The Mothership

And speaking of SMART, I did a cursory check of the health of the current Linux box’s drives, and discovered that they were running a little warm. Like, 49-52C warm. When the recommended temperature is around 40C.

I guess the ventilation in that box isn’t as good as I thought, so I’ve opened up the case to let it cool off a bit, even though it lets a bit more noise escape, too. It’s dropped the temperatures by a few degrees, at least.

Maybe I should start worrying about replacing it with a better system sooner than I thought…

Though I might not be about to overhaul my PC setup, I did wind up ordering an external drive enclosure, and it arrived today. Unfortunately it’s not quite working out as well as I’d hoped; it was a tight squeeze getting the drive in, and one of the plugs that had to be undone to remove the drive tray was quite stubborn.

But the disappointing part is that the chipset this enclosure uses doesn’t appear to support the SMART commands. I have three drives left over from the previous Linux box, but I know one of them was going bad, and without the SMART status I can’t tell which one it was. I tried booting up the old box since I still had it lying around, but it shuts off a couple seconds after turning it on. It might be a power supply short, or a motherboard problem, but I’m not going to waste my time troubleshooting an ancient Pentium II system.

Oh well, it was a cheap enclosure and it’ll still serve its purpose as a somewhat more portable drive for data and backups, including the PS3 now.

I’m not really very happy with my current home theatre/HTPC setup right now, mainly because the HTPC is a big, ugly, noisy, power-hungry tower made out of leftover components of older systems (typically stuff gets ‘handed down’ from my gaming system to the Linux box).

What I sometimes think of doing is replacing the whole thing with a small form factor PC of some sort, like a Mac Mini, which would certainly be much smaller, quieter, and use less power. But, in order for it to fulfill the same duties, some other pieces are needed:

TV capture
Fortunately MythTV and the Linux drivers support some USB capture cards, so I don’t need it built-in to the base system or a free PCI slot.

Storage
I’m currently using a fair bit of storage, and part of the reason the tower works well is that there’s plenty of room for hard drives in it. I have a total of 1.25TB of disk space across three drives right now, which certainly isn’t going to fit inside the Mini or any other SFF box.

So, what am I actually using all that space for? About 350GB of it is ‘personal’ files (pictures, music, non-TV video, documents, archives, etc.), 470GB of it is MythTV recordings, 40GB is backup data, and the rest is mostly free space. That makes things a bit hard to split up, since although I have 500GB and 750GB drives I can reuse, they’re 3.5″ and the internal Mini drive is a 2.5″, which limits me for now to 320GB of internal space (looks like the only 500GB 2.5″ drives right now are slower 5400RPM ones). There are probably other SFF boxes that will take 3.5″ internal drives, but it would take a bit more research.

In any case even if I can fit the 750GB drive into the HTPC, that’s still not enough total space, so some external space would be needed as well. I could slap 4×1TB drives into a Drobo…if I were rich. Since I’m not, a standard USB/FW enclosure will have to do. A 500GB internal drive for the personal files and a 750GB external drive for the MythTV recordings would probably suffice for quite a while (or possibly a double-drive enclosure for the other 500GB drive or future expansion).

There’s still the issue of backups though. There might be enough free space to squeeze them onto one of the above drives, but having them on the same system makes me a bit nervous. It would be better if backups were kept separately, which leads me to…

Networking
My old Linksys router is working fine, but it’s missing gigabit ethernet and Wireless-N, which would be rather nice now that I have systems capable of them (the Wireless-N in particular, since there’s still a fair bit of 2.4GHz interference around here). Both would be provided by something like Apple’s Time Capsule, with the added bonus of being able to do Time Machine backups to it for the laptop, and the ability to add a USB drive to it for some network storage, which could be used for the aforementioned backups.

Audio
It would be nice to clean up the audio mess too, since right now I’m routing the audio through two PCs in order to mix in the consoles and get everything to a single set of PC speakers, which means that I have to have the gaming PC turned on just to get the audio from the PS3. And right now I actually have two sound cards in the HTPC since I want some audio output to go to the TV (i.e., MythTV), and some to go to the computer speakers (everything else). Since I hardly ever actually use the console of the HTPC, I could just let everything route to the TV, and a decent receiver and set of speakers should take care of that.

