Lately, while our house has been pretty much off-limits due to the painting, I’ve been doing more thinking of possible future projects. There are plenty of things I could do to improve my Home Theater system(s), but I’m being practical. What would make things more convenient while also being useful? What I mean is that while you could go out and spend X amount of dollars on the next cool technology, it doesn’t mean anything if it doesn’t actually server your needs. I simply want to compliment what I have already done, while providing myself with future upgrade/expansion potential.

What came to mind was home automation. I’m not thinking big here, simply becaue there is only so much of it that would prove useful to me at this point in time. One thing I’d really like to have is the ability to control the lighting in my bedroom with the Harmony 670 I have. I’ve looked into the X10 line of products and it appears to do what I want, with the right combination of devices. A standard package looks to provide a little more than I’d even initially want. The only downside is the additional IR>RF bridge I would need since my Harmony remotes are both IR. Good news is that they are pretty inexpensive.

I’ll have to do some more research before I feel comfortable in going this route, however. X10 has been around a while, but I keep discovering reason to believe they aren’t the most reliable devices in the world. I don’t need the best, but I’m not buying junk either.

Please leave any comments or suggestions you may have regarding home automation products. I’d like some feedback on your experiences.

I finally got around to getting my home theater equipment added in my projects list.  I’ll get some pictures up soon.  Painters started on the inside of our house today, so I’ll probably take a bunch of pictures after they’re finished and everything is put into place.  That will probably slow things down for the site a bit, however, since I can’t stay at home until they finish.  Hopefully everything will be done by week’s end.

I’ve added a network equipment  table to my projects section.  Next up will be a table describing my home theater equipment.  Eventually, I’ll get pictures to associate everything to up here.

Link for the lazy.

I missed it until this morning, but MyMovies 2.44 is available for download here. It appears to be some minor bugfixes over the 2.43 Final that was released a few days prior. I’ve not noticed any differences, but I ’set and forget’ mine and don’t use anything beyond the MCE interface side of things (except for adding movies). I think it resolved some disc-copy issues.

Also, there is a new version of Vista4Cast (v1.3) available here. Another weather plugin, Extended4Cast is also available there. It looks very nice despite its beta-like status.

Important Update:

I didn’t realize it until now, but MyMovies 2.44 adds the capability of a new “wall of movies” display; similar to the 6-across hack I wrote about a while back.  There is a catch, however…you need 500 contribution points in able to activate it in Collection Management.  Lucky me.  I have over 1800 :)

There is some buzz going around about a 6th installment to the Dirty Harry series of movies.  It’s only rumor, so I’m not going into detail, but it’s gotten me a little excited.

For those wondering how a 78 year-old Clint is going to make it as Harry Calihan again, just think about that old prick that lived down the road from you when you were a little kid, “Get off my grass!”.

Put a .44 in his hand and think about it.

I finally finished updating my entire movie collection to take advantage of the MyMovies web service.  I was even able to contribute nearly 1800 points worth in the process, so I get to enjoy a few extra perks.

There were, however, about a half-dozen or more titles that won’t make it to the web service since they were never actually DVDs.  I have a few old VHS transfers that never made it to DVD, so they won’t be listed.  There’s nothing major, so I’m not going to bother listing them here either.

If you’d like to see what I have (and have on my wish list if it’s not actually out yet), take a look here.

There is a thread at the unRAID forums here that discusses increasing the read-ahead buffer in unRAID from the default 256KB to 2MB can drastically increase performance. I hadn’t tried it since I’m very new to unRAID and not very proficient in Linux, so I was unable to comment…until now.

A few minutes ago I felt adventurous and decided to do it. Effects are immediate, so there was no rebooting involved and it appears as there is also no risk involved…it either helps or it doesn’t.

Long story short, I test it at the default with a 2.1GB file and found I was transferring at 24.8MB/s. Not terrible for a light media server, but not that great either. I then, following the instructions from the thread, put in the following for each of my drives:

For disk1:

root@mediasvr:~# blockdev --setra 2048 /dev/md1

For disk2:

root@mediasvr:~# blockdev --setra 2048 /dev/md2

After testing again, I found that I had gone up to 61.4MB/s. Astoundingly, almost a 250% increase in performance.

Needless to say, I used an entry for the Go script to execute this modification at each boot. Please visit that thread for any discussion. Otherwise, your comments here are always welcome.

We were supposed to begin painting the entire insides of our house today, but we’ve postponed it until Monday. It’s made for a busy last couple of days and the weekend won’t get any better.

Yesterday was spent taking down and cleaning two 30g fish tanks, unhooking my entire living room entertainment center and moving a couple of bedrooms-worth of furniture to different rooms in the house. Today, I’m sore.

The good news is that it is going to allow me to do a much-needed cleanup of the mess of wires that was behind my entertainment cabinet. After disconnecting everything, I took some mesh sheathing I had lying around and bundled my speaker, video and power cables into three separate bundles. All that’s left is to get a double-gang box for the hole in my wall so that I can mount the wire management plate. I had cut the hole too large to screw directly to the wall, so hopefully I can fit an outlet box in there somehow to make it usable. Doesn’t really matter since the cabinet covers it anyway.

I still need to figure out what I’m going to do with the switch panel, switches, modem and HDHomeRun in the office though. When I wired the house I used it as the master patch panel and I don’t really want to take down the entire world for a week. Especially since I’ll be living in the basement while they’re there. I guess I can take down what is not going to be used and let them paint around things. I’ll probably tape up the CAT5e jacks myself since I don’t want them removing them and, considering they use spray guns, I don’t want them ruined. I’ll figure it out when that time comes. There’s not very many jacks anyway.

I’ve been spending a lot of time continuing the update of MyMovies to convert everything I have from the custom inputs to the Web Service. For most, it would take a few minutes to do it all in a batch, but I still want to retain my front cover posters instead of the front cover DVD image. Plus, I make a few subtle changes here and there…I’m just picky like that, but I like what I like. I’m almost done though…only around 50 or so titles left (I think).

For the longest time, most of us Vista (and MCE) users have wanted the ability to add, remove and modify the menus presented on the ‘Home’ screen. It looks as though an application is on the horizon that will give us that capability.

Over at XPMediaCentre.au, a member has started developing an application to do just this. I came across this link from a thread at the TheGreenButton, where a discussion on hacking XML and DLL files was achieving similar results. The application looks to do similar things, without the headaches and guesswork involved.

I’ll be sure to post updates here as I watch this project closely.

Update:

There actually is a download available of this utility.  You have to go a few pages in through the thread to find the latest release, but it is working.  I downloaded it and gave it a try, but it’s very limited in what it had to offer me, personally.  It’s of no fault of the author’s, just Microsoft doesn’t give much to work with.

For those wanting to give it a try, it is very easy to use.  You do have to register with the site to download.  I do not provide downloads on this site.

The debugging log was left on in Beta 2 and will quickly fill available memory. Download Beta 3 and install ASAP.