{"id":7,"date":"2009-03-15T11:25:41","date_gmt":"2009-03-15T11:25:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.adrianlovell.co.uk\/blog\/?p=7"},"modified":"2009-03-15T11:30:42","modified_gmt":"2009-03-15T11:30:42","slug":"a-short-break-my-latest-geekery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.adrianlovell.co.uk\/blog\/2009\/03\/15\/?p=7","title":{"rendered":"A short break & my latest geekery"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"This<\/a>

This is where we stayed<\/p><\/div>\n

I have just come back from a 4 day relax and rest up in Scotland, staying\u00a0at the excellent Marriott Dalmahoy<\/a>\u00a0hotel.\u00a0 Gillian and I felt we needed a nice relaxing break away from London, with nothing specific to do except relax!\u00a0 For anyone thinking about a cheap, but luxury getaway I heartily recommend it.\u00a0 Currently if you are a Marriott Rewards<\/a>\u00a0member (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!\u00a0 I’ll post some photos once I’ve got some sort of online album setup properly.<\/p>\n

We used National Express trains<\/a>\u00a0(NXEC) first class up to Edinburgh, then a ~20 minute taxi to the hotel.\u00a0 A great way to travel, and the first class train ticket was still cheaper than flights from City Airport.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Took us about\u00a0four and a half very comfortable hours\u00a0to get from London to Edinburgh.\u00a0 To top it off, the views from the train are absolutely stunning: http:\/\/twitpic.com\/1uz7j<\/a><\/p>\n

We did spend one day in Edinburgh\u00a0itself, catching up with old university friends over dinner at Browns<\/a> and attempting to do a little bit of shopping!\u00a0 I want to get myself the Edinburgh Edition of Monopoly, but we couldn’t find a shop in Edinburgh which sold it.\u00a0 We were advised in Jenners<\/a> (now depressingly part of House of Fraser) to “try searching on Google”!\u00a0 Amazon to the rescue…so anyone feeling generous it is now on my wish list<\/a>!<\/p>\n

Since returning, I’ve had a bit of a geek-fest at home!\u00a0 I have finally bought myself a NAS<\/a>\u00a0setup, which in this instance consists of a D-Link DNS-323 Storage Enclosure<\/a>\u00a0and two Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 SATA 3Gb\/s 1.5-TB hard drives<\/a>.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I then setup the drives to be RAID1 mirrored, giving some measure of backup.\u00a0 This won’t protect me if something gets deleted off the disk, but will protect against\u00a0a single\u00a0case of\u00a0hardware failure.<\/p>\n

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).\u00a0 I have chosen to have the drives and fans power down after 10 minutes of inactivity, making it even quieter.\u00a0 The “feature” I like the most however, is the ability to hack it!\u00a0 In reality, the DNS-323 is just a Linux machine, running a custom kernel.\u00a0 I have found this excellent Wiki<\/a>, which outlines many of the possibilities, and I’d encourage anyone considering a DNS-323 to have a read through.\u00a0 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<\/a> at a later stage.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>\u00a0to connect.\u00a0 With that done, I set about transferring my iTunes library to the NAS.\u00a0 This was a total nightmare.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 This amazing blog post<\/a>\u00a0helped me out considerably, but even after doing everything listed I was still stumped with one major issue.\u00a0 Windows Vista does not retain network passwords between reboots, even when you check the “remember password” check-box.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Thankfully, in Vista Ultimate you can set this manually up in the User Accounts control panel. If you are stuck on this, hopefully this<\/a> should help.\u00a0 I haven’t tested this on Windows 7 yet, but will do later this weekend and report back progress!<\/p>\n

Finally, Bradford Peyton<\/a> enlightened me to the delights of Quake Live<\/a>\u00a0– a web based multi-player version of the Id Games classic, Quake<\/a>.\u00a0 Unfortunately I’m having problems getting the game running for long, thanks to the eternal hunk of junk known as PunkBuster<\/a>, which is forever causing problems across various games I play (usually because it wants access to my system which Kaspersky<\/a> is unwilling to provide).\u00a0 Anyhow, once I get it fixed do look me up for a game.\u00a0 I’m registered as jacksprat<\/em>, which is my usual alias.\u00a0 In some places, such as\u00a0on Xbox Live<\/a> and on Battlefield 2<\/a>,\u00a0you’ll find me as jackspratUK<\/em>\u00a0as someone else has started registering jacksrapt<\/em>\u00a0and not using it all over the place :(.\u00a0 On that note, I’m going to head out for the rest of the day\u00a0and enjoy the sun!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have just come back from a 4 day relax and rest up in Scotland, staying\u00a0at the excellent Marriott Dalmahoy\u00a0hotel.\u00a0 Gillian and I felt we needed a nice relaxing break away from London, with nothing specific to do except relax!\u00a0 For anyone thinking about a cheap, but luxury getaway I heartily recommend it.\u00a0 Currently if […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,11,9],"tags":[5,12,14,4,13,6,8,7],"class_list":["post-7","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-edinburgh","category-gaming","category-technology","tag-itunes","tag-marriott","tag-monopoly","tag-nas","tag-nxec","tag-quake-live","tag-vista","tag-xbox"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adrianlovell.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adrianlovell.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adrianlovell.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adrianlovell.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adrianlovell.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.adrianlovell.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15,"href":"https:\/\/www.adrianlovell.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7\/revisions\/15"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adrianlovell.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adrianlovell.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adrianlovell.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}