Seasons Greetings to all !
My News Years resolution was going to be to create and maintain my online presence, but I decided to start early.
Christmas day entailed a 7am start (about average for my lot) until 2am. Christmas day is always a big affair in our house. Everyone congregates at ours. It was a bit of an easier ride this year; only 12 for dinner. Annette, Des and the kids (my sister and law and her family) decided to stay at home in London this year. Derek and Leanne (my brother) went to Leanne’s family for dinner, but they did come over in the evening.
Being a technological (wannabe) family it was a hardware Christmas. Connor and Sarah got new desktop PCs (Connor has a very nice 19 inch widescreen that I’m jealously eyeing up) and Emma got a nice shiny Dell laptop (I prefer my black one !)
So my current job is to get the wireless cards into the desktops and configured and copy all of the content from the “old” PCs onto the new. I think I may have just convinced myself that a cheap Network Attached Storage device is in order so I don’t have to do this again !
On the plus side my dad is inheriting Connor’s old PC and I am inheriting Sarah’s ! That’s me upgrading from my 500mhz pc to a 2.2ghz, yes you read that correctly. I tend to run Fedora Core so you can get acceptable performance from older hardware. I have just noticed however that this PC has only 256MB of memory, no wonder the kids complained it was slow !
Another successful experiment was providing the music for Christmas day. On my FC server I have been running slimserver to stream music. I then listen to this on my laptop or on my phone (using a wireless connection). On Christmas I went the whole hog and wired my laptop up to the hifi and then used my phone (M5000) as a remote control. It’s amazing being able to change artists/tracks/playlists at the click of a button from anywhere in the house. I may yet be convinced to upgrade to a squeezebox yet, but then again what i have works and costs nothing.
Back to moving files around the network and working out why one PC refuses to go faster than 1meg when everything else hits 56meg.