good way to do it I would wear a webcam and have it upload picture feeds all the time, I think that would be pretty cool (if extremely geeky. Maybe me and a few other cyclops can get this thing going!

A Rocket Ride

I recently ran a game with a very strong group of players, and I thought I'd relay that experience here. The game was called "Rocket Ride" and is based on a song by Tom Smith. This is a great song about the joys of old-school sci-fi. Here is an excerpt from the lyrics

I want a shining tower of glass and steel,
A rubber jumpsuit and a freeze-dried meal,
The will to survive, the need to explore,
The love of adventure, who could ask for more?

Who couldn't love that?! Anyway, so based on this, I ran my rocket ride game. It was an impromptu meeting of the Amber gaming crew, and included Mike (visiting from GA Tech), Chris and Leslie, Andi, and Keith. I posted a future of the 1950s, complete with finned rockets, smart heros, and the drive for the future.

We started with the premise that all the characters were employees of a corporation that was trying to make the first space trip. That right, in grand Heinlein style we had corporations beating the government to space.

The players began by thinking of characters. And we had all the old great sci-fi tropes out in force. We had "Captain Dr. Thruster" the high-flying leader and pilot. We had the boy-genius "JET - John Edward Thruster, nephew of the captain", guaranteed to get captured by the bad guys, his intelligent dog companion Sirius, the russian food scientist "Red", and the eccentric mathematician / computer scientist.

We started with the first launch of the "Liberty Rocket" (the name of their spaceship) being interrupted by the presence of the Evil Galatic Sector Lord. After arranging a darring escape from Earth with the help of the Air Force, they went to the homeworld of the Sector Lord to see what they could find out about him. Of course, it was full of communists (who else?). There was a beautiful princess (the sector lord's daughter) to woo as well as a revolution by the capitalists to help.

All in all, it was a light-hearted romp through the 1950-based future. And of course the heros came out on top, evil was vanquished (but lived to fight another day), and Captain Thruster got the girl.

Moved In and Everything

Hey Internet,

I got moved into my place, still have a bunch of boxes everywhere, I'm hoping to have all of those unpacked by the end of summer.

Last weekend went out to some furniture places to fill my house. Got a table, 2 recliners, and a sofa. I also bought a new bed (partially so that I could have a guest bed)... Actually I got a LoveSac to use as a bed, it just got delivered yesterday. We'll see how that goes.

Just a short post today, for some reason I just love both this discovery channel commercial and the related XKCD comic:



See the XKCD comic here, though I think you may have to have read the comic to fully appreciate it. Maybe next year I'll fill some room of my house with paypen balls, though I don't think Belle would like it.

The Hunt is Over! The Horn of Valere is found!

Yes, its true, I've made an offer on a house, and it has been accepted. As some of you already know, its the split-level house up in shoreline, MLS 28053247. I'm not sure how long that link will remain active, but for now it has some pictures there, and you can always see the video in the previous post (the second video in the previous post)

Now comes the long part, I'm getting an inspection done tomorrow, and I'm not anticipating any problems. I'm talking to a couple of lenders for the loan, and we'll see how that works out. The closing date is 6/20, which gives me until the 31st to actually move in!

Exciting stuff. Soon I will have to post about the various house gadgets I'm looking into. As with all things, the house must be gadgeted up! Also there will be furniture and art purchasing to be done as well, though all in its own time.

Oh, and I thought I'd give some explanation for the split level over the weird house, the weird house was 50k more, and very inconvenient to the highways, also, only had a 1 car garage. That really killed it, since I'd have to put my expensive car or my expensive bike on the street in a very urban area... So, split-level glory is mine!

PS: If you get the title, congrats, you read good books.

The Great Hunt Continues!

So, Mike and I went out today for quite a bit longer than I was expecting. Anyway, I think we've found two good candidates. Which is good because the last 2 I posted about are already gone :).

The first house we're calling the Weird House, MLS 28032152. This is a really interesting house because of the whole 2nd living space in the basement. The spaces is hard to use, but has a lot of charm and character. Biggest benefit is that its only about 10 mins from South Lake Union, so its the closest house to work that I've looked at so far:



The second house is a Split-level house MLS 28053247. THis ia a very large house with a lot of bigger rooms. It has an enormouse garage (4 car) and a great yard. Its pretty far away, though, ending up all the way in Shoreline. Video below (less edited than other videos, but you'll have to live)



Once again, opinions welcome

House Hunting Videos

So, I went to 9 different houses yesterday evening. Mike and I were a little tired out by the end, but we found 2 winner houses, I think.

The first is MLS#28082816... It Redfin isn't pulling it up right now, but you can try looking it up if you want. This house is nice, with a great yard and a hottub. Video below



The Second is the so-called "View House" which has an incredible view out over east capitol hill and out to the cascades. This one is in the U-District very near university villiage. This one has a spa tub, very nice, but is sorta small, great location though. Video below



So which is the blog favorite?