Another 15 minutes

Today I changed my blog theme, just thought it was time for a change and I liked this design and what it can do, hope you like it too. I will do some more modifications and additions to it still so it’s not quite done.

A few days ago I suffered from disk failure on two disks in my RAID5 array, which forced me to re-install the server from scratch and restore it from older backups. The server is soon up again and Penskyfiles Radio will be online with it.

If you run your WordPress blog on some hosting partner you probably have the automatic updates of WordPress core and plugins working, but if you ever setup your own Linux server and trying to run WordPress on it, it is likely that this will not work out of the box, especially if you’re running multiple websites on the same server.

I don’t want to use some 3rd party plugin for this to work or FTP, so I investigated what it is that makes it work in my hosting partners server, but not my own. I figured it was some PHP configuration missing but it was much simpler than that.

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This will be my first post in Swedish since it only applies to Sweden.

Jag har skapat en ny liten enkel men rolig sida, www.vardagsmysterier.se, där man kan dela med sig av sina observationer om konstiga saker i vardagen och vardagsmysterier samt lite förklaringar på vanliga frågor man ofta undrar över. Än så länge är sidan inte så välfylld, men jag valde att lägga ut den ändå. Jag sökte lite inspiration i helgen på nya sidor och detta är ett av resultaten efter ett par timmars knappande.

I have been redecorating my home for a few weeks now, on and off. Getting rid of old and ugly bookshelfs and getting new more stylish ones that match some furniture I already have. I got the furniture and lights from IKEA, the “Expedit” bookshelf though came with no holes on half of the bookshelfs (!), so I had to drill them myself (takes too much time & energy to bring 100 kg of shelfs back to the store), but after a while I got them up. Then I also got the “Malm” bureau with a glass pane on top, a “Hopen” bed table with frosted glass drawers, and another “Benno” CD-storage in silver. Along with that I got a new spotlight lamp in the ceiling and diod lights for nice effects in the bookshelf etc. I was glad to see that my ceiling was in fact wooden and not concrete like the walls are, so it was easy to do the fixed installation of the spotlights. I also already had the multicolored diodstrips behind the TV, which is a really nice feature. Below are before & after pictures of the room, it’s more clean and modern now, it turned out pretty good. Take a look…

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Today I tested “PS3 Media Server“, a software that allows you to stream and view media from a PC to a Playstation 3, like HD movies. This is pretty much the same functionality as TVersity, which I have written a guide to on this blog, but PS3 Media Server is supposed to be able to handle 1080p videos with ease and also to include subtitle files and many other things.

PS3 Media Server is a free software that was released in version 1.00 just a few days ago, it requires no installation and no setup, for me it was pretty much working right out of the box (probably because I had all codecs already installed from my TVersity installation). I could share my movie-folder and it came up on the PS3 in seconds and I could play DVD ISO-files with no configuration at all. The only problem I had was with video and sound sync, they were several seconds out of sync, but I managed to solve that by disabling the “auto A/V sync” option in the transcoding configuration. The program has a large buffer that is visualized on the main screen and it works very well, there were no stuttering at all throughout the movie.

I liked this program alot, I will probably use this instead of TVersity now because TVersity is slow on updates, takes alot of memory and CPU usage and stutters sometimes in videos. This program seems much faster and more efficient. I’m looking forward to try it out with full HD videos and subtitles and see how everything works.

I upgraded the blog to WordPress 2.7 just now, there should be little changes to the blog appearance itself but the changes are behind the scenes, which is looking pretty good.