DIY DVR

For about the last year I have been spending some of my free time playing around with building my own DVR (Digital Video Recorder). Sure I could have gone out and bought a TIVO or purchased the DVR receiver that my dish provider offers, but that would have been too easy. After spending many hours brainstorming different options, and testing a couple I now have a PC based DVR system that does most of the things I was shooting for.

While the normal DVR systems that are offered by your cable or satellite providers work quite well, I wanted a little more from mine. I wanted a multiple room TV recording system that I could share pictures and music over as well.

The only special hardware required for this system is a video capture card. I choose a card from Hauppauge. The card I purchased came with a remote, and USB IR sensor/emitter. I found out quickly that it is much harder building a DVR when your source is either satellite, or digital cable. The reason is that the PC can’t just change the channel on the card, it needs to send a signal to your receiver to change the channel. This is the reason I needed the IR emitter. Other than the card pretty much any PC that isn’t more than 3 years old should work fine. Here’s a picture of the innards of my PC.

As you can see I now have two tuner cards, so I can record two different channels at once. There are single cards available with two tuners, but at the time none came with a remote, and IR receiver/emitter. As you can see I also have some extra hard drives to increase storage. Here is a picture of the connections on the back of the PC.

As you can see one receiver is connected using composite RCA cable. The other is connected using coax, the reason is that currently that receiver is located in another room in the house. Also note on the far left is a video out that runs to one of my TV’s.

One of the things that I was trying for when building this was to avoid any extra cost I could. If I were to use a commercial DVR system, I would have to pay a monthly fee on top of the cost of equipment. The overall cost of my system is quite a bit more than a commercial one, but the computer would have been purchased either way. So really it is only costing me what the tuner card cost.

Since I wanted low cost, I tried GBPVR first. This is a free application that can be downloaded from their site. While I really like the things the software can do, I had too many problems getting it to change the channels on my satellite receiver so I kept trying, but I highly recommend giving it a try if you every build your own DVR. All you can lose is a little time. I tried several other free applications in the months to follow including Windows Media Center 2005. I didn’t have much luck with any of them for various different reasons.

When I decided to upgrade my computer hardware, I decided to install Windows Vista Ultimate. Included in this version of the OS is the new version of Windows Media Center. After about 20min, I had this working with my satellite receivers, and was watching TV through my computer.

For the last month now I have been using Vista’s Media Center, and it does most of what I want. The best thing about Windows Media Center is that I can use my Xbox 360 as an extender, which allows me to do everything I can on my computer from my Xbox. The interface is clean and easy to navigate, I can browse any pictures or listen to any music that is stored on my PC and of course I can watch and record TV.

While there are still some minor things that I would like to have the ability to do with my DVR, I’m getting closer that I was before. I will still try other programs as the features change, but for now I’m happy to have something that works. If you’re interested in building your own DVR, check out this Wikipedia article. This lists most of the DVR applications that are available. If you’re into Linux I highly recommend MythTV, it is one of the best applications available.

I’m sure I missed some details, feel free to leave a comment with any questions and I will try to answer them possibly in another post.

Using Microsoft Word Styles – Part 2

In the first part of my guide to using styles in Microsoft Word, I briefly covered the benefits of styles, and how to create a new style. In this post I will cover some of the other ways you can customize your new styles.

Once you are in the “Create New Style” window, click on the “Format” dropdown button in the bottom left corner. You will quickly find that by using the options found in this dropdown you will be able to customize your text to look and behave almost exactly the way you want. Now for a quick run through of the options that can adjusted with each of the items in the list.

Font:

Font tab:

Here you will find your typical options for formatting text. You can adjust the font, font style, size, and color.

Character Spacing Tab:

Here you can adjust the scale, spacing, and position of your font. You also have a checkbox for kerning. Kerning adjust the spacing between letters so the area between all letters is equal. It is common in certain fonts to have extra space between some letters that is especially noticeable in larger font size.

 

Paragraph:

Indents and Spacing Tab:

On this tab you will find everything you would normally find in the paragraph options window in Word. You can adjust alignment, indentation, and line spacing. I have found it especially useful to using the before and after spacing to control the spacing in my documents instead of using extra blank lines. For example, if you are creating a chapter heading style, you can set the spacing after to 18pt, and it will automatically create a blank space after the heading. This eliminates extra blank lines that can create formatting discrepancies when reformatting a document.

 

Line and Page Breaks Tab:

You set your line and page breaks here. So for your chapter heading you can select “Page break before” and you chapter will always start on a new page regardless of format changes done to your document.

 

Tabs:

You can customize your tab stop locations for each individual style here. It is really nice to have the ability to create different tab locations based on what type of text element you are working with.

 

Border:

I don’t use this one too often, but the one thing I found it really useful for is when creating a note, or tip item that has a boarder and back fill. If you are creating a long document that has many of these, you can create a style that automatically creates the boarder and shading. So instead of creating the boarder each time you want to insert a tip, you simply apply the style to the text that should be inside the box.

 

Language:

I can honestly say I have never used any options from this window. But this allows multi language documents to be formatted so the spelling and grammar tools use the correct language for the text.

 

Frame:

On this window you can customize how your text wraps around page elements such as pictures. You can also create a text frame where you can restrict the area your text can fill.

 

Numbering:

From this window you can customize how your numbered, and bulleted lists appear. You can customize how your numbered and bulleted lists look and behave. You can even import custom images to use as your bullet points. This is a great way to make these lists behave the way you want them to, as we all know numbered and bulleted lists in Word can be very aggravating.