In the end, the gaming PC would be hooked up directly to the PC speakers, with a headphone switch, and everything else would go to the receiver.

Power
Unfortunately the change to using external components winds up adding three wall warts to the AC power requirements, and it often feels like I’ve got too damn many of the things already. At least total power consumption would still be a bit lower.

Television
And I still need a new TV of some sort. I still need to do more research here, but it doesn’t really affect anything else as long as it has enough inputs (at least one HDMI for the PS3, one VGA for the 360, one component for the Wii, one more DVI/HDMI/VGA for the HTPC, and one or more HDMI/component for a potential future digital cable box, TiVo, or whatever).

Miscellaneous
I’d also probably need a new KVM so that I can continue to use a single keyboard and mouse for both the gaming box and the HTPC. I already have one, but it’s for PS/2 devices, and it’s about time to switch over to USB anyway.

Cost
At the bare minimum, just replacing the HTPC, I’d be looking at $650 for the Mini or comparable SFF box, $170 for the USB TV tuner, $60 for a decent enclosure, and $30 for a bare-bones VGA+USB KVM, for a total of $910. And that’s just to replace something that already works just fine with something that’s just quieter and smaller.

Then add on another $390 for a Time Capsule and another enclosure for the network and backup improvements, for a new total of $1300.

And then here’s where the daydreaming ends, since it would be nice. But not that nice…

So, with one week of stats under the belt now, according to what I’ve been tracking at TDP I consumed 12,227 calories over the last week. At my weight at the time and ‘light’ activity level, I should have burned 22,337 calories (3191 x 7), for a difference of 10,060. Using the guideline that losing a pound of weight requires roughly a difference of 3500 calories, the expected weight loss should be 2.87 pounds. Actual weight loss over the last week was 1.0kg, or 2.2 pounds.

So it’s off by about 30%, which isn’t too bad for an inexact science like this. I suspected that the calorie counts on some days might be underreported a bit due to uncertainty about sizes and inexact matches in the database, and the physical activity level is very rough and leaves a lot of room for error.

If I assume that the calories consumed is correct, then the average number of calories I burn per day is actually closer to (12,227 + 2.2 x 3500) / 7 = 2847. If I assume that the calories burned is correct, then I’m actually consuming (22,337 - 2.2 x 3500) = 14,637 calories, about 20% higher than what I entered. But the reality is probably somewhere in the middle between the two.

For some reason the power has been a bit dodgy lately, with three brief outages at my place within the last week and a half, including one as I was getting ready for work this morning.

But on the plus side, I used the opportunity to figure out which breaker switch controls the computers without having to go the pull-it-and-see-if-they-suddenly-shut-off route…

I finally got around to buying a scale, so I can start officially tracking with numbers. I was a bit depressed at the actual starting weight, though; it came out as a bit higher than what I guessed I was way back at the start of this, so I expected to be even lower than that. Oh well.

This scale also measures body fat, though that won’t really matter until towards the end (right now all it really needs to say is “too high”). It’s debatable how accurate these kinds of scales are for that, but it’s fine as long as I can actually see a difference occurring.

You’ll also be able to click on the “Change” field on the right for a graph of my progress. Well, once there’s more than one data point…

Well, I still have to buy a new scale to get specific numbers, but so far I’ve been able to move down one notch on my belt.

I’ve also been avoiding pop for the last couple weeks, as I used to drink a lot of diet colas but started to get worried about all the caffeine. The local Safeway has a lot of lightly-flavoured waters, but it’s tougher whenever I go to a local cafe for lunch or the food courts at the malls, as then it’s either pop, way-overpriced small bottles of water, or nothing.

So far I think it’s made me a bit more tired in the mornings, but that might be because it’s affected my sleep a bit. I’m getting to sleep more easily, but still waking up a bit tired; I’d been getting by on 6-7 hours of sleep before, but I seem to need a bit more now.