EDGEcase

As twittered back in December, I got a new PC, so my mother got my old system, which left her old system spare.

It seems so simple, get a big hard drive and rip all my CDs, at last, I mean its not like its was a 286. Its a 900MHz AMD Athlon with a 120Gb ATA100 drive, 512Mb RAM, two extra ATA133 ports, 1 ethernet port, so more than fine for a bit of file server.

I now got around to getting the drives and ripping out the modem, floppy drive, CDR and slapped Ubuntu server on the main drive. Which was super minimal, even the ssh server is an extra package.

Its still very much up in the air what I’m going to use it for, but so far I have Music server (no idea which one but maybe SqueezeCenter), so form of IMAP email to get all that data off my desktop, a bit torrent client so I can just leave them running and I’ve really wanted to play with Asterisk for a while now.

I can see this taking lots of time and having a learning curve but I’ve been admining my Ubuntu laptop for a few years now and a few of the servers at work, so I should be fine and anyway not knowing what I’m doing has never stopped me in the past.

I wonder how many time I end up reinstalling stuff?

So Friday was tv-links.co.uk being shut down (Jack Schofield’s and the Open Right Group comments), now today I find out about Oink, which was the first I’d heard about that site (Points West Look North report on YouTube (via:waxy) and DJ Rupture comments (also via:waxy)).

Both were international operations with people in a number of countries arrested and high profile, I mean get a TV news crew to come along to your bust is making a point, are they the first in a new waves of takedowns for P2P sites?

For me tvlinks fulfilled more of the promise of the iplayer from when I first heard about it, than the current version on the BBC (which I heard has so far cost £130 million , but I can’t trackdown the link right now, 2007-10-24: found the link now). All sort of programmes, in a simple to find layout, in a ok quality. Great if you missed a episode or even half a series, so you can catch up at your own pace.

Other sites take this to the next level adding extra meta data like cast listing, links the DVD releases , links to fansites, Trailers, talkboards and all for much less than £130 million. The BBC has built some of this meta data already, I just hope that the current iPlayer can evolve into what it should have been in the first place.

As for OiNK, I never even been to the site but from what I have read today, it does sound like it had a large number real music fans much like Audiogalaxy, lots of stories of people discovering many many new groups via the site.

Anyway it will be interesting to see how this all plays out.

or how I came to understand why I would want GPS in my phone. Here’s the story.

We were in the new (relatively speaking) part of Carcassonne (which is well worth a visit if you are in the area). This area framed by wide boulevard (which are on the site of the city walls) with lots of parking around a the grid like centre of narrow streets full of shops and places to eat, so we parked the car. Asking my mother that she remembered where we had parked, and off we go to window shop and get some food. So after a few hours and a very lovely meal finishing with a fantastic pear tart, we headed back to the car, or at least tried.

We had been having such a good time that my mother had forgotten where the car was, but had an idea which direction so off we walked, out from the center towards the car, no joy. In the end it was nearly two hour before we found the car, this was in February, and yes the south of France is cold at that time of year.

Since, I’ve always used my phone to take a picture of the street name where the car is, as a sort of outboard brain thing. But it would be so much easier with a GPS, set a marker where the car is, then just forget about it, shop, go for a meal whatever, then simply walk back towards that marker, easy.

First thing I thought of when this article over at lifehacks popped up in my feedreader was in Klingon?

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