Blogging on hobbies
Blogging is such an odd beast. There are a myriad of reasons to do it - none of which really appeal to me, and that's probably part of the reason that I've averaged five months between posts in the last year or so. I do, however, need some medium to keep track of things. Specifically, where I stand in many of my hobbies.
I've been told by several people (and often said it of myself) that I have too many hobbies. Better too many than too few, but I'm having trouble keeping track of particulars - did I decide what costume pieces to make for next year's Renn Fest yet? Have I made any decisions about wood type or stain color for the trunk I want to build? For that matter, have I finished any plans for the trunk? Which parts have I bought for my home theater PC, and which have I researched that seem like a good buy? What on earth am I going to do with the BeagleBoard that I procured, and what sort of home automation do I really want right now anyway? I like the esoteric board games that I've played, but it seems like an expensive (and very hit-or-miss) hobby - do I want to put the time and money into building a good game collection?
Research into and thoughts on hatmaking, theater, home computing, home automation, costume making, and gaming (both the board, role playing, and video varieties) are easily thought of or looked up and then forgotten. I need a place to record ideas, preferably in an easily searchable medium. I could use pen and paper, but that is not easily searchable - especially when material overlaps (home automation and computing, hatmaking and costuming). I could use a wordpress blog on the patrickandgillian domain, which I set up partially - but that requires that I maintain it myself - additional work that I don't care to do.
Or, I realized this morning, I could use my old livejournal. I doubt anyone reads it, beyond a few people (and I could use a measure of general advice from time to time, so it probably shouldn't be completely hidden). I don't particularly care if it is read or isn't - if I wanted it to be private, I could write it in OpenOffice or Google Docs - both easily searchable, but difficult to categorize/tag if I end up with a good deal of entries. If I wanted it to be widely read, Facebook notes would work - but I don't need that many people reading about which infrared diodes I bought and why (nor do they probably care).
So, purpose! This journal was started back in July of 2003 (as a means of communicating with Gillian, mostly). I have little use for a blog, but I have a large need for a search-able, tag-able hobby journal.
Rather than posting a bunch of other new entries, I'm going to put a brief summary of the state of a few things that have been bouncing around inside my head.
Theater
The Mikado is progressing nicely. My original goal was to have the music rehearsed by the end of January so that most of the blocking can be done by the end of February (leaving March to polish bits).
All of the music is rehearsed for the leads (except for #4 and the finales) and most of them are very well prepared. The women's chorus likewise is doing very well. The men's chorus rehearsals are moving slowly, mostly because as a group the men's chorus has the least singing experience. I'm not overly concerned, but it means that for the foreseeable future there has to be a men's chorus music rehearsal every week.
Blocking is difficult - I believe in part because I know that most of the blocking that I write (especially if it involves the choruses) cannot be changed easily once taught. For nearly any other artistic decision, I can try it one way, decide if I like it, and then make a decision. With blocking, it's difficult to know a priori what the right decisions are - and it's very hard to make changes. Having been on the other side more often, I definitely understand that - but I at least understood a little why the Threepenny director seemed to change things every rehearsal. It was annoying to the cast, but until you see it how do you know that you want X chorus member to stand upstage or downstage from X bit of scenery? Visual elements (including cast) are difficult to place until you actually see it, and so I waffle a bit on blocking. Thankfully, this week I'm just blocking some of the easier stuff (and clean entrances - so I don't need to know previous blocking locations).
I've also considered if it might be nice to try using some sort of marching band software for blocking the show - I've seen the programs Chuck uses and they're not too difficult. It is set to music, so it could show me how the characters move from place to place and how I want to do the timing (assuming that said software allows me to draw the stage and isn't insistent on using a football field as the background).
Shoe-making - I got a pair of (semi)traditional Japanese shoes from Steph, and it should be decently easy to make two dozen pairs. My fear is two-fold - one, they're basically wooden flip flops with a pair of 1"x1"x3" blocks attached to the underside, and with only flip-flop straps I'm afraid they'll be kicked off if they're loose at all - and two, that the clomp, clomp of twenty three people in wooden shoes on a wooden stage is going to drown out anything and everything else. Felt bottoms perhaps? Not sure on this one.
