Category Archives: Computing

Computing news, tips, etc.

Media server project

I am currently using a Seagate Central as a temporary network drive.  I had a WD My Book Live die on me, and it took me over a week to pull off not quite 2TB of data using the DiskInternals Linux Reader application.  With that and other media I’d collected since the My Book Live died last July, I’ve filled a 3TB Seagate Central to within 400GB of capacity.

My current path is a Synology DS214play NAS (network attached storage) box.  There are a handful of models in the DS214 series, but the D214play has the most powerful processor and a floating point unit, having the ability to transcode video and audio files on the fly.  Since I will be using this as a media server as its primary function, getting a unit capable of transcoding was a good move for me.

Why do we need transcoding?  Not all devices in the house can play the same video formats, and the DS214play will transcode them to the proper format while sending them across the network.  The excellent Mezzmo package for Windows 7/8 does the same, but I am not going to turn my desktop computer on, burning up 300 watts or more of power, just to send a video to one room in the house.

The DS214play does not come with hard drives–it is an empty 2-bay unit.  I have researched drives a bit.  My recent experience with the My Book Live, whose drive got corrupted after a simple power outage, has made me shy away from their products.  Although, their pricey “Se” and “Re” series drives are high reliability enterprise drives with a five year warranty and extra technology to help with error recovery and vibrational stability.  The WD Red drive is claimed to be an “enterprise” or NAS drive, but its poor 5400 RPM speed instantly ruled it out for me.

One drive catching my attention was a Hitachi, aka HGST.  Many server and cloud providers have used these with among the lowest failure rates in the industry.  Given the price on one of these in a NAS-duty configuration was $70 lower than the same sized 4TB WD “Re” drive, I decided to give it a try.

Having 4TB will take care of my needs for awhile, and the Seagate Central will be a backup drive, fired up occasionally to sync with the DS214play.  The My Book Live is still under warranty, so I will be replacing that as well, and may use it for a backup also, likely with less critical files.

The Synology NAS products are really well thought out.  Rather than having to hack them and install my own set of utilities, Synology has the ability to download applications that install right to the NAS without any hacking or special knowledge needed.  Bittorrent clients, the Serviio DLNA/UPnP server, a video surveillance recorder, and many others are available as add-on modules.  Very nice!

It is all coming together nicely.  Further progress will be posted here as it happens.

Tired of the Windows 8 Hate

Maybe my opinion is unpopular, but for the life of me, I can’t quite understand all the hate toward Windows 8.  Yes, the new start screen is not all that great.  But the way I use a computer may be out of the ordinary compared to most “home” based users.

The first thing users need to keep in mind is that outside of the new start screen, Windows 8 is not all that new.  The jump from the archaic Windows XP to Vista was large for a reason: XP is based on the obsolete Windows NT 4.x series, whereas Vista is actually Windows NT 5.0 (although the NT designation has been dropped).  Windows 7 is in reality Windows 5.1, and Windows 8 actually 5.2.  I still don’t understand why they numbered the OS as confusingly as this, but at least it is not as senseless as naming it after…cats.  Cats? Seriously?  No wonder a certain OS is not taken seriously in the corporate world.  Anyway…

I upgraded (yes, upgraded) to Windows 8 for the improvements to the core OS.  And there are many.  Numerous changes to features such as the File Explorer have made the OS far easier to use.  New devices are also easy to add:  my new-ish Canon multifunction network printer/scanner pretty much installed itself.  And VueScan, once installed, automatically discovered and supported the Canon’s scanner.  There are too many other enhancements to explore them all fully here and beside that, they are well documented on the Internet anyway.

But what about that start screen?  It does work nicely on a touchscreen.  Even the standard Windows desktop responds nicely to touch–double-tap an icon to open a file or program.  Drag things around.  It all works nicely with touch.

That’s the thing: for those who use their computer as a computer and not a touch interface, we spend 99.9% of our time on the desktop anyway.  That’s right!  In my day to day computing, I’m at the desktop.  It looks almost the same as it did in Windows 7 (albeit with a few styling changes and enhancements).  Plus, there are ways around the whole start menu fiasco.

In my case, I downloaded Start8 from Stardock as a trial, and liked it enough to keep it.  The whiners out there will complain about spending $4.99 on a little utility for Windows.  If you can’t afford $4.99, you shouldn’t even own a computer; ditch that unhealthy overpriced “designer” coffee for a day instead.  With Start8, I log in and go right to the desktop if I want to.  All of my applications are back in a start menu where I want them.  I actually do not use the start menu much anyway: Quick Launch is still in Windows, and I have about 50 icons in a second row in my taskbar as a result, as I’ve always had them since the days of XP.  I have never liked pinning anything to the taskbar (it eats up too much space), so Quick Launch is a far better and more compact alternative for me.  Aside from a custom styled start menu button I created, anyone can log in to this computer and get a standard Windows experience right off the bat.

