The Projects Blog

This isn’t a house project at all, but it’s a project that I’m really excited about - I’m going to teach Prakash French! He’s been wanting to learn for a while, so I’ve prepared a curriculum and I’m really looking forward to getting started.

We managed to, um, “acquire” the French in Action video series that was used as the basis of my college French curriculum. I’m very familiar with the series and it is FABULOUS - by far the best French language-learning program out there, even though it’s pretty old. I found the French in Action textbook on Ebay, and through random luck (they shipped the wrong item and then allowed me to keep both items once they shipped the correct one), I ended up with Part 2 of the French in Action workbook that corresponds to the text and videos. I managed to find Part 1 of the workbook on Ebay within a few days, so now we have the full set. The only thing we’re missing are the audio tapes that go along with the series, which Prakash is looking into. It’s not the end of the world if he can’t find them, but they would be nice to have.

We’re waiting for the Olympics to end, but then we’re going to get started. Hopefully the next time we get to go to France, we’ll have two French speakers instead of just one. Trust me, that will be much more convenient.

As of right now, 3,400+ songs are properly tagged and filed. This was a monumental task, eradicating years upon years of badly edited tags. I used mp3tag, and Windows Media Player 11 for tag editing. I’ve moved from CDex to Audiograbber, which does a better job of handling music compilation discs. I’ve learned that CDDB’s should only be used as a guide and shouldn’t be relied on to file the library.

Lisa gave me an iPod for our third wedding anniversary, which actually aided and expedited this process. The iPod’s menu screen let me quickly find errors which I otherwise couldn’t find using the above programs (due to the sheer number of files). I use SharePod to edit tags on the iPod and transfer music.

—

Lisa completed the database of our DVDs and VHS tapes through Google Docs. She categorized them by box sets, movies, workout dvds and VHS cassettes. It can be exported to microsoft excel xls format, which I can view on my pocket pc when we’re out.

This particular project came to standstill because our server became overwhelmed. It has a meager 80GB hard drive, most of which is now housing photos and videos. Because we needed the space, I removed all the music from the server to house the (more important) pictures.

Two developments have occurred. Lisa acquired a new camera, which takes 10 mega-pixel pictures; the size of the pictures of roughly double that than the previous photos, necessitating upgrading the server to properly make backups. We’re not quite certain if we’re buying a dedicated network storage device or simply a new hard drive configuration; more on that to follow.

Also, I have been bringing parts of our music collection to work and ripping them on a computer which sits idle most of the day. Since my attention is generally diverted to other things, progress has been slow on this front, but I’ve managed to rip thirty nine CDs total, to my personal travel hard drive. After all the CDs are archived, I’ll revisit each rip to check for quality and re-rip as necessary. My goal is to have all CD backups at the highest quality VBR. Having lost a huge portion of our collection, we’ve come to appreciate high quality archives in spite of the space trade off.

Did you ever have a project that you’ve put off for months at a time, fearing that it would take hours to finish, and would be difficult to accomplish, only to be a five minute, inconsequential chore? That sums up this project quite nicely.

The xB had no radio; more specifically, the antenna was disconnected making listening to AM-FM stations impossible. Part was due to the fact that the adapter for the antenna went missing, and in part that I loathe AM-FM radio. However, without the radio we weren’t aware that Lisa’s train was 30 minutes late, and she was stuck waiting when I could’ve dropped her off some where more convenient.

The project entailed two parts. First, I had to reconnect the adapter (easy) and second, rewire the CD changer (hard, or so I thought). The latter was wired to the 12V ignition line, meaning that it lost power when the car was off, and lose its memory of all the CDs in the changer. I presumed this is how it was to be wired, since that’s how it was wired in the Mercedes nearly eight years ago; however, I found a manual that said otherwise (connect to 12V constant, instead).

Success! The radio now receives crystal clear AM-FM stations with text (where available), and the CD changer no longer loses its memory when you turn the car off. All it took was a philips head screwdriver and a pair of pliers.

Even though this blog hasn’t been updated lately, we’ve been working quite diligently at fixing up the house. We’re not approaching any one project systematically, but instead all the projects can be all be lumped into one massively parallel project.

One such example is organizing and rewiring. A number of devices have been moved, disconnected, wiredly badly or insufficiently, and over the last several days we’ve taken to fixing them. The inspiration was this:

This the Bedford charging station from Pottery Barn that so happens to match the mail sorter from the same series and style. It holds up to eight devices. By buying this, I moved Lisa’s camera and the camcorder to this unit; I then completely redid the wiring behind the entertainment unit for the tv, dvd, and game consoles; I redid the wiring behind the couch for the lights; and the next day, I completely rewired the basement so that all devices would finally work.

Lisa has been just as inspired lately as I, if not moreso, and has been on a tear with a variety of projects. Expect more updates in the near future.

Hey look, I finally finished a project!

This is the Paris album from the outside.

Sample spread from the album - each page has two photos and a description that I wrote in.

This is just to get an idea of the thickness of the album.

Now I just need to finish up the rest of the photo projects!

This one is a bit of a sore spot for me. This project started about a year ago, shortly before Nora was born. I encoded about 14 hours of video over the course of a month, usually between 10pm and 4am, when Nora refused to sleep anywhere except on my chest. To date, there are 24 hours of video to encode.