Hatmaking
I've been interested in hatmaking since last year around this time. I wanted to rent a fore-and-aft hat for my Major General costume (the style of hat I've seen the Major General wear in other productions, and the same style hat I wore for Pinafore). It turned out that no one makes the hats anymore (all the ones in existence are antiques), and there are only three or four of them in Houston (and so $40 to rent for a couple weeks). I take that back - one group still makes them, but you have to be some level member Knight of Columbus to get one; they won't make them for just anyone. Combining this frustration with a general love of hats (as one Threepenny cast member said it: "I want to become a person who wears hats") has motivated me to learn a bit about hatmaking.
Also, hatmaking is not a word. Millinery, at least in modern times, has come to often mean the making of women's hats. A haberdasher, in the Queen's English, is one who sells small articles for sewing - buttons, ribbons, zippers, etc. In American English, it is usually a men's outfitter - someone who might make hats, but in general makes men's clothing. I suppose "hatter" is the proper term, and "hatting" the action, but that just sounds stupid.
I need some basic supplies before I can really get going. I got a couple of books on the subject and a large gift certificate from my mother-in-law for Christmas, and I know some of the basic supplies that I need. I don't know all the terminology yet, but I need a box to steam hats in, I need the head-model that's my size to form hats to, and I need some of the actual crafting supplies - buckram, hat bands, and hat felt (not sure what makes the different sorts of felt different, but that's one of those things I intend to find out). I also need to decide what sort of hat I'm starting with - I have three fedoras, a bowler, and a driving cap. A top hat, maybe? Or another driving cap, since it's a fairly easy hat to wear around and it should be fairly easy to make?
Costumes
Renn-Fest costumes: I've bought some leather scraps and am going to see if I can't make some accessories out of them - pouches, flask holder, that sort of thing. No progress in a while, though.
Also, while I have my normal Renaissance costume, I do want to make a full pirate costume and a full Scottish costume at some point. For the former, I have some patterns from when we did Pirates. For the latter, I bought a pattern, but I need to order the family tartan. I can probably go in on it with Ryan (you know, same tartan and all) and save some money in shipping.
I also am going to start collecting pieces for a steampunk costume. I have a pattern for the floor length jacket. I suppose this could be either a Halloween or Renn Fest costume (time traveler, maybe?).
Halloween costumes: I made the purple jacket. I have a green vest. My hair is almost long enough and I have experience with the white makeup from Threepenny - my Joker costume is almost finished. Also, if I find the right brocade, the Joker's purple jacket can be used as a Willy Wonka jacket.
Computers
My home computing situation is messed up enough that I have whole spreadsheets devoted to trying to figure out what I want to do. In the end, I suppose I want seven computers - a laptop for myself and Gillian, a file server, a home theater PC, a heavy PC for games or video processing, a web tablet or two and a very low power always-on PC for home automation. Some of these can overlap, I suppose, but nearly all of these (except for my work laptop, which I also use at home, and the file server that I just replaced) are somewhat of a work in progress.
I fixed my file server situation last month by just buying a decent NAS. I wanted something low power, with decent storage, several options for mounting and enough features that it was easier and cheaper to buy it an to build it myself. I went with an Iomega ix-200 2 TB (a pair of 1 TB drives mirrored). It's more storage than I had before; I'm not really using this to backup movies yet. It has a number of nice features: NFS as well as Samba mounting (NFS is significantly faster, but a bit of a pain to set up if you're doing it yourself), media server stuff (iTunes, as well as a UPnP server for video), torrent queuing, and all the normal backup/power features of a decent NAS. If I can find another USB cable laying around somewhere, it also interfaces directly with my UPS, so that if I lose power (or trip a circuit) it will shut down graciously - a definite plus for the stability and life of the drives. Another plus is that it will work as a print server - and my old laser printer is USB only, no networking built in. Previously I'd been using CUPS through my old file server, but it never seemed to work properly printing from my laptop.
My laptop is fine, and owned by TI. No complaints here, other than that it's three years old and falls off the RAM boundary into swap more often than I'd like. VNC, a brower, and Outlook open will usually consume all of it's 1 GB of RAM. Anything past that and it's writing to and from the hard drive constantly. Oh, and our hard drives are encrypted, so it slows to a crawl. I just have to be careful what programs are open at once.
