I just received a link for the Vista and Windows Server Service Pack 2 Release Candidate standalone downloads from Microsoft.  Many of you have already downloaded and installed previous release candidates, but this is the one that will probably be RTM.

Get it here if you haven’t already.

Just dropping in real quick to say that I have uploaded an updated ImagesByName RAR file.  It’s just under 100MB, so it’s getting quite large already.  I may start doing diff files so everyone doesn’t have to grab 100MB just for a few updates.  I’ll test that out this week.  Anyway, it’s in the download section.

I’m also going to start outlining a couple of encoding guides for the encoders I use…mostly MeGui, RipBot264 and Handbrake.  Search them up and take a look if you haven’t already.  I’d link, but I’m tired and ready to eat!  Hopefully I’ll get some time tomorrow to bring some news.

A new release of Salami’s Movie Organizer has been released (well, on the 18th) that fixes moviemeter.nl metadata fetching.  You can get it here.

I finished my movie of offices this weekend.  There is still some straightening up and organizing to do, but everything works now.  I also completely reorganized my server room and it looks much nicer now.  I’ll take some pics and put them up in a day or two along with the new office/playroom space.

I also reinstalled my C2Q primary system this weekend.  I tried to clone my 74GB Raptor to a Drive XPert RAID0 array, but the Paragon copy script that is supposed to execute on boot just hung, leaving me unable to get into my system.  I’m sure I could’ve fixed it with a little searching, but I didn’t care.  It had been a while since I did a fresh install and I wasn’t really going to be losing any data (I keep everything on unRAID and the other array on my C2Q box).

I also imaged over my NETSVR to a new 146GB Seagate 15K SAS drive on a Dell SAS 5/iR controller.  That sped things up a little.  I imaged over my VPNSVR to a new partition on the 250GB that was in it and removed the 320GB PATA drive.  That drive went into my unRAID server to take the place of the 500GB drive that used to be home to my file NAS drive.  I was only using 140GB of it and my kid’s movie drive was almost empty.  I still have one 500GB left, but I’m going to need that for my TV recordings soon.  Finally, I retired the old BKPSVR since I got a free PCI slot on VPNSVR to move the Adaptec SCSI card and Dell tape drive to.  A lot of drive musical chairs this weekend!  It all worked out well though.

I got the old 48″ Sony projection TV moved into the office/playroom and got HTPC3 hooked up to it.  It looks like the 11g network adapter will be enough.  I have an access point only about 10ft from it, but I was worried about latencies and how Media Browser would work with it.  I imagine it will be a little slow at first, but once it caches everything it will work just fine.  It will be good enough for the kids, for sure.

Well, I’m tired and my sinuses are killing me, so I don’t think I’m up for bringing anymore news for the day.  Tomorrow is a new day!

I don’t know how much is going to get posted here over the next couple of weeks.  We have a home care inspection on March 5th and we have a lot of work to do to prepare for it.  The biggest part of it is for me…we have a “master-on-the-main” bedroom that we were using as an office that we decided to use as our in-home care room.  The problem with that is that I have all the network cabling in the house converging to that room via a 12-port patch panel I installed into a wall.

We’re now moving our office to the complete opposite side of the house and upstairs, so I’ve got to undo everything that took me 2 weeks to do.  I’m just glad I had a basement that all of this was done in.  The good part of it is that the upstairs room is huge (above garage area) and it will give me a chance to clean up my server room and centralize everything down there.  I have a finished room in the basement that has been home to all of my servers, so it does make sense to move everything else down there too.  I ran a dual TV/phone jack in there last night to prepare for a cable modem/Vonage connection.  Tonight I’ll be running a line or two to the room over the garage via the attic.  I’ve been up there once, but I don’t remember if I can get down through a wall there or not.  I also bought an 8 and 5-port D-Link switch at Micro-Center that I’ll need to re-route everything.  I already have an 8 and 5-port, but I don’t want to rerun all the cabling, so I have to do some additional switching.

I’m also going to have to take apart our desks to get them up there, so I’m not looking forward to that.  There’s a lot of other stuff to do too, but moving everything is going to be the biggest part (there’s a king size bed and dresser in the upstairs room that needs to come down too).  I may start taking a few pictures along the way in case any of you ever have to do something like this.  Now that I think about it, I should have taken some for the TV/phone outlet.  There was plenty of wall fishing involved there.  Oh well, the attic drop will involve some more.

I know I had said that a SecondRun.tv plugin review was coming, but there are full screen issues with the last release, so I’m going to continue to hold off.  Currently, I can only watch video in the webpage view (without resorting to a keyboard/mouse), so it’s not of much use to me.  If you use a keyboard and mouse with your Media Center already, then it’s probably not a big deal at all for you.  Otherwise, the plugin is looking really great.

