Bingo.

However, my network is now clearly diagrammed with wired and wireless devices alike. Static DHCP leases are up to date, and the serial number/model panels of all major electronics have been photographed and uploaded to Evernote. Some manuals have been added.

Maybe next weekend I'll consolidate network shares, and see if I can either get rid of the Linux box (weeps at reduced diversity) or make sure it's being used in an automation workflow. Or I can verify VNC is up and working, and maybe move its noisy ass into the living room. Right now it's just a backup iTunes server and a file server.

How much backup iTunes do I need? The PC and the Linux box run off the same files, the Linux box broadcasting music using firefly, and the Apple TV has a dupe of the library, the iPod has the same, and the MacBook and both Android devices have all the purchased non-DRMed files. God forbid I should be without music.

I'm choking trying to work out how to organise the information to stream with uPNP, though. I have found apps that will poll and rename, but I need to combine that with transcoding somehow.

Can any of your wired devices be made wireless?

The ones that are wired are wired because it's the only adapters they have, or because I regularly move large files to and from them and want a big stable pipe. In fact, I'd like to have a cable for my MacBook too, I think. And I need to check and see if my DVD player gets cabled.

Looks like my Firefly media server is down anyway.

I mean, it seems to be running--I can access the web server and make config changes, but none of the iTunes installs can access it. And development is stalled on it. Now I see a bunch of media servers that run off a NAS, but not the one I have. I wasn't thinking of that when I was shopping, dammit.

I've got this little guy for my living room stuff. It draws a maximum of 3 watts.

[link]

It's smaller than a paperback. (Well, smaller than my SciFi and Fantasy paperbacks, maybe not smaller than a short mystery)

Dear Microsoft, Google and Netflix,

Fuck you.

-tommyrot.

Microsoft, Google and Netflix want to add DRM-hooks to W3C HTML5 standard

OK, the whole thing is technical and wouldn't have any immediate effect, but...

A proposed anti-copying extension for the WC3's standard for HTML5 has been submitted by representatives of Google, Microsoft and Netflix. The authors take pains to note that this isn't "DRM" -- because it doesn't attempt to hide keys and other secrets from the user -- but in a mailing list post, they later admitted that this could be "addressed" by running the browser inside a proprietary hardware system that hid everything from the user.

IMHO, making people use computers with a proprietary hardware system that hides everything from a user would be a Very. Bad. Thing. So if that's their long-term goal, then hang on to your open-architecture computers....

5 ports, 4 devices? Am I reading that right? One for the connection back to the mothership? I need more ports than that--I have an 8 port one in my living room right now, and only one port free which I'm thinking of giving over to the other laptop.

It would be...

Bedroom - Router + switch = 6 ports. (2 from router, 4 from switch)

Living Room - switch = 7 ports.

Oh, I misread you entirely. Yeah, it does look like I need to do something like that. It's a shame, because I wanted to upgrade my router anyway, because it's a bit hinky, so it would have been nice to get increased functionality at the same time as upgrading reliability.

I also need to take another look at my power bars, and make sure those are sensible. I think I'm maxed out under the desk too, which was another reason I didn't want to add another electrical device there.

Oh, for fuck's sake I've fallen down the VNC rabbit hole again. I'm back to ground...well, one. Where VNCing in gives me the grey screen with one terminal window. I can't run Gnome on the box itself because it's sending some perverse frequency to the monitor no matter what I choose (the monitor error message keeps reporting the same thing, no matter what setting I pick). I'm up to my elbows in error messages and google and manuals, and I'm about to break it all down and find out exactly what video card is up in that beast.

This is what you get with a $200 PC and a ~10 year old flatscreen and an old install of a DIY OS. NO LOVE.

Well, didn't manage to get a resolution better than 800x600. I'm going to back up the data from that server, and at least upgrade to the latest version of Ubuntu, and if that doesn't work, install from scratch.

Has anyone here used Fences ( [link] A chatty developer at a vendor of ours mentioned it, and it's really helping keep my work desktop under control, and I'm about to give it a shot on my much bigger home desktop. It allows you to bring back some old school Win 3.1 functionality, basically, and group icons on your desktop, "fence" them off in a movable container.