Games or other things..

A month or so ago, the computer I use for playing games decided to stop booting. After a few days of troubleshooting, I just gave up. The only problem is that the gaming computer doubled as my Plex file server. The case had 15 hard drives in it, accounting for close to 30TB worth of raw storage space. After Folder/File duplication with drivepool, I had a good 5-7TB of free space. I was pretty happy with this. Prior to this, I had been using a few CineRAID enclosures. After pulling these out of storage, dealing with a broken/faulty power brick my new Drivepool has about 26TB of Raw storage. This is pretty close to what the original setup had, so all well and good.

I started to look at what I had stored on my drive pool as I was copying files off the smaller drives that were no longer included in the new drivepool. It appears that I suck at any real organizational skills. The main question I had for myself is “Why do I have almost 2TB worth of photos?” After a deep dive into the issue, I can only say that I had 3, 4, 5, or more copies of any one photo stored in folders named backups, with backup folders in those backup folders, nested 3 or 4 layers deep.

It has been close to a week since I started to try and make sense of this mess. I have deleted close to 1TB worth of duplicate pictures, pictures of food, and pictures of black or white voids. I still have a long way to go. I have found a few goodies tho.

A new beginnings beginning over again with yet a fresh new beginning.

Today I decided to slowly start weening myself from Facebook and the immense amount of political bs, memes and just plain stupidness. I feel like I have done this a few times in the past with little to no success.

Emma was born September 27th of 2019 and she is going to be one of my main subjects for the pages of my tantrums. First step is to learn how to add photos to a word-press post that I’m writing on my iPad.

Emma is probably the best thing to ever happen to me, next to Jodi, but don’t let Jodi know, I don’t want this going to her head. It takes having a kid to realize just how selfish, stupid and pretty much just a crappy person you have been in the past.

Let’s see about more photos. Jodi and I went to kohl’s over the weekend to look for some winter/colder weather clothes. While that was a successful part of the trip, the real gem was a sippy cup.

With Emma being a girl she has been getting a lot of Wonder Woman stuff. Now I have nothing against Wonder Woman, but she is no Peter Parker. Just wish Sony would get their heads out their behinds and finally make a great Spidey movie.

I think I’ll end this post with a video.

The original baby girl with the new and improved baby girl. MJ & Emma.

Media Servers, bits and pieces all over copper. Space the next frontier.

When I bought my house, it had many non grounded two prong outlets. Shortly after moving in I decided to replace the two prong outlets even if they were not properly grounded for convenience. That all came to a halt the moment I discovered power lines that were wrapped in old brittle paper. It scared me more than it probably should have and I started to make arrangements to have the whole house rewired. At the same time I had cat5e run to all the rooms, which in turn gives me gigabit connectivity in my house. Mind you that my cable only runs at 20mbps at best, but from device to device I effectively have gigabit.

I have been using plex on my macbook pro to stream movies to my PS3 and now PS4 for well over a year now. I originally had a HP media server running WHS (windows home server) 1.x and I really liked it. That is until it stopped working. I had been planning on building a new media server for a while and I had even contemplated just getting a mac mini, but I really liked the drive extender option that the WHS had and it worked exceptionally well. There were a few options for this feature on the windows side and even on the linux side, but none on the mac side. This eventually led me to discount getting a mac and just building a cheaper windows box. I took my time getting my server built as I ran into a few hiccups. First the PSU I picked up was the correct size until you tried plugging stuff into it. Then it was, well to big. So I researched the PSU issue and found another one that had really good reviews and was known to fit. Long story short, after about 4 weeks I got my media server up and running.Using a mish mash of 14 drives I installed Stablebits Drive Pool making a virtual media volume with 14TB worth of usable space. It took me a few days to copy all my media to the server and ran into a few more hiccups and wound up starting that process over a few times as well.

