With the advent of higher definition Television, growing demand for high quality lossless audio as well as general madness the need for a reliable as well as flexible and large home storage solution grew rapidly for me. Just hammering more disks into your home router / server just won’t nail it over the long term. So i’ve set out to build a cheap (per TB), (hopefully) longlasting as well as reasonably reliable home storage system for the enthusiast (read: “tinkering geek”). This was achieved using a custom made case for the parts as well as a lucky find for the adapter card. Read on for more…
linux
PulseAudio for analog/spdif hell – so simple, yet you have to know…
When it comes to a flexible audio setup Alsa starts to suck … hard. If you want output mainly on S/PDIF (be it optical or coax), automatically upmixed to 5.1, then encoded to A52 so your receiver will eat it, but sometimes your general AC3-passthrough 5.1 movie, sometimes maybe even output to your regular analog output … then its quickly becoming clear that ALSA is basically a driver framework, and not a end-user audio application. I found that most audio middlewares i’ve known sucked quite hard: Jack is too unuseable, arts or phonon never did their job, esound is kind of … dead. So what’s left? PulseAudio is left! Its setup seems very quirky to firsttime users and if you come with some strange distro-configuration (*cough*ubuntu*cough*) you may want to throw it against your wall … but actually its super flexible and nice.
If you have a similar setup to mine – read on!
Free/Open Wireless Sync your iPhone with Linux!
While using 3.x on my iPhone free (as in self-hosted and “free as in free speech”) syncing was a bit of tinkering here and there but worked. With iOS 4 Apple introduced a new scheme for the Calendar (which used to be a nicely and sanely formatted sqlite file), so all the sync-tools aren’t really working anymore. Iphonesync (required J/B Phones and synced to e.g. Funambol) can still read notes(?) and addresses but can’t sync the calendar anymore. So i was looking for another option to sync this thingy – and found one (or two) …