Dugie’s Pensieve

The first step in building my Home Server was decide on an arcade cabinet type (See Update #0 for the story so far).  There are six or seven different types of cabinet (Wikipedia has the complete list) - but I wanted an upright cabinet.

My original plan was to buy a second hand arcade machine, and refurbish it.  As it turned out, buying a second hand cabinet is not that easy in Australia.  Most machines were ~$800+, or pickup only from Sydney (which is 12 hours drive away).

So I decided instead to make my own, with a self imposed budget of $500 AUD.

After a bit of research, I found out quickly, that the arcade controls, can be a time consuming pain in the ass if you don’t know what you’re doing - I admit, I don’t know what I’m doing, so I bought the pre made arcade controls from Xarcade.  Good choice I thought :)

Side Note:  Strangely enough, you just don’t see old school arcade machines anymore, nowadays they tend to be car racing simulators, so measuring up an existing cabinet wasn’t as easy as I thought it was going to be.

I ended up taking a ride to a laundromat out near Ballina just get “hands on” and old arcade machine — I probably didn’t need to, but I knew there was one there, and it was a great excuse to go for a ride :)

 Getting Dimensions, via Google.

• In the end it was just me and google, trawling the web looking for resources
• Getting dimensions was tough - most sites have 404s or just not there anymore.
• I found wiki.arcadecontrols.com, a great place to look around for ideas
• 1.8 m high seems to be the normal height — deluxe cabinets are 2.2 m high (and too expensive for timber)
• If found Jeff McClain’s page a great site for ideas
• and decided on using on Pier’s dimensions
• As for the cabinet width; measure the width of your doors and where you want to put it inside.   No point building it if it wont go inside =)
• My width is 700 mm  

Tracing the Cabinet

• I sketched a couple of plans onto sheets of timber - get a feel for what it would like.
• And make sure the monitor would fit
• For personal preference I moved 77.56 a bit higher, so it was above my knee
• I flattened 60.106 a little bit, to fit the premade controls

Now it all looks, pretty good, so I’m off to starting cutting it out!

Ok, so some of you jumped the gun and have asked what the pet project is.  Well the short answer is:  I’m building a Microsoft Home Server, cause I’m at a point in my life where I need the remote access, storage and the backups. 

No before you go "Oh pleeeeaazzzeee!", I’m following Doc Emmett Brown’s advice:  The way I see it, if you’re gonna build a home server , why not do it with some style?  

So my home server "ultimate case mod", is a replica  arcade machine.  Sure it’s not as small and sexy as well blogged Home server prototype, but it’s got other appeal - and it’s an tribute to my interests in virtualization.

Think about it, it’s perfect:  Lot’s of room for drives and big fans for cooling, UPS, and storage of other stuff.  I’ll be spending particular care, to make this machine as silent as possible too.

I’m picking up the wood on the weekend, the arcade controls arrived last week, the 21" monitor is out of storage.

This will be the first post of many, as I’ll be blogging everything as I go along.  I plan need to have it finished by Christmas.  Thanks to mame-arcade for the sample photo of their arcade machine, until mine starts to take shape.

Anyway, there is lots more to do, but I’ll save that for another post.  Now the interesting question is, does anyone know the subtle link between an arcade machine and Windows virtualization — and no, Ben you are not allowed to tell :)

I still get the occasional email from people asking about my "Media Center story".  My MCE took about a month to plan (thanks must go to Stephen Ed, and all the folks over at XP Media Center forum), a couple of days to purchase, and a weekend to build, and has been faithfully online since October 2005.

In summary, the media center has changed the way my family lives.  We now have a complete ban on live TV in our house - this means we actually watch more television, but we spend less time watching the TV.  We also listen to more music, take more photos and short videos, and the best bit:  spend more time looking at videos and photos of family.

So here is a cleaned repost, of my current configuration, and how I got there..

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve reached a point where soggy toast and little vegemite finger prints are the norm in my house.  (Davo if you’re reading this, all those good times to come my friend) 

I’m also reaching the point where my son obsesses over my DVD collection more than I do, and not for the same reasons.

So I bought myself a 500Gb Western Digital Mybook.  It was really cheap, looks great, and sits nicely beside my Media Centre.