I’ve been knee deep in webhosts all day.  My Mom owns a children’s store in my hometown and for the longest time I’ve tried to convince her to take it online.  She finally decided to listen and has been really excited about it.   I bought her a domain name about a month ago and she said she was a go with it all so I purchased a starter plan via 1&1 Hosting (who this one is through) and started setting everything up.

I know nothing about e-commerce sites, so I went with Wordpress and an e-commerce plugin that was available for it.  It was pretty nice and looked like it would suffice, but 1&1 really sucks when it comes to resources.  I found that after installing that plugin, I pretty much was limited to nothing else.  Memory usage was maxed and doing simple tasks resulted in continuous displays of the  Internal Server Error 500 page.

So, enough was enough and I’ve decided to transfer the domain to InMotion Hosting which rated very high on many webhosting review sites for business purposes.  Only problem is that I have to wait 60 days from the time of domain registration for it to begin the transfer process.  The 60 day mark is February 2nd, so not too bad.  Hopefully it won’t take too long to actually transfer.

This also gave me a chance to look into dedicated storefront software and I was surprised to find so many free options.  I looked at Magento, osCommerce, Mal’s e-Commerce, VirtueMart, Zen-Cart and others.  I finally found one I really like for her in Prestashop.  It’s pretty simple, but has a nice interface and I don’t think the admin panel will overwhelm her.  It also seems to have all the options I can ever imagine her needing…even if it does better than I expect (I hope it makes her millions, but I have to be a little realistic at first).

Anyway, that’s what I’m doing right now as I wait for Prestashop to upload via FTP.  After it gets off the ground, I’ll post the link and you can all buy your kids some new clothes.

So, out of complete boredom, I decided to try and stream some videos to my Blackberry 8320 that was provided to me by my work.  I manage a Blackberry Enterprise Server Express at work and I have them configured to for data usage, so I can do this without relatively no impact.  Unfortunately, I found that the OS that shipped with our Blackberries (4.2 I think) did not support streaming media, so I was out of luck…until I decided to upgrade it.

I downloaded v4.5 from T-Mobile, which is our carrier, and it took about an hour to go through the install.  I wasn’t expecting that.  Anyway, I first tried TVersity as my streaming media server since it was supposed to support the transcoding of MKV files better, but I repeatedly timed out when trying to stream a file.  So, I figured I would try out the Orb one more time.

I set this up on my VPNSVR since it doesn’t do much except run my WSUS and act as my VPN access point.  It’s not the most powerful system  (E1200 and 2GB DDR2), but it passed Orb’s system requirements.  After configuring a folder for Orb to use and making a few configurations to test with, I accessed mycast.orb.com and logged in from my Blackberry.  I initially browsed to a folder containing a movie in AVI format and hit play.  Success!  I was presented with the Blackberry media player and it started playing 12 Angry Men.  The resolution was extremely small, however, and did not fill my screen, but I was still pretty happy that it even worked.  I don’t have any initial plans for this functionality, but it makes my work phone a whole lot more fun.  I was able to get MKVs to playback, but the video was not viewable.  The audio appeared fine, but it was still unwatchable.  Oh well, I imagine I would only really use this for TV episodes or home videos and I only have a handful of those in MKV format.

So, if you have a fairly new Blackberry, upgrade your OS to 4.3 or later and enjoy streaming media using Orb!

It’s not exactly new news as there have been several beta versions and an alpha already released, but I decided to sign up so that I could download it for the first time this past weekend.

I’m talking about the latest DivX 7.0 package which now includes an h.264 codec for playback on its included DivX media player.  I played a few minutes of a a 720p movie I had and it worked, so yay for that.

I also joined their new project team and downloaded the DivX h.264 CLI encoder they have.  I’ve not used it yet, but I think I’ll give it a test run on the next DVD/BluRay disc I get.  I’ll see if I can do a comparison test using similar encoding methods with the x264 encoder.  They both go use the same frame serving and scripting software, so it may not be that hard.  I’ll post my results if and when I get around to doing that.

Just signed up for Technorati and they force this stuff, so here’s my link:

Technorati Profile

Yeah so, I don’t have much to put out this week since I’m sick and too tired and lazy to actually come up with something new for you.  I feel like I just snorted a line of razor blades and got a massage from an asphalt roller.

Anyway, I will wish you all a Happy New Year!  Nyquil cheers to everyone!

Since I love Wordpress so much, I thought I should put it out there.  The new version of Wordpress, 2.7 “Coltrane”, is now available for download or automatic update if you’re on a beta or RC.  Automatic upgrade from RC1 took about 5 seconds, literally.

I’m not going into what the new version brings since it is so completely different (at least from the administration portal view), so read about it here then get on it!