Why didn’t anyone tell me…

Notes that seem to need clearing up on the internet:
1. Handbrake is still your friend. In 0.9.4 (current version) use the profiles named “High” or “Normal” and all is well. They support HD if you see note 2.
2. Keep it under 4 gig. If you’re encoding to HD – make sure to use the ‘target [...]

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“What, Dave, more?” you ask. Yes, I’m afraid so. I’m afraid so. Trying to keep it short this time.
All builds have a server, 4+ disk RAID5, and offer flexible storage expansion to keep them around for about 2 to 4 years. Each has a “Priced from scratch” number. Remember that this includes 4x $100 drives [...]

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One of the abstraction problems I had with plotting out home virtualization is that I’ve already solved a number of these problems, and I don’t have a dedicated budget to go about replacing my whole – working – infrastructure. But knowing how much electricity is lost and heat generated with each little power brick and [...]

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In my previous post on the topic, I presented a couple alternative ways to get a lot of home infrastructure with little redundancy and some virtualization. The fact is, it’s pricey to do it ‘properly’. So I set out to look at the pros and cons of some alternative methods that make it a more [...]

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How will Dave centralize his home infrastructure?

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encode
Back Story
We finally stepped part way into the HD era, by attaching a PS3 to our SD television. Sacrilege, I know, but it’s what I have for now, and the economy isn’t getting any better this week. But, as we only have two games for it (Little Big Planet and Mater-National Racing), we have found [...]

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My wandering uses of Quicken started with very early versions on Mac OS, back in the black and white days. Then there was the new age of color macs, and then shortly after was the Windows Revolution, where they discovered that there were greener fields on green screens. Then, suddenly, there was not one product [...]

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I’ll fess up now. I like audiobooks. I spend too much time commuting and too little time with the paper books in hand, so I got hooked on audiobooks back in 1998 when I discovered the Rob Ingles version  of Lord of the Rings on Napster. I since found the whole set on ebay, so [...]

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If you’re like me you read a lot of, “wow, that’d be neat” type of articles. Like on creating that Digital Bookshelf you’ve always been meaning to do. Or organizing your photos, or your parent’s photos, or writing that cool app you wish you had time for, or whatever it might be. I notice that [...]

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I have an Infrant ReadyNAS x600 or whatever they were back in those days, and it’s a rock solid little network server. I also run lots of differing Macs and PCs in the house. My backup solution up until Leopard was to take complete disk images. Since SuperDuper is still a week out of releasing [...]

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