Items Tagged With tutorials

Old Timer
Since ripping and centralising all our DVDs and CDs a few years ago our "Jukebox" server had grown and grown and was in need of replacement. With 5 years of digital photographs taking up 10s of gigabytes alone and ripped DVDs taking anywhere from 3gig to 9gig each!, no matter how much disk space you have it never seems quite enough.

The donated ancient motherboard and RAM that I had received three years ago had performed well. Despite being a lowly Pentium Pro 200 with 128meg, it had coped admirably with serving multiple PCs, Xboxes and other IP clients. However the drive bay configuration in the old AT rackmount case (that had been "modified" with a hacksaw to allow the ATX board to be fitted) meant there was no room left to add any more hard disks, and keeping the drives that were already in there cool was becoming a major issue too...

One of the common question that appears on our mailing list is regarding the use of Cat6 cable in home installations rather than Cat5e. Here's a very interesting piece which gives some of the problems you might not have considered...

Quinten Uijldert (lets just call him by his IRC name - "Q") has documented how he has converted an old laptop into a digital photo frame. He has used Damn Small Linux as the OS...

"If you take an old IBM Thinkpad 560X, a £7 beech frame, some glue and a bit of patience you can make yourself one of these :). The OS is Damn Small Linux and the slideshow software is Feh...

A nice little "How To" article..."For any build project, the primary consideration is the purpose for which the box will be used. This server has the job of acting as a secondary media server to support streaming MP3 music files around an office, with, perhaps, some Web-serving duties, too...

Rather than wait another few weeks to publish my Home CCTV Server review I've decided to make t a two part affiar. Part one is now on-line...

"I have had CCTV at home for 8 years now in one form or another. Over that time camera performance has increased, whilst prices have fallen. Par for the course where most technology is concerned I suppose. A year or so ago I bought a Samsung CCTV switcher from eBay to view our cameras by modulating its output round all the TVs in the house. Using its simple timer it switched between each camera at a set interval, while this worked it was frustrating as the camera you wanted to view was rarely the one that was on the screen at that particular moment in time. The eBay acquired switcher died a month or so ago and so the search for the "upgrade" was on"...