This is where we stayed

I have just come back from a 4 day relax and rest up in Scotland, staying at the excellent Marriott Dalmahoy hotel.  Gillian and I felt we needed a nice relaxing break away from London, with nothing specific to do except relax!  For anyone thinking about a cheap, but luxury getaway I heartily recommend it.  Currently if you are a Marriott Rewards member (which is free to sign up for) you get 3 nights for the price of 2 as well, so we didn’t burn too big a hole in the old credit card!  I’ll post some photos once I’ve got some sort of online album setup properly.

We used National Express trains (NXEC) first class up to Edinburgh, then a ~20 minute taxi to the hotel.  A great way to travel, and the first class train ticket was still cheaper than flights from City Airport.  NXEC is great if you pay the little bit extra for first class – giving you much more space, regular free tea and biscuits(!), but most importantly it’s quiet.  Took us about four and a half very comfortable hours to get from London to Edinburgh.  To top it off, the views from the train are absolutely stunning: http://twitpic.com/1uz7j

We did spend one day in Edinburgh itself, catching up with old university friends over dinner at Browns and attempting to do a little bit of shopping!  I want to get myself the Edinburgh Edition of Monopoly, but we couldn’t find a shop in Edinburgh which sold it.  We were advised in Jenners (now depressingly part of House of Fraser) to “try searching on Google”!  Amazon to the rescue…so anyone feeling generous it is now on my wish list!

Since returning, I’ve had a bit of a geek-fest at home!  I have finally bought myself a NAS setup, which in this instance consists of a D-Link DNS-323 Storage Enclosure and two Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 SATA 3Gb/s 1.5-TB hard drives.  First thing I had to do was to go to the D-Link website and download the latest firmware (1.6), to enable support for the 1.5TB drives.  I then setup the drives to be RAID1 mirrored, giving some measure of backup.  This won’t protect me if something gets deleted off the disk, but will protect against a single case of hardware failure.

The D-Link device is a great piece of kit, running almost silently, and providing a variety of different access methods (which you can read about through the link above).  I have chosen to have the drives and fans power down after 10 minutes of inactivity, making it even quieter.  The “feature” I like the most however, is the ability to hack it!  In reality, the DNS-323 is just a Linux machine, running a custom kernel.  I have found this excellent Wiki, which outlines many of the possibilities, and I’d encourage anyone considering a DNS-323 to have a read through.  The only thing I have done is to enable SSH access, so I can move files around on the drives easily and possibly run BitchX at a later stage.

Now the NAS is all setup, the first thing I did was to dump all my content onto it, setup some read-only shares and configure XBMC to connect.  With that done, I set about transferring my iTunes library to the NAS.  This was a total nightmare.  I was trying to a) move iTunes off my Windows XP machine onto by Windows Vista machine and b) transfer all the storage onto the NAS.  Apple make it as complicated as possible to transfer iTunes from an old PC to a new (why you can just use your iPod I don’t know), meaning it’s all but impossible to do this flawlessly for most users.  This amazing blog post helped me out considerably, but even after doing everything listed I was still stumped with one major issue.  Windows Vista does not retain network passwords between reboots, even when you check the “remember password” check-box.  The means that whenever I fire up iTunes, it can’t find any of the files on my NAS unless I’ve already setup the network.  Thankfully, in Vista Ultimate you can set this manually up in the User Accounts control panel. If you are stuck on this, hopefully this should help.  I haven’t tested this on Windows 7 yet, but will do later this weekend and report back progress!

Finally, Bradford Peyton enlightened me to the delights of Quake Live - a web based multi-player version of the Id Games classic, Quake.  Unfortunately I’m having problems getting the game running for long, thanks to the eternal hunk of junk known as PunkBuster, which is forever causing problems across various games I play (usually because it wants access to my system which Kaspersky is unwilling to provide).  Anyhow, once I get it fixed do look me up for a game.  I’m registered as jacksprat, which is my usual alias.  In some places, such as on Xbox Live and on Battlefield 2, you’ll find me as jackspratUK as someone else has started registering jacksrapt and not using it all over the place .  On that note, I’m going to head out for the rest of the day and enjoy the sun!