Firewire and USB-2.0 are fast enough to easily attach disguised cheap IDE disks externally.
www.pcmcia.org
(they have FAQ-s explaing card types, ...)
Firewire and USB-2.0 are fast enough to easily attach disguised cheap IDE disks externally.
www.techcase.de
-- where to configure your cube or travla[1]
system
GNUpod -- a collection of perl scripts to use your iPod under ..., i.e. allows you the administration of the music library etc.
It serves (at least in theory) different and quite separate purposes:
converting your CD music into an MP3 library, adding nice meta information into the MP3 headers
uploading, downloading, synchronization, ...
...
There is no redundancy in MP3 audio files, so when MP3 CD-s get older and get more scratches, you will start suffering a lot, as the player skips as much as it needs to find the next playable location, and that results in pretty un-nice gaps and that will keep you waiting many, many seconds for the continuation.
The player expects the MP3 files beneath a directory level, one directory for each album.
For sorting purposes each such directory and each such file within a directory starts with a three-digit number.
I MP3-ed almost my entire CD collection into an MP3 library following these requirements, with the artist name above the albums of the artist.
For using this MP3 library with my iPod I have to establish a mapping from this deep structure to a rather flat structure. For this purpose I run a perl/shell script to map/symlink artist-album-file to a name formed exactly like “artist---album---file”:
cd ARTIST--symlinks-for-iPod; find "$( echo $PWD | sed -e 's/^.*\//..\/..\/music\//' )" -type f -name '*.mp3' | perl -F'/' -a -ne 'chomp; chomp $F[$#F]; splice(@F,0,3); symlink($_,join("---",@F)) || warn "{$_}: $!"'
File names on the iPod are shortened to 27+4 (4 for .mp3
),
3 characters like ~27
are used for making the short names unique.
Nowadays computers (I mean PC-s here) have reached quite a speed and equipped with enough RAM, they are able to do us very good servics for quite a couple of years. The very special one kind of thing, that's likly to die far too early is hard disks. So why not make use of disks in external cases to be attached via Firewire or USB-2.0, like the ones of Coolergiant (with quite some regional presences)? They have cases for static use and also portables.
SONY DRX-700UL -- my future (?!?) external DVD/CD rewritable drive
I installed the 2.1a firmware update according to http://sony.storagesupport.com/dvdrw/downloads/530FW21a/Instruction/530update.htm
SONY DRX-530UL -- my external DVD/CD rewritable drive
striping
mirroring
RAID 0 + parity checking using a single partition
parity striping
www.heise.de's c't 1998/22: Linux: Festplattenzugriff beschleunigen
just one USB-1.1 plug
two PCMCIA slots of type I or II, or a single one of type III
...
Both Dimension towers were ordered without too much and too deep reasoning. They are really not bad at all, but they seriously lack extensibility: not enough extra PCI slots, not enough IDE drive slots, i.e. no space for the possible 4 drives. I am going to compensate that by adding a Firewire + USB-2.0 PCI card and by occasionally adding external Firewire'ed disks.
[1] I would love to install a travla in my 911, but I still haven't found good and reasonable applications for it ... -- questions regard: display, car LAN, WAN access via ..., ...