I finally broke down and put up proper thumbnails and web-sized images for my photo archive on my Hades server. It's actually usable now. The web-sized images are generated on demand, and cached. There's about 6GB of image files there, so have fun.
Jim on 09.19.05 @ 10:02 AM ET [link]
I decided to open up my entire photo archive on my basement server Hades. Navigation is fairly rudimentary, and there are no thumbnails right now, just lots and lots of very large full-sized images. Some browsers (like Firefox) will automatically resize the images for easier viewing. In any case, pulling down all those multi-megabyte images won't be quick unless you have a really fast connectoin.
I'm assuming that there won't be all that much traffic, and Comcast won't get on my case. I think their official policy is still no HTTP servers running on residential customer's machines. But they opened up port 80, so why not.
Jim on 09.17.05 @ 08:43 PM ET [link]
I had a cheap webcam sitting around doing nothing, so I decided for fun to hook it up to Hades, the basement Linux server. I puzzled over what to point the thing at that was geographically near the server box.
It's worth mentioning what it took to get this General Electric "Easycam" running under Linux. After plugging the webcam in, it was obvious that there wasn't an appropriate driver already installed under Debian. So I ran "/sbin/lsusb" to find the USB vendor and device. Armed with this information, I then went to the site Linux USB and searched for the device ID. It pointed me to a driver for the SPCA5xx chip on a French site. I downloaded the driver and built and installed it with no problems.
Back to our story. The only thing nearby that had any kind of action was the cat's litterbox. Oh well, why not. So now I have a 12 hour archive of cat box photos. What a waste of good technology. The basement is usually pretty dark with the lights turned off, so the bulk of the images are fairly dark. But a cursory scan of them revealed a dark shape at 7:53 in the morning. What could it be?
Jim on 09.11.05 @ 12:14 PM ET [link]
I've discovered a good Net radio tool for Linux, called Streamtuner. It allows you to select from lists of Internet radio stations from Shoutcast, Xiph, and Live365. Much simpler than going through their own web pages.
As a bonus, Streamtuner will use Streamriper to optionally record the stream to disk. And it actually splits each song into a separate MP3 or Ogg file, with proper tags.
Streamtuner is Linux-only, but Streamripper runs on Windoze, too.
I'm sure The Man frowns upon this sort of thing.
Jim on 09.05.05 @ 10:22 AM ET [link]
I borrowed some high-quality RJ-45 connectors and a good crimping tool from work, made a 30 foot cable, and lo and behold, it worked the first time! Compare to my failed attempts two weeks ago to make a cable with bargain basement (literally) gear. It's amazing what the right tools will do.
Jim on 09.03.05 @ 03:38 PM ET [link]
Hades, my $50 home web server, is now visible to the world here. It's a bare IP address since my jimandbarb.net domain doesn't know about it. Maybe the easiest thing to do is link through my jimandbarb.net site using redirects.
And not only that, but Comcast will occasionally change this IP address. So I've put in an automated page to track it daily in case it changes. Luckily Comcast now has port 80 open (it had been closed before the Comcast purchase of AT&T Broadband, or the AT&T purchase of Roadrunner, or ...) which makes things a little cleaner.
Not much there right now, except my SquirrelMail server, which is hidden.
Jim on 09.03.05 @ 03:28 PM ET [link]
Email: jim@jimandbarb.DELETETHISPART.net
(please remove the DELETETHISPART before sending me mail!)