Gillian's laptop is another issue entirely. Her Toshiba tablet has had motherboard problem after motherboard problem, and now that it's out of warranty it's not cheap. I searched around for prices online - as it's not a standard motherboard (the damn thing isn't even rectangular) it's like a $400 replacement. Considering it's a three year old machine, that's an expensive replacement just to keep it running. She's been using her older Compaq laptop, but it's ancient. Not really sure what to do about this one, either, but it seems higher priority than any of the other machines, and replacement might be a cheaper long term option than repair.
With the old file server dead, I thought to use some of that hardware to play with MythTV settings. I've had fun playing with rewriting the menus and integrating StepMania, the Dance Dance Revolution clone. And while I've never had a proper HTPC, I'd love to be able to timeshift TV - especially with Futurama coming back in June. I've been looking at hardware, and I think I can build a fairly powerful machine for around $500. The components I've been looking at:
For the heavier PC - for video editing and graphics - I'll probably use similar parts to the HTPC so that the parts are interchangeable. I'll at least go with an AM3 socket AMD processor, and I'll probably go with an ASUS or Gigabyte board that supports a ton of RAM. My current machine struggles when I've tried editing even thirty seconds of the Pirates or Trial videos, so I need to do something about the hardware if I even want to consider editing the whole videos (in particular, the playback version inside the program and the final exported video often have different timing on the audio/video sync, so I can't easily sync the audio track. I think it's a buffering issue within Cinelerra's playback screen, but I'm not entirely sure).
The web tablets are the interesting ones. I originally was hoping for the Crunchpad to pull through - a $200 web tablet would have been awesome. Sadly, only the idiotically named JooJoo came out of that project, and it's $500. I could get one of the Always Innovating touchbooks - for just the tablet it's $299 (also, it runs TI chips, which is a plus), but I've heard from friends at TI that the machine is kind of flimsy - to be expected from a cheap device, I suppose. What I really want is something that can easily be used just for web browsing, that's a 10 or 11 inch screen, and is around $300 or so. I'm rewriting my cookbook interface to use PHP so that it's readable through a webpage (the data is stored in MySQL, and currently the frontend is Java, which our hosting service doesn't support - hence the PHP port), and I'd love to be able to have one of these web tablets in the kitchen to read my recipes off of, rather than needing to bring my laptop itself into the kitchen every time.
The last machine I'm looking at is in sort of a chicken-egg situation. Do I need an application for the machine before I bother actually building it, or will an application become evident once I start playing with the little guy? The Beagle is a pretty cool piece of hardware. It's 3"x3" and it has HDMI, USB, and an SD card reader. It runs a TI OMAP, so it has an ARM core and a DSP - it's perfect for a small home automation job, even if it's something complicated enough to require an FFT or two. I just need an idea of what to do with it first.
If I build even two of these machines, I'll still have enough hardware laying around to build another machine for something - the Intel Atom board that I played with is still looking for a purpose, but it draws an order of magnitude more power than the Beagle, so it probably won't be an always-on sort of machine. It could be another home automation piece, though, with a wake-on-LAN command sent from the Beagle. I just don't know what sort of automation I want or could use in our current house.
That's all for now. And I didn't even mention woodworking projects...
I've been told by several people (and often said it of myself) that I have too many hobbies. Better too many than too few, but I'm having trouble keeping track of particulars - did I decide what costume pieces to make for next year's Renn Fest yet? Have I made any decisions about wood type or stain color for the trunk I want to build? For that matter, have I finished any plans for the trunk? Which parts have I bought for my home theater PC, and which have I researched that seem like a good buy? What on earth am I going to do with the BeagleBoard that I procured, and what sort of home automation do I really want right now anyway? I like the esoteric board games that I've played, but it seems like an expensive (and very hit-or-miss) hobby - do I want to put the time and money into building a good game collection?
Research into and thoughts on hatmaking, theater, home computing, home automation, costume making, and gaming (both the board, role playing, and video varieties) are easily thought of or looked up and then forgotten. I need a place to record ideas, preferably in an easily searchable medium. I could use pen and paper, but that is not easily searchable - especially when material overlaps (home automation and computing, hatmaking and costuming). I could use a wordpress blog on the patrickandgillian domain, which I set up partially - but that requires that I maintain it myself - additional work that I don't care to do.