 

Shortcut Key:

While this window will not allow you to make any customizations to your text, it does allow you to create a quick and easy way to apply your newly created style to your text. For example, you could set Word to apply your new “ChapterHeader” style every time you press “Alt + Shift + C”. If the keyboard shortcut you select is already set for something else, it will let you know where it says “Currently assigned to:”. This can allow you to continue typing without having to reach for your mouse every time you want to apply a style.

 

When you are back at the “Create New Style” window you will notice you have the option to apply this style to only this document, or any new document based on this template. Selecting the second option and creating a template allows you to use your styles you created in any document that is created from that template. This saves you time by keeping you from having to create the same style over and over. I hope to cover creating templates in a future post, so check back in the coming weeks.

 

Let me know if there is anything you would like to learn how to do with Word, or any other application or device. I will try my best to create a how to or tip to help you.

Half of the project done.

I pulled an overnight last night to get our new SAN into a rack. We decided to purchase a fifth rack to make the move easier, and allow some room for expansion in the future. The whole process took two of us about 11 hours. The physical racking of the equipment was the easiest. The fact that we have around 275 virtual machines that use the SAN for their storage is what caused this to take so long. We made a few hardware changes which required us to do some reconfiguration on all of the virtual machines. Here are some pictures of the SAN in the rack.

Here is the SAN in its new home. As you can see we added a third disk enclosure. The disk enclosures hold 16 hard drives each. Below the SAN is the battery backup equipment. With the current power load this UPS will keep the SAN running for about an hour.

Here is the view from the back side of the rack. The SAN runs almost entirely on fiber cables, which are the orange cables in the picture here. I still have to tie the cables up to clean this up a little. At 7:00AM we decided this could wait until Monday since we were both ready to go home and sleep!

I haven’t done any cable management with the other racks yet. We are working to get a new data center approved. If that happens we will wait and clean up the mess when we move to the new space. All that really means is more over nights for me!

Using Microsoft Word Styles – Part 1

Taking a little extra time to use styles in Microsoft Word can save you time in the long run. In this post I’m going to give a brief introduction to styles.

Styles allow users to create custom formatted text that can be applied to portions of your document quickly and easily. By taking the time to create styles and apply them to the different elements in your document, you can easily modify the formatting of your entire document with a few simple clicks. This becomes especially useful on long documents with many different text elements. Another benefit to using styles is to help ensure consistency in formatting throughout your documents.

 

To create a new style in Word 2007, click on the small expand icon in the styles area of the ribbon tool bar.

This will open the styles window. Once this window is open, you can click on the new style icon.

You will then be presented with the style editor.

In this editor you will find your basic options for modifying your text. You will want to make sure to give your style a descriptive name. For example, “ChapterHead” for the heading style used at the beginning of each chapter, or “BibText” for your citation text. By giving your styles a descriptive name you will know exactly what the style is used for when glancing at the list.

You will then choose the “Style type” that is appropriate for your style. If your style is based on another style you can select it in the “Style based on” drop down box. This can save you time if you want a style that will change if the base style changes. The last option in the properties section allows you to specify the style the next paragraph will be. So if you have a “ChapterHead” style that will always be followed by “BodyText” you can select “BodyText” here. This is nice when you are typing a document as you simply change to “ChapterHead”, type your heading, and when you press enter Word will automatically change your style to “BodyText”.

The remaining options on this page are the same as the basic paragraph formatting options we are all used to in Word. Once you have made all the changes you want, simply click “OK”, and your new style will show up in the styles list. You can now apply this new style by selecting the text you want to apply it to (or for a paragraph style, simply make sure your cursor is in the paragraph you want to change), and click on the style name in the styles list. If you have a different style set for the following paragraph, it will also be changed.

I have only scratched the surface of styles in this post. I hope to create a few more tutorials on styles in the coming weeks that will help you to better utilize them in your documents. While it is quite cumbersome to initially create the styles, the time spent is well worth it in the long run.

My next project at work

I’m working on my next tip, but it won’t be ready until next week. So for this week I thought I would share my next big project at work. I for a company in southern Minnesota. I have been at this company for almost seven years now. My actual job title is a little obscure, but it is best described as Junior Network Administrator, basically I’m second in command as far as our IT department is concerned. One of my duties is to physically mount hardware in the equipment racks, which is what this project will involve. Below I’ve included pictures that will hopefully give you an idea of just how much work I’m in for!

Here is a view of the front of the racks in our data center. We are a small to medium sized business, and currently have four server racks that are reaching capacity. One reason we are able to fit all of our servers into four racks is that we use VMWare to virtualize our servers. Basically what this means is that we are running 23 virtual servers on 3 phyisical servers. This saves us a lot of money, space, and energy.

Here’s where the hard work is going to come into play! This is the view from the back of the server racks, A.K.A. “The Rat’s Nest”, A.K.A. “The Spagetti Monster”. The part of this project that will take me the longest is cleaning up this mess!

This is our new Compellent SAN (Storage Area Network) this is basically a bunch of hard drives that can be accessed via the network. We have another SAN that is identical to this one, but is already in the rack. I need to get this one off this shelf and into a server rack. Before that can be done, I need to either move some of our existing servers and equipment around to make room, or we need to puchase a fifth rack.

I don’t know if I’ll finish this before the semester is over or not, mainly because all this work needs to be done during nights when no one is working so we can take the servers and SAN down. If I do any work, I will update my progress here.