MN Maven

So the other day I wondered over to Teton Gravity and watched the trailer for their new ski video Re: Session. Right then and there after watching the video I was instantly ready for winter again. Last year I didn’t get out as much as I usually do skiing. I think I got out about 6 times total, but I did get out to Utah last year where as the year before I didn’t make it out to Utah. Last winter however I did put the miles on the snowmobile. I think I averaged almost 200 – 250 miles a weekend. I put on over 2500 miles total last winter, nearly doubling the miles I put on the winter before.

Now back to Re: Session. The reason I am posting this up because it merges two of my passions in one. Snow/Skiing and HD video. Re: Session was filmed with both Film as well as with a Red One 4k (read twice high def resolution) camera. Even though there aren’t many consumer grade 4k displays out there, the fact that they used a 4k camera to record/film this ski video just boggles my mind. I can not wait to see this video and experience the picture quality that something only a 4k camera can produce.

So if you have a chance head over to TGR and watch the Re: Session trailer.

So now that Comcast has implemented the 250gig a month limit I have been trying to come up with a solution to monitor my bandwidth usage and track it from month to month. Currently I am running a Buffalo WHR-HP-G54 router with third party firmware from DD-WRT. DD-WRT has it’s own built in traffic monitoring, however with the event of a power loss, the monthly tracking is lost, so because of this I wanted to come up with a solution to utilize my WHS box that runs 24/7, is on a UPS, and has basically an unlimited HDD space so log files won’t be an issue. Because I am running DD-WRT it allows me to capture SNMP packets and use that to monitor my traffic. In the past I’ve used simple tools like SNMP Traffic Grapher (STG). I soon found out that STG wouldn’t cut it for what I needed and started looking around for something more robust and something that would save my data month to month.

One of my past jobs, working for a small Dialup, DSL, and fixed wireless ISP we were in the habit of taking advantage of free and open source tools to monitor our network. Two of the tools I used on a regular basis were NAGIOS and MRTG. Both were and probably still are great tools for what we needed to monitor the network, however the people I worked with were big into Linux and understood it inside and out. I am and windows gui, give me a gui any day of the week. So I started looking around for something that would install on windows server 2003 (IE my WHS box) and found Cacti. After digging around some more I found a .exe self installer that someone put together on the Cacti forums and from there it was simple as double clicking, following a few instructions and I was up and running with Cacti on my WHS box.

Here is the Windows stand alone installer for Cacti: http://forums.cacti.net/about14946.html

The installer does everything you need to get it up and running, all you need to do, is download it, transfer it to your WHS box, then RDP into your WHS box and double click and install. The installer finds out that you already have IIS installed and up and running on your WHS box, so its a really easy, straight forward install.

Once you have Cacti installed, you then need to enable SNMP on your router, in my case I am running the buffalo router with DD-WRT which makes it extremely easy to do. Next follow the Cacti documentation to setup cacti and traffic monitoring. Once you have that done that you are now good to go and you are now monitoring you incoming and outgoing bandwidth. I now just wish I had a way to send me a notification if I were getting close to the 250gig a month cap. Like have it alert me via email if I were to get within 90% of the 250gig cap, but for now I have at least got it monitoring my traffic and logging it, which was half the battle.

As always you can register here and comment on the blog, or follow me on Twitter.

- Josh

Tonight while working on transferring my “test” HTPC internals into a new SFF HTPC style case (look for a review of if soon) I was participating in the live stream of the Entertainment 2.0 podcast in which Adam Thursby and Josh Pollard had Jere Jones the developer of Show Analyzer on. Josh and Adam were interviewing Jere about Show Analyzer and the the background behind it and all that but towards the end Jere came out and said that Show Analyzer will, some time in May, support .WTV file extensions for windows 7.

What does this mean? Well this means we can now get commercial skipping to work within Windows 7 Media Center. I for one can not wait for this to get release. So keep and eye out over at Jere’s website and the forums to find out when .WTV extensions will be supported.

- Josh

Tonight I participated in a SageTV vs. Media center round table hosted by Josh Pollard and Adam Thursby the hosts of Entertainment 2.0 podcast. We were also joined by Brent Evans of Geek Tonic, and finally Tim Campbell the co-host of HTPCentric podcast.

We talked about various topics from cost, ease of use, 3rd party applications, our favorite things about each application, and our pet peeves about each applications. I think the show went really well and hope those of you who take the time to download and listen enjoy it as much as I enjoyed participating in the podcast.

Head over to Entertainment 2.0 / HTPCentric websites where you will be able find the podcast. As of 9pm CST Thursday March 12th, it wasn’t posted and probably won’t be until some time in the early AM Friday the 13th, so on lucky Friday the 13th head over and check out the podcast.

- Josh

This weekend I decided to cut out caffeine/pop out of my daily diet. I’ve been getting bad head aches lately and also have been trying to loose more weight so I decided to take out one of the biggest sources of sugars in my diet, mnt dew.

If you talk with my wife or any of my coworkers you will know I drink way too damn much dew or pop in general. Some days I was drinking up to 4 cans a day of pop, and wouldn’t eat all that well due to being full on pop. I was also buying 32oz giant cups of dew from the cafeteria at work.

I know that is had to be bad for me when I’d go too long and start getting with drawl head aches from the lack of caffeine, so I decided to cut it out completely. So far on day 3 it feels like I slept way better last night, and I found myself not needing a boost that I got from it.

So wish me luck, I am hoping that with cutting out the large sugar intake, as well as going out running or riding my bike when the weather gets warmer to reach a goal of loosing another 15 – 20 lbs by August.

So we will see how that goes.

- Josh