Or, I realized this morning, I could use my old livejournal. I doubt anyone reads it, beyond a few people (and I could use a measure of general advice from time to time, so it probably shouldn't be completely hidden). I don't particularly care if it is read or isn't - if I wanted it to be private, I could write it in OpenOffice or Google Docs - both easily searchable, but difficult to categorize/tag if I end up with a good deal of entries. If I wanted it to be widely read, Facebook notes would work - but I don't need that many people reading about which infrared diodes I bought and why (nor do they probably care).
So, purpose! This journal was started back in July of 2003 (as a means of communicating with Gillian, mostly). I have little use for a blog, but I have a large need for a search-able, tag-able hobby journal.
Rather than posting a bunch of other new entries, I'm going to put a brief summary of the state of a few things that have been bouncing around inside my head.
Theater
The Mikado is progressing nicely. My original goal was to have the music rehearsed by the end of January so that most of the blocking can be done by the end of February (leaving March to polish bits).
All of the music is rehearsed for the leads (except for #4 and the finales) and most of them are very well prepared. The women's chorus likewise is doing very well. The men's chorus rehearsals are moving slowly, mostly because as a group the men's chorus has the least singing experience. I'm not overly concerned, but it means that for the foreseeable future there has to be a men's chorus music rehearsal every week.
Blocking is difficult - I believe in part because I know that most of the blocking that I write (especially if it involves the choruses) cannot be changed easily once taught. For nearly any other artistic decision, I can try it one way, decide if I like it, and then make a decision. With blocking, it's difficult to know a priori what the right decisions are - and it's very hard to make changes. Having been on the other side more often, I definitely understand that - but I at least understood a little why the Threepenny director seemed to change things every rehearsal. It was annoying to the cast, but until you see it how do you know that you want X chorus member to stand upstage or downstage from X bit of scenery? Visual elements (including cast) are difficult to place until you actually see it, and so I waffle a bit on blocking. Thankfully, this week I'm just blocking some of the easier stuff (and clean entrances - so I don't need to know previous blocking locations).
I've also considered if it might be nice to try using some sort of marching band software for blocking the show - I've seen the programs Chuck uses and they're not too difficult. It is set to music, so it could show me how the characters move from place to place and how I want to do the timing (assuming that said software allows me to draw the stage and isn't insistent on using a football field as the background).
Shoe-making - I got a pair of (semi)traditional Japanese shoes from Steph, and it should be decently easy to make two dozen pairs. My fear is two-fold - one, they're basically wooden flip flops with a pair of 1"x1"x3" blocks attached to the underside, and with only flip-flop straps I'm afraid they'll be kicked off if they're loose at all - and two, that the clomp, clomp of twenty three people in wooden shoes on a wooden stage is going to drown out anything and everything else. Felt bottoms perhaps? Not sure on this one.
Hatmaking
I've been interested in hatmaking since last year around this time. I wanted to rent a fore-and-aft hat for my Major General costume (the style of hat I've seen the Major General wear in other productions, and the same style hat I wore for Pinafore). It turned out that no one makes the hats anymore (all the ones in existence are antiques), and there are only three or four of them in Houston (and so $40 to rent for a couple weeks). I take that back - one group still makes them, but you have to be some level member Knight of Columbus to get one; they won't make them for just anyone. Combining this frustration with a general love of hats (as one Threepenny cast member said it: "I want to become a person who wears hats") has motivated me to learn a bit about hatmaking.
Also, hatmaking is not a word. Millinery, at least in modern times, has come to often mean the making of women's hats. A haberdasher, in the Queen's English, is one who sells small articles for sewing - buttons, ribbons, zippers, etc. In American English, it is usually a men's outfitter - someone who might make hats, but in general makes men's clothing. I suppose "hatter" is the proper term, and "hatting" the action, but that just sounds stupid.
I need some basic supplies before I can really get going. I got a couple of books on the subject and a large gift certificate from my mother-in-law for Christmas, and I know some of the basic supplies that I need. I don't know all the terminology yet, but I need a box to steam hats in, I need the head-model that's my size to form hats to, and I need some of the actual crafting supplies - buckram, hat bands, and hat felt (not sure what makes the different sorts of felt different, but that's one of those things I intend to find out). I also need to decide what sort of hat I'm starting with - I have three fedoras, a bowler, and a driving cap. A top hat, maybe? Or another driving cap, since it's a fairly easy hat to wear around and it should be fairly easy to make?