Now one would assume that, with a gigabit connection between my PS4 and my media server I should be able to stream 1080p media no issue. For the most part this is correct. Last night I ran into a movie that must have been encoded with a codec that plex just couldn’t handle.Another option is the CPU I chose to use in the media server was just not strong enough to trans-code and keep the PS4 fed with data. I can play many other 1080p videos no problems and the one I was trying to watch was only a 720p stream, so I am willing to bet that the encode was with a bad codec.

I am overall pleased with how the media server turned out and plan on making a few drive replacements after I get my taxes back, which will give me more space. Always need more space.

Computers, are they the Devil?

I recently updated my mac to the new Yosemite Beta, and overall it was a pleasant experience. I wound up going back to Mavericks the other day tho due to some Bluetooth issues, that I really couldn’t live with on my daily computer. This required a format and clean install. Wasn’t really that hard just took a while. I am really looking forward to Yosemite tho, its got some really nice refinements that I really liked. I didn’t get into the iOS8 beta so I couldn’t see how that integration works, but that’s another feature I am really looking forward too.

Mood of the day…

Slayer – Exile

Even though some things are better left unsaid
There’s a few things I need to get off my chest
I need to vent – let me tell you why

I’m suicidal, maniacal, self-destructive
You leave me no hope, no life
Nothing worth living for
I’ve taken it, can’t take it anymore
My worst nightmare
You make me want to slit my own fucking throat
Just so I’ll be rid of you
Just to get rid of you

You self-righteous fuck
Give me a reason not to rip your fucking face off
Why don’t you take a good look in these eyes
Cause I’m the one that’s gonna tear your fucking heart out
My hate is contagious; you’ve got no one to run to
EXILE

Just tell me fucking why everything becomes an issue
Your opinion is always senseless – fuck this
You make my fucking skin crawl
I’ve lived with it – can’t stand anymore
My worst nightmare
I want to take a bullet in the fucking head
Every time I think of you, every time I think of you

There’s nothing more for me to say
There’s nothing more for you to say
There’s nothing more for us to say
I fucking hate you anyway
EXILE

Can’t count the ways that you light my fuckin fuse
I can’t tolerate the sight of you, the thought of you or
anything about you
You know what I want to see?
How many ways can a loser fucking lose
I know you’ll find a way
The humility awakening the idiot inside
You spineless fucking maggot – you’re just wasting my time
Get out of my face – Get out of my life
Out of my fucking way – Just die

Thoughts about relationships and stupidity

Why, do I have to hit myself in the head so much when it comes to women. Last year I broke up with my girlfriend of almost 2 years because I didn’t really see us together in 10 years. We had lots in common for sure, but I saw many things about her that just really didn’t mesh well for me for a really serious relationship. So I broke up with her after a rather unhappy gencon trip, that had lots of arguments and she just had a crummy attitude. That was my deciding point. But hey we could still be friends I figured. I figured wrong. I should have taken someones advice and made a clean break and we should have just gone our separate ways. Now a year later Im dealing with some of her guilt trips, if they could be called that. “You don’t really care about me.” All due to a phone of mine that’s on her carriers account.

Live and learn. I was gonna post the last set of SMSs we had, but you know what, I have changed my mind. She has it in her mind that I don’t care anything about her or what happens to her and as of this moment, she is correct. I’m not even gonna wish her safe travels to and from Denver tomorrow. Conversation is done, and I am moving on.

OS X, iTunes and the frustrations with a Bluetooth Headset

I have a decent set of bluetooth headphones and a spotify account that I love to listen to when I’m not listening to my audible books. One thing about OS X that utterly drives me insane is the fact that if you connect any bluetooth device to your mac it automatically assumes that you want to use iTunes. This unfortunately is not even remotely true. So after some searching i found a few simple fixes for it that are some what ok. The first is to go and turn off all access to the file via Terminal with the chmod command. This is not a bad idea actually. sudo chmod 000 iTunes.app does the trick, its a little clunky as I don’t do a lot of navigation via command line any more so its slow. who would have ever thought the days of DOS commands and command line would ever be useful, mind you its not dos, its a UNIX type command line, so not many of the commands are even DOS like. Easy to remedy, and easy to learn tbh.

