April 2006

Cheap NAS on Linux

Don't pay for NAS! Get it for free (or super cheap). Here's what I did (and continue to do).

1. Wait until someone throws out a computer. In my neighborhood, I seem to see one every 4 months or so. The latest one I got was a 400mhz Celeron(!). Before that, the best free PC I had was a 200mhz Pentium. This is more than enough to do what you need to do. Make sure it has a network card.
2. Buy a big hard drive. Install it in the PC. You will (probably) be better off having a small hard drive as the primary hard drive, and the big drive as the secondary, in case step #3 doesn't work out for you or you want to change Linux distributions.
3. Install Linux. On my 200mhz Pentium system, I installed Damn Small Linux (DSL) because it was small. On my "new" system, I am installing Ubuntu. The biggest negative with DSL was that I couldn't really use apt-get or whatever to upgrade the system as I wanted. Note for newbies: ignore everything I said. Just get Linux on the machine. It doesn't matter what distribution you get.
4. Install a ssh server. You can use Putty then to log in and change settings. My NAS server is sitting in the basement with no monitor, no keyboard, just a network cable and power.
5. Install Samba.
6. Edit the /etc/samba/samba.conf file to your liking. There are much better tutorials than this. The items that I have that I use are a public directory, and a homes directory for each individual user. I really only use the one big public directory.
7. Make backups. I actually have a number of old junky harddrives installed. I use a script that has a line like "cp -ruv --preserve=all dir1/* dir2" to mirror the drives.

That's about it. Cost me a total of about $100 (the hard drive). I took out everything that I would never use (floppy drive, CDs, sound card, etc.) to reduce power useage as much as possible.

Don't pay big money for NAS when you probably have what you need (well, most of it) sitting in the corner of your basement.

Escapepodder Script (podcaster.pl)

Chris at bitforbit wrote a perl script to recurse through directories and generate a podcast for each directory. You can pick it up here.

He also noted:

Oh, one thing worth mentioning that may not be obvious right off the bat is that the File::DirWalk module is required, so if you do put it up on your site, you may want to mention that.

He was nice enough to provide a copy of it to me as well. You can download it here. I'd click the link above, though, as he may have updated it in the meantime.

Thanks, Chris!

Another podcast using Escapepodder.

Here's another podcast using Escapepodder: Coffs Harbour Geek Radio.

I need to update the Your Freaky Life podcast to version 0.13...bug fixes in there.

Your Freaky Life

Here's a nicer direct link to the Your Freaky Life podcast: yourfreakylife.be. It was a free domain, so hopefully it will last a while!

Speedmaster 7000

I have a Speedmaster 7000 bike computer. It appears to use Group F in this chart. It takes 2xSR44 1.5v batteries. (Hopefully someone will find this info useful, like me next year when I have to change the batteries again).

Experiment for Someone Industrious

Here's an experiment for someone more industrious than me to perform. This is a "mind experiment" to determine if podcasting is really dying out (as suggested by Jan Polet, and suspected by myself).

1. Get a list of RSS feeds with podcasts in them
2. Monitor daily (or pull out as many items in them)
3. Track podcasts and their update frequency
4. Graph out how long the period is between podcast updates

I suspect that podcasts have a high initial udpate freqency, then die off after some time that can be correlated (somehow) to number of listeners plus the podcaster's ability to pay the bandwidth bill. Also, I'd be interested in seeing the number of podcasts updated per day over a period of months. The graph of that would tell you if podcasting is dying, growing, or whatever.

Anyone up for this experiment?

Open Source Podcasting

Here's what GPL software tools you can easily use to create an open source podcast in Windows:

• Audacity to record
• LAME to convert to mp3 format
• Escapepodder to create the RSS feed
• Whatever free FTP client to throw it up on a server (can use Windows' own FTP program)

One of the goals of Escapepodder was to have a flash ready application that anyone, anywhere could use to create RSS feeds in a tiny package from a flash drive. There is a flash drive ready version of Audactiy, as well.

Another Escapepodder

Found another one here: http://www.proberadio.end-of-dreams.com. Unfortunately, the site seems to be in the process of going down...bummer!

If you use Escapepodder, please let me know...I'd be glad to throw up a link on my blog here. I'm interested in learning who (if anyone) is using it.

Playing with CSS

Playing a little bit wiith the CSS layout of the site. I'm trying to make this two columns, but it's tricky to do without using graphics backgrounds and that kind of stuff. Oh well...looks kind of nice though.

Bassendean Town Radio

Here's a link to Bassendean Town Radio's RSS Feed, another podcast source using Escapepodder. Their web page uses another form of linking for the HTML, but the RSS feed is Escapepodder generated.