Catching up here at the Home for Orphaned Computers...

Got a gift from a friend of mine on Friday...a Pioneer A06 DVD recorder drive. Buttercup will be the lucky computer to get the drive. It's a 733MHz PIII with 512MB RAM...it should handle it fine. I'm looking forward to using the drive primarily for backing up my computers over the network. Eventually taking all the stuff I have on mortal, all too mortal VHS videotape and saving to MPEG1 files (MPEG2/VOB is overkill) on DVD-R would be a good thing to do.

I could also see the need to occasionally rip a misbehaving, broken DVD and recopying it to DVD-R. Just my luck that the MPAA got a judge to put an injunction down on sales of DVD XCopy, although the free utilities that do the same thing without the fancy gui are still very available. My primary interest in videogeeking tools is in being able to take DVDs that I own and rip them to VCD so I can watch them on my 400MHz PII laptop. It's taking content that I paid good money for and using it as I will. If my lappie was a generation newer it would be able to happily play DVDs with a Windows software player, but 400MHz is a bit too slow. How's about a nice slide show of Lord Of The Rings? Sound fun for you? That's what it would be like if I put a DVD drive in the lappie and tried to play a DVD.

Today is going to be maintenance day here at the lab. I need to reinstall Windows and install Linux on one of my computers. (Nuku Nuku...466MHz Celeron) It's so nice to have drive sleds! Multiple OSes without the hassle of setting up dual-boot. Then I'm going to have to use the Linux drive on Nuku Nuku to back up Buttercup and burn the contents of Buttercup's home directory to CD-R. Then Buttercup will get a drive transplant and a reinstall of Mandrake 9.1. (No, I don't trust 9.2!) It is likely all this work will take longer than a day to finish. It is likely I might even blow all this needed computer maintenance off for another day. Bleah.

Anyway, one thing militating in favor of a computer maintenance blitz...it's raining today. The Winter Rains have finally come to Los Angeles, about a month late. We're still looking down the barrel of a drought, but the possibility of another "March Miracle" is something that can't be discounted. No fun for the folks who live on hillsides that got burnt in October, but I suppose it's ok for the rest of us. I just checked, and nope, I'm not made of sugar. And I don't rust.