I’ve just finished copying up half of my DVD collection.  It was pretty much a straight copy with all the directors commentaries and stuff.  To copy the DVDs, I used AnyDVD and robocopy — and a small Vbscript to automate the “copy and eject process“.

With Vista, you will need to review KB 930526 and James’ walkthrough.

This means I’ve now emptied a full shelf on bookcase, which is about ~110 DVDs and reduced the footprint to something the size of a decent novel or hardback.  (See the photo above)

For the virtualization geeks, it’s kind of the ultimate P2V. :)

So tonight I’ll pack all the DVDs in storage crate, wrap it in plastic, and put them in lockup.  I’ve still got two more shelves of DVDs to do, so I’m off to the computerstore to buy another MyBook.

I’m very happy with the end result.  No more stressing, over soggy toast in the DVD drive, or scratched DVDs ending up in the dog bowl.  [Don't laugh]

About bloody time:  EPG Data set free, “Massive blow to free-to-air TV - Business - Business - theage.com.au“:

THE longstanding walls protecting free-to-air TV continue to crumble, with the announcement that the commercial networks will make their jealously guarded electronic program guides available to all manufacturers.

More localised content on TechTalk Blogs with “An EPG for Australia at Last-” and “Free TV Australia announces plans for Industry Supported EPG“

It’s been nearly 6 months since I’ve blogged any decent updates about my dealings with my Media Centre. 

I’m very happy to report that using my Media Centre to Host a Virtual Machine has worked really well.  I’ve nearly crunched the ~220 DVDs that I own into Divx.  I would have finished by now, except I keep buying new DVDs.  The VM has also assumed quite a few other roles since it’s inception, and I’ll probably come back and blog more about that.  But it’s working beautifully, I can run whatever I like within the VM and keep the Media Centre sterile.

I do/did have one concern though.  I’ve heard from a variety of sources that Readyboost and Media Centre make a really good combination.  I’m a little concerned though, I have this fear of breaking off a USB key (or the unpleasantness of it hanging out the front/side of my beautiful looking case).  So I did some research and found the “INNODISK 4GB USB 2.0 FLASH DRIVE” from  Aus PC-Market.  It looks perfect, just plug it into a USB header on the motherboard and no unsightly messiness.

If you are thinking of building a Media Center, Paul has a really good post on Silent PC Design Fundamentals, it pretty much ‘notes from the field’ that both of us used when building our own boxes.

Other than that, everything is sweet and I couldn’t possibly imagine life without a Media Centre — so now I need to sit back, relax and wait for the TV Internet goodness of Joost.

I’ve been meaning to blog this for a while now.  It’s no secret that Liz and I are huge fans of our Media Centre.  I mean really, who (other than my wife) asks for their own Xbox 360 as a Birthday present, then use it as an exclusive Media Centre Extender?  It’s probably the only Xbox that has never had the DVD drive opened!

Anyway, I digress.  The reason for the post, is my Media Centre hosts a Virtual Machine with Virtual PC called “Divx”.  As the name suggests, it’s primary purpose is to take the the ~220 DVDs that I own and convert them into Divxs — and this takes time and CPU.

Using VMs on my Media Centre works very well for me.

The Media Centre is almost silent, it’s on 24 hours a day, and has [nearly] more storage than I know what to do with.  My desktop however is not, I enjoy sitting at my desk with the computer off.  It’s a comfortable place to sit and read, and I enjoy having the computer off and a chance to get away from emails and feeds.

So using my home baked VM solution I combine scheduled tasks and that mighty find tool ThreadMaster.  With the these tools, I throttle the CPU usage enough so that it doesn’t interfere with mission-criticality of the regular media centre duties.  From time to time I RDP into the VM and check the progress.  By using RDP into the VM, I ensure I don’t upset anyone who may be using the Media Centre at the time.  I’m sure everyone has been in that moment and knows what I mean.  Now I know I could use Virtual Server instead of Virtual PC, but there is a certain amount of comfort in the simplicity of this solution.

I imagine one day this style of virtual machine “Home Appliance” may even become more mainstream — who knows running your own mail server in a VM on your media centre may be perfectly normal in a few years?  Or maybe Virtual Machine technology will have evolved enough to run your Media Centre in a Virtual Machine.  Who knows?

But for the time being this is working really well.  Just thought I’d share this silly little bit of trivia with everyone.