Radiohead, Mac, and UPS
My free time has been completely consumed with 3 things this week.
- Radiohead’s In Rainbows album
- My new Mac Mini
- My new Uninterruptible Power Supply
I did get some Halo 3 in the mix but I must digress. In Rainbows has been playing non-stop on my work computers and my iPod. The more I listen to this album, the more I love it. Yes that’s right, love it! I find myself looking forward to Jigsaw Falling Into Places everytime the album loops around. I still haven’t decided if this is top 3 of my RH albums. It’s so hard because the more you listen to it, the more you enjoy an album. This happened to Amnesiac and Kid A. I didn’t like those album at first but when I started to listen to them more and more, it grew on me. In my opinion In Rainbows is another masterpiece.
I used the hell out of my Mac Mini this week. It’s been on 5 days straight. I’ve been making it my own by installing various freeware and testing out Parallels. I got my laptop’s WinXP loaded on my my Mac Mini. Only thing left is to get an activation key from Microsoft. My iTunes is setup similar to my PC but I don’t think I’m going to reformat my iPod with the Mac. The PC has all the interesting historical data like the star ratings and the times I’ve played a song. It’s so stupid how little things like that makes such a good experience in using an iPod. Moving it over to the Mac is a cumbersome task. My entire library is on my Linux fileserver.
I also had to replace my UPS this weekend. I got it setup but was interested in getting it to shutdown my server in the event of a power failure. The model I got was an APC BACK UPS XS 900. It came with software for Macs and PCs. Unfortunately none for Linux. I found out that there is an open-source solution called apcupsd. It basically are scripts that allows you to do shutdowns for APC branded UPS. I also found that people have used my UPS with this software solution successfully. I installed the source code and compiled it. Everything is working fine, I think. I’m in the middle of running various tests. So far it passed the few early tests. I need to simulate a complete power failure and see if it shuts down my server. May not sound fun to you but gobs of fun for a geek like me.
October 17th, 2007 at 7:39 am
Nice! Keep us posted on the transition, discovered limitations or cool functions!
October 18th, 2007 at 12:47 am
The Mac Mini is still chugging along. I’ve noticed it’s starting to lag on performance when you’re using Parallels to run Windows. I think eventually I’m going to need a memory upgrade. If you haven’t done so, download QuckSilver. Awesome macro-like program to execute programs by a couple of key strokes. Saves me a ton of time!
I also completed my testing of the UPS. Everything checks out. My Linux server can now shut itself down in the event of a complete power failure. Very important since this will unmount all the hard drives to prevent data corruption. Woot woot!