Thoughts and Ramblings

General things I find of interest.

Tooling Matters

In the debate between Mercurial and Git, I’ve long held the side of Mercurial. This is mostly due to the fact that Mercurial’s commands are far easier to understand, but I’ve also liked the fact that Mercurial doesn’t encourage rewriting a repository’s history as much as Git does. This has encouraged me to seek to use Mercurial as my favored DVCS, but that’s now changing. Mercurial has a tremendous advantage in that it’s command structure is easier to understand.

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Saturday, November 10, 2012

My Media Setup

While I’ve described some of the pieces in my media setup, I have not described it as a whole. I started the process when I got annoyed with DVDs that don’t allow you to skip the copyright warnings, commentary disclaimers, trailers, endless menus, studio logos, and other crap when I simply wanted to watch the movie. It was time for something better, and now I have it. Storage I’ve written some on my storage setup before, but I’ll describe it briefly here.

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Tuesday, June 5, 2012

Switched to Linux

In one of my previous posts, I had mentioned how to install FreeBSD on ZFS. I was doing this for my file server, which I ran in this configuration for quite some time. It worked well for a while, but then I decided that FreeBSD was too constraining. This came when I was attempting to setup a process to rip media from DVDs and BluRay disks. I noticed that Handbrake doesn’t run natively, but is available via a port.

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Sunday, April 1, 2012

Goodbye Roku, Hello GoogleTV

In my previous post, I said “I think Iâ€™ll elect to forgo a player for an external drive and rip every disk that I might buy.” That thought didn’t last very long. I decided to buy a Sony NSZ-GT1 which contains both a BluRay player and a GoogleTV together. I did this because I finally realized that the Roku that bought was never going to live up to my requirements, especially amid their numerous regressions in firmware updates.

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Sunday, December 18, 2011

The Case for Ripping Media

As some of you may know, I’ve ripped every DVD I own and store them on a file server. It’s a lot of space and it took a lot of time, but for my uses, it’s worth it. I started this because one movie, I don’t remember which one, forced me to wait on FBI warning, another copyright violation warning, the same in French, and a disclaimer. Then it displayed two previews and a lengthy menu before I could hit play.

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Tuesday, November 29, 2011