I have been spending a good deal of time learning applescript and automation in general, mostly to speed up things at work. I was like this is a good time to put some of that knowledge to work. I wrote two scripts to change iTunes.app permissions to either 000 or 777 depending on if i plan on using iTunes or not. This is a lot easier, but i know you can do else or if statements, I’m just not familiar with them. A quick google search found me a nice script that gives me a pop up and does either of the commands based on my answer to the pop up dialog. Now were talking! I can’t use this guys script because he turns the x(executable) bit on or off and while that might work, its not what i want to do. I changed the wording of his pop up dialog a little and changed his -x to 000 and the +x to 777. Working like a charm. I couldn’t be happier.

Now if apple would let people just disable this feature all together I would be even happier.

Slow and steady?

Hit rank 27, almost rank 28. I have about 3 or 4 more level 3 quests I havent done and those will get me to rank 28. At that point I will either run them all on hard and normal to get as much out of them as possible and then level. Looking threw the Quest list I missed 4 level 2 quests, but one chain is bugged and it cant be done. I dont care about the solo quest as the xp is a trivial amount. For level 3 quests I have the sacred helm, kobold assault, first strike and hobgoblin captives to do. I have completed two level 4 quests as they were the end quests of some of the ones in the level 3 range. Tonight I got in a few groups that were ok, slow and lots of deaths in one, redoing a quest that I soloed by myself not more than an hour before with no issue. Oh well its off to bed and tomorrow is Rifts PnP with some peeps and I am really looking forward to that. Plus this coming weekend I have Pathfinder in Ft. Collins and I cant wait for this weekend.

Starting things fresh from the beging.

A quick refresher about me. As those people who know me know, I spend way to much time sitting in front of a computer playing games. I do this for many reasons, most not considered healthy or in many ways sane. Most of my time is sat around getting lost in the world of Dungeons and Dragons: Online (DDO for short). So the other day, the guild I associate with decided to do some epic elite (ee) quests. I have a few level 20+ characters, and every single one of them is melee based. Tobril and Sam both have archers that also can do melee, as well as assorted mages, barbs, monks and the sorts. They have been playing for a very long time. Anyways, after looking at the death count and noticing my monk racked up a good half of all deaths I decided its time to break out a ranged toon. I have a rogue, who at one time I really enjoyed playing, not so much anymore. Well last night I killed him in DDO’s TR system and started him over at level 1 as a ranger. In the long run he will have 6 levels of Ranger, 12 levels of Monk and 2 levels of Fighter. This build will give me a complete ranged feat set and a almost complete melee set. I will be missing improved crit:Blunt (no, not the smoking weed variety). Aver all I have high hopes for it, as he was a long time ago an arcane archer and I really enjoyed that once upon a time. Time will tell. I have achieved level 5 and he is running around slapping things around with monk wraps and occasionally pulling out a bow to kill things at a distance. I find myself in melee most of the time tho. I think this will change once I get Zen Archery and Many-shot. About the same time I will have an enhancement on the monk front called 10,000 stars, which is a Many-shot alternative. All this will take shape around level 12 or 13. At that point I should be mostly ranged with occasional melee to up some Ki (chi) power to fuel some of the monk things.

Asleep – Emily Browning

Sing me to sleep, sing me to sleep
I’m tired and I, I want to go to bed
Sing me to sleep, sing me to sleep

And then leave me alone
Don’t try to wake me in the morning
‘Cause I will be gone

Don’t feel bad for me
I want you to know
Deep in the cell of my heart
I will feel so glad to go

Sing me to sleep, sing me to sleep
I don’t want to wake up on my own anymore
Sing to me, sing to me
I don’t want to wake up on my own anymore

Don’t feel bad for me
I want you to know
Deep in the cell of my heart
I really want to go

Sing me to sleep, sing me to sleep

There is another world
There is a better world
Well, there must be
Ooh, there must be

There is another world
There is a better world

Tim’s Tantrums

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