By David Barrett, on January 9th, 2012
It is possible to start any program as a service in most versions of Windows with the following method. I use this mainly for software written as a Python web application like SABNZBD, SickBeard and CouchPotato. I have also used it with Newsbin Pro which is a windows usenet newsreader client.
The first thing you need to download 2 files from the the Windows 2003 Resource Kit and the 2 files you need are srvany.exe and instsrv.exe or you can download just those 2 files from here. Once you have these 2 files place them in the root of C:\ for ease as this is what my example will be based on.
Continue reading Run any Program as a Service on Windows
By David Barrett, on December 13th, 2011
The third essential component in a home streaming setup is the server and pretty much any PC can be turned into one. I have chosen to repurpose my old Core 2 Duo setup that I used to use for gaming and here are the specs
Intel E6300 | 4GB DDR2 Memory | Asus 775 Motherboard | 1 x 250GB O/S Drive and 1 x 750GB Data Drive
As you can see its not blazingly fast and I have no redundancy on the disks and I do run low on space sometimes. I get round the space issue by deleting stuff that I have watched and will never watch again.
Continue reading Home Media Setup: Part 3 The Server
By David Barrett, on December 6th, 2011
Here is the second part of a series of posts documenting my home media setup. This post will concentrate on the networking side of streaming media to the Media Center in your front room.
Networking can be the unsung hero of your setup or the expensive trial and error villain. Truly it is one of the most important parts to get right and is worth spending some man hours achieving.
The simple rule is to connect everything through Gigabit switches with cables, this sounds simple but the trick is to hide those wires. The alternative is WiFi or HomePlug networking and these bring headaches and expense ensuring you get it right.
Continue reading Home Media Setup: Part 2 Network, Network, Network
By David Barrett, on November 30th, 2011
Here is the first part of a series of posts documenting my home media setup. This first post will concentrate on the Media Center which is the show pony of this whole series and brings your media to life.
There are two key components that are required for a Media Center and these are the hardware and the software. If you get the wrong combination then it can make the experience turn sour very quickly.
Continue reading Home Media Setup: Part 1 The Media Center
By David Barrett, on November 28th, 2011
I have been very quiet on this blog but will be looking to update it soon with my Home Media setup which I have slowly been building up and fully automating.
This has been a long process trialling different methods but the technologies I have used are now bedded in and working as I want them. So I wanted to document it for my own archive and maybe help others with a similar setup.
Continue reading Home Media Setup
By David Barrett, on November 18th, 2011
I have been running out of space on my Intel X-25M 80GB SSD and I wanted to clear up some space but had with all the housekeeping I still had nearly 30 GB of games installed. These were installed mainly because I just went with the defaults and I wanted to move them onto my storage HDD.
I thought about uninstalling but as I had Supreme Commander on there which is a pain to install and update especially GPGNET, I looked into moving the game from one disk to the other. After a very small amount of searching I found a little program called Application Mover by Funduc Software
Continue reading Application Mover
By MagicalTrevor, on August 4th, 2011
 Here is a guide on how to convert a DVD to AppleTV with free software. The guide assumes that you’re using AppleTV2 but the same guide will work for other devices. Finally, adding the resulting videos to iTunes is covered.
Continue reading Converting a DVD to AppleTV
By David Barrett, on July 27th, 2011
I found this Android App on the VMWare Flings website which is basically VMWare experimental software area. So I thought I would install it and try out a new email client.
To install it you have to navigate to the following address via your Android Browser
http://labs.vmware.com/flings/vza
Continue reading VMWare Zimbra Email Client for Android
By David Barrett, on June 17th, 2011
If you are getting slow network transfer rates and you know your network is solid the first thing to try is to disable TCP/IP auto-tune. I have never been in a scenario where having auto tune turned on is beneficial so now turn if off as a default.
Scenario’s this really affects are when copying large amounts of data across the network i.e. file copy and when streaming to Media Centre PC’s (HTPC) running software like XBMC, Boxee or Windows Media Centre.
Continue reading How to disable Windows 7 / Vista TCP/IP auto-tune
By David Barrett, on February 6th, 2011
In the past I have had a Virtual Private Network setup to my home network so I could access my computers, as a side effect this may get round any proxies you have in place at work. I had to move the hardware I was using to host my VPN server out of my network so I just let it slide and did without.
However, I now have an old PC that I am using for a central server again and thought I would revisit my VPN setup. I don’t set this stuff up very often (once before) and had to trawl the web for a guide. I found some but there were steps missing and it took me a while to figure out my missing configuration.
Continue reading Setting up a Simple Server 2008 Virtual Private Network (VPN)
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