Costumes
Renn-Fest costumes: I've bought some leather scraps and am going to see if I can't make some accessories out of them - pouches, flask holder, that sort of thing. No progress in a while, though.
Also, while I have my normal Renaissance costume, I do want to make a full pirate costume and a full Scottish costume at some point. For the former, I have some patterns from when we did Pirates. For the latter, I bought a pattern, but I need to order the family tartan. I can probably go in on it with Ryan (you know, same tartan and all) and save some money in shipping.
I also am going to start collecting pieces for a steampunk costume. I have a pattern for the floor length jacket. I suppose this could be either a Halloween or Renn Fest costume (time traveler, maybe?).
Halloween costumes: I made the purple jacket. I have a green vest. My hair is almost long enough and I have experience with the white makeup from Threepenny - my Joker costume is almost finished. Also, if I find the right brocade, the Joker's purple jacket can be used as a Willy Wonka jacket.
Computers
My home computing situation is messed up enough that I have whole spreadsheets devoted to trying to figure out what I want to do. In the end, I suppose I want seven computers - a laptop for myself and Gillian, a file server, a home theater PC, a heavy PC for games or video processing, a web tablet or two and a very low power always-on PC for home automation. Some of these can overlap, I suppose, but nearly all of these (except for my work laptop, which I also use at home, and the file server that I just replaced) are somewhat of a work in progress.
I fixed my file server situation last month by just buying a decent NAS. I wanted something low power, with decent storage, several options for mounting and enough features that it was easier and cheaper to buy it an to build it myself. I went with an Iomega ix-200 2 TB (a pair of 1 TB drives mirrored). It's more storage than I had before; I'm not really using this to backup movies yet. It has a number of nice features: NFS as well as Samba mounting (NFS is significantly faster, but a bit of a pain to set up if you're doing it yourself), media server stuff (iTunes, as well as a UPnP server for video), torrent queuing, and all the normal backup/power features of a decent NAS. If I can find another USB cable laying around somewhere, it also interfaces directly with my UPS, so that if I lose power (or trip a circuit) it will shut down graciously - a definite plus for the stability and life of the drives. Another plus is that it will work as a print server - and my old laser printer is USB only, no networking built in. Previously I'd been using CUPS through my old file server, but it never seemed to work properly printing from my laptop.
My laptop is fine, and owned by TI. No complaints here, other than that it's three years old and falls off the RAM boundary into swap more often than I'd like. VNC, a brower, and Outlook open will usually consume all of it's 1 GB of RAM. Anything past that and it's writing to and from the hard drive constantly. Oh, and our hard drives are encrypted, so it slows to a crawl. I just have to be careful what programs are open at once.
Gillian's laptop is another issue entirely. Her Toshiba tablet has had motherboard problem after motherboard problem, and now that it's out of warranty it's not cheap. I searched around for prices online - as it's not a standard motherboard (the damn thing isn't even rectangular) it's like a $400 replacement. Considering it's a three year old machine, that's an expensive replacement just to keep it running. She's been using her older Compaq laptop, but it's ancient. Not really sure what to do about this one, either, but it seems higher priority than any of the other machines, and replacement might be a cheaper long term option than repair.
With the old file server dead, I thought to use some of that hardware to play with MythTV settings. I've had fun playing with rewriting the menus and integrating StepMania, the Dance Dance Revolution clone. And while I've never had a proper HTPC, I'd love to be able to timeshift TV - especially with Futurama coming back in June. I've been looking at hardware, and I think I can build a fairly powerful machine for around $500. The components I've been looking at:
- Antec Fusion Case - A bit expensive for a case ($130), but it comes with an LCD and IR receiver built in, and it's a nice form factor for a home theater system. I've also already found the instructions online for integrating the IR receiver and LCD with a linux box - although my universal remote doesn't have a conf file yet, so I may be spending some time mapping the buttons for lirc to find, but that's okay.
- AMD Phenom II X3 - The one I linked to isn't necessarily the one I'll get, but I'm probably going to go with an AMD, and I'm probably going to pick one from the most recent generation (Phenom II). My current AMD processor is old enough that there's no way I can reuse any parts anyway (my old Athlon is a 939 socket and the board uses DDR 400 memory), so I might as well buy the current stuff. Especially if I want to be using this for HD video streaming, I probably don't want to go too cheap on the parts.
