TiVo

Tivo Desktop
Running on Windows. Grabs the shows to a local VM disk. It won't save to a mapped drive. Lame.

VideoReDo
Converts the .TiVo to an mpg that the TiVo can view. Also strips commercials. Costs about $30. Windows.

TVAP
Watches the local VM disk for new shows. It then runs VideoReDo on the shows and saves them to the file server. It creates a text file with the show metadata in it. Windows.

pyTiVo
Publishes the shows on the file server for the TiVo to view again.

Runs on the file server (Solaris) but could be anything that can run python and ffmpeg (mplayer?). Unix, MacOSX, Windows. Uses the show metadata from TVAP.

Apparently pyTivo doesn't like "-" in the name of a share. Anything I tried to transfer from such a share would pause after 10 seconds and eventually kill the transfer. Removing the "-" from the sharename fixes it.

pyTivo has a version that will create a share for every subfolder you have. It works well.



Encoding and Ripping

Lifehacker Top 10: Top 10 Free Video Rippers, Encoders, and Converters

Organizing blogs

I've been reading a number of blogs about organizing, GTD (Getting Things Done) and dealing with clutter. Here's a list of links:

Unclutterer - and dealing with paper clutter
Declutter an area from Good housekeeping

43 Folders deals with GTD and is a source of the hipster PDA (paper based)
Lifehacker has tips on GTD and changing your life habits
Zen Habit's simplification of GTD Nice graphic of flow

Resources for Decluttering your home from http://zenhabits.net

WWLD? No. 2: Keeping Connected | 43 Folders
WWLD? No. 3: Organizing your environment | 43 Folders
WWLD? No. 4: Living Your Life | 43 Folders

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Sysadmin

Brendan Gregg has a ton of Solaris tools and stuff that works elsewhere. Portping can substitute where pings are not returned but another service is.


Clonezilla is a ghost clone

How to Make a Network Cable

Today's links

DVD Flick - DVD Authoring w/ chapterising
Libra - Personal media inventory w/ lending. Barcode reading via webcam, cuecat
ZFS quick guide.
Automatic ZFS snapshotting - Not quite Netapp, but better then anything else out there IMO

Back of the napkin Network speed testing

I've been trying to compare iSCSI, NFS, and general network speed lately.

Awhile ago, my main Linux system was a dual PIII 500MHz. I was getting 20MB/s over the gigabit ethernet which seemed slow to me. At work I've seen 40MB/s to 60MB/s. I upgraded the server to an AMD dual core system and get 60MB/s.

My back of the napkin testing was pushing a gigabyte with dd:
time dd if=/dev/zero bs=1048576 count=1024 of=

GNU dd can also display MB/s.

I figure /dev/zero is the fastest source of bits. I can output to /dev/null to get the fastest data sink. Or local disk or NFS or SMB. But that still didn't measure just the network.

I found ttcp which sets up a client/server. On the sink I do ttcp -r > /dev/null. On the source, I pipe dd to ttcp -t . Netcat by Hobbit could do the same, but now there's a GNU nc that doesn't let you do -lp! I suppose I should just compile my own.

Something like:
On sink: nc -lvnp 5150 > /dev/null
On source: dd blah | nc -v -w 2 serverip


Bill McGonigle has this note about iperf. It looks interesting too.
Iperf's home
TCP tuning

The Iperf tarball has a test directory (read the README in it):
one side: perl server
other: perl client tests remote local | tee iperf.log
Tune some stuff
Run it again to iperf2.log
grep Mbits.s /tmp/iperf*.log | awk '{print $1, $(NF-1)}' | sort -n +1 | less
If iperf2.log is at the bottom, you got more megabits.

Is it accurate? I don't know. Does it help measure change? Yep. And that's what tuning is about.