The Paris video was done, in fact, and was ready to be uploaded to the web and pressed to DVD when the 250gb hard drive died, taking all the video with it.

So this project entails re-encoding all the video and editing it. To that end, we bought two items: a new hard drive for my laptop @ 120GB, and a USB external backup drive @ 500GB.

The new hard drive required completely disassembling the laptop. I’m committed to this project.

This project is also part of the photos project. We’ve been taking short clips on our cameras, so we’ll merge the videos in a timeline and make linear DVDs of Nora’s life so far.

We’re looking forward to uploading videos in the coming months, especially the Paris video, since there’s a lot of hysterical commentary.

The music project is two-fold: I am sorting and tagging our mp3s, and I am ripping our CDs to mp3 format.

I do most of the tagging work under Windows, and use mp3tag for the tagging and Winamp 2.95 for testing/listening to music listening and individual tag viewing.

Ultimately, all the music will be managed by Windows Media Player 11. WMP 11 is capable of music streaming - we just set up FIOS and ordered a media center DVR, which allows us to stream music using Media Manager.

For ripping music, I use CDex. CDex is not for the faint of heart - it has a ton of features that programs like WMP11 and iTunes hide from the end user. I generally rip between 192 and 320 VBR (depending on the type of music), paranoia settings.

At this very moment, our collection stands at 3,342 songs with only somewhere between 1/3rd to 1/2 of our CDs converted. As we unpack boxes (another project) we keep finding more and more CDs. This project has been taking years because of the number of malformed tags and different naming and tagging conventions Lisa and I have been using. At the same time, we’re trying to download the music collection which was stolen from our car (close to 100 cds) - but many of the records are obscure and difficult to find, so it’s been slow going.

Much like our books project, we’re trying to create a database of all our media, which is not only good for while we’re shopping but a good record to have in case of disaster. Because of the sheer volume of media that needs to be sorted and entered, the google app featured previously isn’t good for rapid data entry or collaboration. With that in mind I created an Access database, with the back-end located on our server and the front-end installed on each pc locally. I’m using Access 97 since it’s low on resources and fairly reliable. Lisa and I can enter new data and view each other’s data in real time.

This is standard data entry form. I’ve created forms for all three types of media, but they don’t deviate from this standard. Once a bulk of the media is entered into the database, I’ll make a unified form with a drop down box to specify the type of media.

This is an image of the back-end - it looks like an Excel spreadsheet, which is great because…

…the info can be easily copied and pasted into the aforementioned google spreadsheet without any fuss. This makes sharing the document with interested parties extraordinarily easy.

Arguably, the room that needed the most work before Nora’s birthday was the basement. Because six people planned to sleep at our house, we decided to reorganize the room to accommodate all of them. Because of all the extra space we gained, we continued to work on the room because it made a great, wide open play area for Nora. We decided to make it a work area, too, as to not disturb Nora at night.

We picked up a desk from Mare and Michael, and modified it to accommodate my computer equipment. I’ll be doing all the video and music project work down here, which I will go into detail in another entry.

Denby approves!

We also purchased an inexpensive shelving unit to house the server, printer, and other electronics. By doing so, we were able to get rid of the TV stand and gain several feet of space, not to mention making this area more baby safe. It matches the decor quite nicely.

I also mounted the speakers to the wall directly. Acoustically, it’s not the best setup, and we’re looking into speakers that would replace ceiling tiles and could also be mounted in the walls to make the sound system nearly invisible.

The view from the desk.

The view from the other corner of the room.

There is quite a bit more to do. I plan to buy guitar mounts for the wall to get the guitars off of the floor. We’re going to switch the beige box server for a laptop (another project), and move the monitor and CPU to the office (another project). We will also be installing Verizon FIOS with a set top box in the basement for our guests and ourselves, as the basement has gotten daily usage since reorganizing.

The biggest concern is keeping the space as wide open as possible, so we’ll be looking to make more space, with an eye toward potentially remodeling and unifying the whole basement.

In addition to the projects I described in my last post, I’m also working on a big photo organizing project of a different sort. Until recently, Prakash and I have uploaded pictures from our respective cameras to two different folders on our home server. We had different naming conventions for those folders, and as a result, his photos were organized topically (e.g., “Nora in New York”) and mine were organized by date (e.g., “2007.07– Random Pictures of Nora”). The different types of organization have made it hard to combine our pictures, so neither of us have a complete copy of each other’s pictures on our personal computers and they’re still mostly separate on the server. This is annoying because it means that, if we both took pictures of the same event on our separate cameras (which we often do), those pictures aren’t stored together. So if I want to see pictures of our trip to NYC with Nora in July, for example, I have to look in both Prakash’s “Nora in New York” folder and my “2007.07– Random Pictures of Nora” folder. My task now is to get all of the pictures combined and organized under one system, get that system uploaded to our server and to each of our personal computers, and backed up on CD and put in our fireproof box in case of disaster.

This project is seriously tedious, for what it’s worth. On my computer alone, I currently have more than 13,500 photos organized into 294 folders. Prakash has 8180 photos in 163 folders. Some of these are already combined and some aren’t. There’s no real method to determine which ones we combined in the past and which we didn’t. It’s sort of a nightmare, to put it mildly. This one is going to take a while…

… and then, once this is done, I need to scan all of the photos from the pre-digital era and do the same thing with those. Yikes.