- Gigabyte HDMI motherboard - I'm going with either a Gigabyte or ASUS motherboard. I also would like the fastest RAM I can buy - which is obviously heavily dependent on the motherboard supporting it. I'd also prefer to stick with a micro-ATX form factor, which limits some of my options. This particular motherboard has the right socket, a 2600 MHz FSB, and supports up to four sticks of DDR3 1666 without overclocking (DDR3 1800 with overclocking). For power reasons, I'd prefer not to overclock, so DDR 1666 is, I believe, the fastest I can choose right now. It has a limited number of expansion slots (a single pcie x16, a single pcie x1, and two normal pci slots), but the board supports 8 channel digital audio and has an hdmi port (ATI Radeon HD 4200 onboard), so the only card I need initially is a TV capture card. If I ever decide I want better video or sound, the slots are there for the cards, but at first I think I'll trust the reviewers and rely on the onboard audio and video ports.
- Hauppauge 2250 dual capture card - One of the nicer cards out there. This is one area for an HTPC that I really don't want to go cheap. The nicer cards, like this one, will do dual capture (so you can record multiple channels at the same time), do hardware mpeg encoding - so your processor is free to run a game emulator and a web browser while the card is chugging along recording Mythbusters - and Hauppauge is well supported in Linux. Additionally, this card has an extra S-Video input, so I can capture my VCR output and finally convert some of my other old VHS tapes to digital (Disney devised an early DRM-style protection for VHS tapes - there's a layer of noise on the very first line of video in every frame. Several of the major studios used it, especially in later VHS tapes. You probably can't see it, because it's at the very edge of your TV, but it's there. It's interpreted as a "do not copy" signal by most VCRs, and my VHS-to-DVD converter that I bought off of Laura won't copy a fair number of my movies to DVD as a result. Fun fact: this noise track also makes the tape age a bit faster, so it actually impacts the quality of the product. Thanks, Disney!)
For the heavier PC - for video editing and graphics - I'll probably use similar parts to the HTPC so that the parts are interchangeable. I'll at least go with an AM3 socket AMD processor, and I'll probably go with an ASUS or Gigabyte board that supports a ton of RAM. My current machine struggles when I've tried editing even thirty seconds of the Pirates or Trial videos, so I need to do something about the hardware if I even want to consider editing the whole videos (in particular, the playback version inside the program and the final exported video often have different timing on the audio/video sync, so I can't easily sync the audio track. I think it's a buffering issue within Cinelerra's playback screen, but I'm not entirely sure).
The web tablets are the interesting ones. I originally was hoping for the Crunchpad to pull through - a $200 web tablet would have been awesome. Sadly, only the idiotically named JooJoo came out of that project, and it's $500. I could get one of the Always Innovating touchbooks - for just the tablet it's $299 (also, it runs TI chips, which is a plus), but I've heard from friends at TI that the machine is kind of flimsy - to be expected from a cheap device, I suppose. What I really want is something that can easily be used just for web browsing, that's a 10 or 11 inch screen, and is around $300 or so. I'm rewriting my cookbook interface to use PHP so that it's readable through a webpage (the data is stored in MySQL, and currently the frontend is Java, which our hosting service doesn't support - hence the PHP port), and I'd love to be able to have one of these web tablets in the kitchen to read my recipes off of, rather than needing to bring my laptop itself into the kitchen every time.
The last machine I'm looking at is in sort of a chicken-egg situation. Do I need an application for the machine before I bother actually building it, or will an application become evident once I start playing with the little guy? The Beagle is a pretty cool piece of hardware. It's 3"x3" and it has HDMI, USB, and an SD card reader. It runs a TI OMAP, so it has an ARM core and a DSP - it's perfect for a small home automation job, even if it's something complicated enough to require an FFT or two. I just need an idea of what to do with it first.
If I build even two of these machines, I'll still have enough hardware laying around to build another machine for something - the Intel Atom board that I played with is still looking for a purpose, but it draws an order of magnitude more power than the Beagle, so it probably won't be an always-on sort of machine. It could be another home automation piece, though, with a wake-on-LAN command sent from the Beagle. I just don't know what sort of automation I want or could use in our current house.
That's all for now. And I didn't even mention woodworking projects...