Adventures in Domestic Geekdom

I will probably start using this blog for all sorts of stuff since I’m out of grad school nowadays. But it’s probably worth seeing where I am with my digital music since then:

• I’m still using my original Squeezebox 2. It works great. I’ve upgraded my server to 7.8.0 beta. It works pretty well most of the time. Sometimes some stuff with Perl plugins, but usually it just keeps trucking. I’m sure the VFD has faded over time, but I have no way of knowing that.
• Still rocking the Denon AVR-3805, and we’ve since renovated the family room and now have professionally installed speaker cables to my Klipsch Quintet speakers. Which still sound great. My KSW-10 subwoofer has had two new sub amps installed, the last one a BASH subwoofer amp that has performed admirably. I think the old amps failed because the driver would occasionally get stuck, but I’ve found manually manipulating the cone seems to free it up.
• We now have a nice Samsung D-series TV, which isn’t part of the music system per se, but with Logitech Media Server now having a DLNA server, I can play music through the TV if I really want. But there’s really no point in doing that.
• I spent a lot of time looking for a wireless streaming solution to my Android phones; I played for a while with Subsonic and it worked well enough but I didn’t end up paying for it; I tried even to get DLNA support working through a VPN or SSH tunnel and was not successful. Luckily, eventually SqueezePlayer came out and works perfectly, especially paired with SqueezeCommander to control it. So that’s what I use most of the time to listen to music when on the move. The only disadvantage is the lack of a clean handoff between 3G/4G and WiFi. Usually I just turn of WiFi and it’s fine.
• I can also use my DirecTV HR24 receivers to listen via the LMS DLNA support. I don’t do it very often because it can be quite slow to load up the menus.

So, that’s the short version. My 500GB drive is almost full of music; I have 3TB drives I bought just before the Thailand floods but haven’t installed because I was busy with grad school; and I’m still on the fence about if I’m putting them in my now 5 year old server or if I’m buying a new low power (probably a dual-core Atom) server to upgrade to. I’m torn because I wouldn’t mind building an HTPC box to use with my new TV, but I don’t want the hard drives in the family room making noise. The server isn’t too slow but it would be nice to get some dual-core excitement.

So my next projects will be upgrading the server and/or hard drives and continuing to explore with DLNA stuff. I’ll update when I can.

After my trials and tribulations with the Thecus, I realized I needed a real solution. People on the Slim Devices forums had talked about mini-ITX boards with Via processors as low-power, high-performance solutions. Basically I want a real math coprocessor to handle encoding and transcoding duties, and having an x86 processor will make things simpler. I still wanted low power consumption, and although the system may use more energy at its peaks, the ability for it to throttle down the CPU variably as well as to go into deep sleep mode and spin down the drives when not in use should offset that overall.

I decided I needed more power to run SlimServer comfortably, as well as rip and encode CDs when I get them. I also might want a second Squeezebox someday, and I couldn’t easily run two at once on the Kuro Box or Thecus, especially if transcoding was involved. I also want some headroom for home automation or other projects.

So I got a motherboard, case, and http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16813995002. The case was bigger than I expected but I figured I should be able to cool passively (lots of vents) and keep noise and power consumption down. If I can’t there some case fans which are actually very quiet. And this thing will live down in the basement anyway. The power supply is very efficient and usually fanless.

I’m reusing the hard drives I got for the Thecus, as well as my old CD-ROM drive, scavenged from the external USB case to mount inside the box as an IDE device–taking one more power supply out of the equation and its phantom power and efficiency losses.

I put everything together and it didn’t work. It powered on but it didn’t POST. I later determined that the RAM wasn’t seated correctly, and it takes some pushing to get it in right. I’ve booted it but without a loadable OS on it (funny, it can’t boot the ARM Linux kernel off the hard drives) it is less than useful.

I’m thinking I’ll install OpenSUSE on it. I’ve enjoyed Debian and Gentoo but since I have an x86 CPU I might as well avail myself of all the options. While the thing has a video adapter I do plan on running it headless most of the time. It has a sound card as well, and I may try to run squeezeslave on it and use it to play music downstairs.

Fun stuff.