Archive for category asides

hosting websites

As the free three year trial of 1and1′s professional hosting package has expired I needed to make a choice about what to do with the couple of sites I hosted with them. I’ve been running brotherson.com from my home server for about four years now. I pay for the highest residential service from my cable provider to have the best upload speed without breaking my wallet. It seems only logical to move all of my sites in house…so I am now hosting all of my external websites from home.

Additionally, I am able to help out a friend that faced the same dilemma I did and am now hosting his sites. I’m not able to offer the same SLA’s as a hosting provider, but it is something I was willing to do to help him out and am happy he obliged my offer. Here’s to hoping my cable connection is as steady as it has been in the past. Cheers!

, , , ,

1 Comment

simplecenter is open sourced

This is old news, but simplecenter has been open sourced. What does that mean? To me it means I can get newer versions and customize it to fit my needs. To others it means that the group at simplecenter hope to make it the iTunes and WMP alternative.

I own a Rockford Fosgate Omnifi system purchased from woot more than a year ago. The device has served its purpose well – streaming MP3′s wirelessly from my PC to my hifi system. The only downfalls it has are that the device does not have a digital out interface and that there isn’t a neat touchscreen remote that will work from various rooms in the house. As well, it does not support flac and has a limited database that allows only ten thousand MP3′s to be added to the library.

Earlier this week I figured out how to hack the version of simplecenter shipped with the Omnifi to allow more than ten thousand songs – a little editing of a properties file within the jar file that housed the application’s code. However, I still wasn’t pleased with the operation of the application, using a large XML file to store the media library. I did some looking and saw that the Omnifi support direct from Omnifi has all but disappeared and that simplecenter has open sourced their code. Read the rest of this entry »

, , , , ,

2 Comments