1000umbrellas - 1000umbrellas.com
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Migrating the Site to A New Home 11 Apr 2013 | 06:00 am
I plan to shut this defunct blog down soon and migrate it to http://mjdescy.wordpress.com. Hopefully Google will index that site and keep the few pages that are useful to people accessible going forwa...
My Favorite Ubuntu Linux Music Server 9 Jan 2011 | 04:57 pm
The Problem After about a year of enjoying how well my Ubuntu Linux home server downloads, organizes, and serves video files to my TV, I started to think harder about serving up music to devices arou...
2010 Gadgets of the Year 3 Jan 2011 | 03:09 pm
Now that 2010 is completely over, I thought it would be fun to look back on the gadgets that meant the most to me over the past year. I’m leaving off the Cr-48 I received last week from Google (too ne...
Google Chrome OS Testing 24 Dec 2010 | 04:14 am
A Christmas Present from Google Last night, when opening boxes from the stack that UPS has shipped to me in the past couple days—Christmas presents, all—I found an unexpected Christmas present to me:...
How to Manage Linux File Permissions and Ownership 2 Dec 2010 | 05:23 am
IBM just published a great article that describes how to manage Linux file permissions and ownership. That’s a very important topic for managing any server, and is very important in my Transmission-Da...
How to Install Sick Beard on Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx 23 Nov 2010 | 02:56 am
Sick Beard is a (terribly, terribly named) application that downloads TV episodes from newsgroups—as opposed to BitTorrent—moves and renames them, and even fetches artwork and episode information (.NF...
Boxee Box Review on Amazon.com 14 Nov 2010 | 08:18 am
I received the D-Link Boxee Box yesterday, tested it out, and posted a thorough review on Amazon.com. I like the product a lot; it completely blows the WD TV LIVE I have out of the water in all areas...
How to Monitor Services on Ubuntu Lucid Lynx Using Monit 28 Oct 2010 | 12:00 am
Even though my Ubuntu Lucid Lynx media server runs pretty solidly, I like to monitor it periodically using SSH and command line tools. Some of my favorites are w, htop, ps, bwm-ng, and nmap. After reb...
How to Cache Everything on the WD TV LIVE Due to a Slow Network 27 Oct 2010 | 05:23 am
This is a simple script I wrote to perform one-way sync to mirror my server’s media folder on my WD TV LIVE‘s external hard drive. I have to run such a script because the wifi-N signal in my TV cabine...
Using TVNamer to Move Completed TV Torrent Downloads 11 Oct 2010 | 03:34 pm
I have previously written a post explaining how to install and configure TVNamer to automatically rename downloaded TV episode files into nice, human-readable formats. I found that if you create a con...