Do I use the new Modern start screen?  Yes.  I switch over to that mode for a diversion.  I’ll read the news in nice big print, using the news app.  I’ll take in a few games of Taptiles or Wordament.  I’ll check out a few more things.  Once I’m done, one tap of the mouse takes me right back to my work-cluttered Windows desktop.

Windows 8 has too many good enhancements to just write off completely.  And with utilities such as Start8 on hand, that familiar Windows experience is still there.  To the complainers: your whining has gotten old, and most of us are tired of hearing about it.  Seriously.

How HAECO-CSG Kills The Music

“Wrecked,” as one audio engineer calls it.  That is what HAECO-CSG does to music.  What is it, and why was it so bad for recorded music? To understand the process, you have to turn the clock back to the late 60s, when both monaural and sterophonic playback equipment were commonplace in many homes back in the late 1960s.  In some ways, the two were compatible, but in others, they weren’t.  HAECO-CSG attempted to cure that problem.  Little did anyone realize what a sonic mess it made out of recordings.  How could something with good intentions lead to such bad sound?

You have to consider what happens when you play a stereo recording, summed to mono.  The left and right signals stay the same volume, but since music more in the center of the soundstage were present in both channels, they could be as much as three decibels higher than the far left/right signals, which would throw off the balance (the “mix”) of the recording.

Rather than issue two separate versions of a recording as had been done in the past, Howard Holzer, A&M Records’ chief engineer in Los Angeles, created a system that would electrically alter the recording so that when the stereo recording was “folded down” to mono, the balance would be mostly preserved.   HAECO was the Holzer Audio Engineering Company, and CSG was the Compatible Stereo Generator. Mission accomplished?

Not quite.  While a casual and non-critical listener may never hear a difference, the end result is an effect where the stereo soundstage is smeared.  To give an example, let’s use an example of a human, male voice.  Say, Sergio Mendes, on the track “When Summer Turns To Snow” from the Fool On The Hill album, one on which CSG was used to master the album.  A human voice consists of the fundamental frequency (the pitch of the voice…Sergio sings in a baritone), and sibilants (or “formants”), which are like the rasp of the vocal cords, the whistle of air between the teeth, or other high frequency components that are not the main pitch.

Normally in a stereo recording, you can pinpoint the voice by both the formants and the fundamental frequency coming from the exact same spot in the soundstage.  Not so with CSG.  What happens is that the image is smeared.  The formants can be pinpointed, but the fundamental frequency is smeared across the soundstage in a “phasey” sort of way.  The sound also has more of an overly-full presentation to it.  The net effect of CSG with a voice like Sergio’s, and the rest of the music, is almost the same kind of phasey effect you get with the “fake” stereo that was also popular at the time.

The real problem, today, is that many recordings were mixed to two-channel stereo with the CSG processor in the chain, so no two-channel tape exists without the CSG processing.  The only way to properly undo the CSG effect is to remix from the original multitrack master tapes…if they even still existed.  Many CDs have been reissued over the years that contain the CSG processing.  They sound about as good as

There is another fix, and I will outline this in my next installment.  Stay tuned.

Audiogalaxy Music Streaming App

I’ve tried a few different apps for streaming music from my computer to other devices.  The latest is Audiogalaxy.  Once a file sharing peer to peer service, Audiogalaxy now offers what some are incorrectly calling a cloud music service.  What Audiogalaxy does is stream music files from your computer to any remote device, such as my Android phone.  How does it compare to the others?

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XenForo: The Future of Forum Software

Is Facebook killing forums?  That was an essay topic on the Admin Zone forums.  My opinion is that forums have survived the onslaught of all sorts of “threats” over the years, which turned out to be minor blips on the radar.  As the Facebooks over the years have come and gone, forums have survived.  We’ve survived instant messaging, Twitter, MySpace and other so far.  Forums are more focused, and group members are more single-minded in the topic at hand.  Facebook is more generalized, simpler and more user-friendly in many aspects; we’re comparing apples and oranges.

Forum software itself has grown rather stagnant, however.  phpBB3 was a long-overdue update to phpBB2 that caused many forum owners such as myself to look elsewhere since the software sat undeveloped for about five years.  SMF’s latest version looked promising but there, the development staff has splintered and development has ceased, despite what they are claiming publicly.  vBulletin had a major update with the release of 4.0, but many forum administrators (present company included) found it to be a bit nicer looking, but also a bit slower and rather devoid of any really new thinking in the area of forum software.  How did such a major and influential product lose its way?

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