When I buy music online, I prefer to buy FLACs. I also prefer to buy music that has moderate dynamic range. I’ve found that I enjoy music that has a ReplayGain value of -8dB or less the most. When I see ReplayGain values at or above -10dB, I usually have a bias against the mastering, which probably used at least some brickwall limiting to produce such a high volume. Unfortunately ReplayGain values aren’t a primary specification prior to purchasing music, so I usually have to purchase on reputation. I probably shouldn’t display ReplayGain values in my primary view on Foobar2000, but I do. It’s mainly to make sure the files are tagged with it, but like I said, it does color my anticipation of the music.

My FLACs get transcoded to LAME MP3 v2 (~190kbps) for normal playback, which could be on the computer, an iPod or iPhone, or to an Airport Express via Airplay. If I’m at a computer that has access to my FLAC archives and Foobar2000, I’ll listen to those.

I rarely purchase iTunes Plus (256kbps AAC) or MP3 files (190kbps or better), but when I do it’s with the expectation that I will not transcode them into another lossy codec or to the same codec at a different bitrate. I will burn them to CDs with a note like “from AAC” or “from MP3″ to let myself know not to rip the CD later expecting a lossless copy of the original. Sometimes if I’m using a playback device that’s storage-constrained, I will transcode down to AAC or MP3 at ~128kbps. These files aren’t anything I would archive – they’re for playback only.

Speaking of burning CDs, I do burn discs to listen to stuff in the car with a little more quality than just plugging my iPod or iPhone into the aux jack. Like many, I have quite a few CD playback systems around the house and at work. One little quirk I have is that I like to write CD-TEXT on my burns; my car stereo and a few of the players I use support displaying that info. When I burn CDs, I don’t apply ReplayGain or any volume processing. I burn CDs with Nero, CD Architect (rarely, if I want to do some limited mastering, crossfades, or track adjustments), or Foobar2000 (if I don’t want to write CD-TEXT).

• League Name: BDFL Experimental
• League ID: 295823
• League Password: brutal

Yahoo! Sports Pro Football Pick ‘Em

• Group Name: BDFL and Friends
• Group ID: 6488
• Group Password: brutal

Yahoo! Sports College Football Pick ‘Em

• Group Name: BDFL and Friends
• Group ID: 1982
• Group Password: brutal

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• Group Name: BDFL and Friends
• Group ID: 2426
• Group Password: brutal

As always, you can find the Brutal Deluxe Football League and Podcast at our website.

Cloudberry offers a free trial, so I downloaded the Add-in package and installed. WHS warned me that the package was unverified, but I installed it anyways. After install, the app appeared in the navigation bar as “Cloudberry Online Backup” on the WHS Dashboard and in the list of installed Add-ins. The user interface of Cloudberry has five tabs that are easy to understand. Before I could do anything with it, I needed to give it the credentials for my S3 account in the Settings under “Set Storage Account”. It prompted me for a Bucket name, which I assumed it would create if necessary. It didn’t, and complained that the named Bucket didn’t exist, so I went into the AWS console and created it. After that, the account was added.

Because I’m not currently using this to back up critical system data, I went into Options and tuned the upload speed to 75KB/sec (about a quarter of my current upload bandwidth) and tuned down the process priority to Low. At this point, I was ready to Setup a Backup Plan, so I launched that wizard. I selected my S3 account as the target, and was given a choice between the Advanced (default) and Simple Backup Modes. Because these are just photos that I’m not keeping multiple versions of and don’t need encrypted for extra privacy, I selected Simple. I’ll probably use Advanced mode for documents or other sensitive data I might backup to S3 in the future.

I was pleased to see that the Backup Plan wizard defaulted to showing backup sources at the share level rather than at the physical drive level. There was an option to add the physical drives to the view.  I quickly selected just my “Pictures” share. I used the Advanced Filter settings to specify just to back up files with .JPG, .PNG, .MP4, and .RAW filenames, mainly to avoid backing up system files like thumbs.db and desktop.ini that Windows throws in to picture folders. However, it looks like the default selection of “Do not backup system and hidden files” would help me there. I opted for no compression, to use S3′s Reduced Redundancy Storage (RRS), and to purge deleted files after 30 days. I chose a weekly schedule with a backup at 1AM Saturdays to reduce the load on the server. The wizard then created a service to run with Administrator privs. I liked the email notification options, but chose not to use them at this time. Then the backup plan was created and I set it to run immediately.

I was concerned as I watched the initial phase of the backup.  Out of over 24GB worth of 10,000 picture files, the job status listed just 100 files and 1.8GB. However, the network utilization was on target and the performance impact to the server (an HP ProLiant MicroServer) was negligible. As I was watching the initial backup, I paged through some of the other tabs and found them straightforward and easy to understand. As the backup progressed, its number of target files and capacity increased, indicating that it wasn’t intending to cap out the backup job early.

I was very pleased to see that unlike Jungledisk, Cloudberry transferred the folder structure and files without putting them in containers. I was able to navigate the folders and see the pictures from the S3 web console. Very cool.

As I finish this entry, Cloudberry is plugging away at the initial backup and all indications are that it will work even better than my old solution! Recommended.

Even though I was comfortable on WHS v1, the 400SC was maxed out internally with three hard disks and two optical drives. Being a mini-tower, it was using more power than I needed to just do WHS functions. I had originally considered building a mini-ITX-based pedestal server, but when the base components added up to over $300 I checked on the HP ProLiant MicroServer, which I’d been following since its release. For about $320 I could get the server with the first GB of RAM and a 250GB HDD included. I decided to go that route, adding a 2GB DIMM, HP DVD/RW, and 1TB HDD. With the other two HDD bays I would install the two 1TB drives already deployed in my original WHS. The hardware arrived late this week and as of this writing I have decommissioned the old WHS and moved all the data and the HDDs to the new WHS 2011 server.

I decided not to try to use the MicroServer’s limited RAID. I’ve only got about 500GB of data (not including client computer backups) on the server right now, so I’ve spread that out between the first three disks, and I’m using the extra 1TB drive for server backups. Eventually I’ll add a USB or eSATA external disk for that function. I also plan on setting up Cloudberry Backup for WHS2011 to export my photos to Amazon S3. I’d been using a beta JungleDisk plugin for that on my old WHS. A review of Cloudberry Backup is coming.

We gathered early the morning of Saturday, June 4th, and set out on the nearly 3-hour drive to the trail. By 9:30AM we had found the parking lot for the Chuck Keiper Trail, had a celebretory drink, strapped on our gear, and hit the trail. We had both a topographic map (with elevation profile) and a first-hand description of the Chuck Keiper East Trail, and in the beginning it seemed to match what we were experiencing. However, about 7 miles in it was becoming apparent that the elevations we were hiking weren’t like what the map said. Two of us were tracking our progress via GPS-enabled devices and our courses weren’t tracing out in shapes similar to the map. Also, our GPS coordinates were slightly off the topo map we had. We continued marching on: we knew we were on the “Chuck Keiper Trail” since it was orange-blazed and signed occasionally. However, cabin locations and individual trail names weren’t matching up to the map; in fact, nothing we saw along the way indicated that this was the East loop. Until we got to the merge with the West-East Cross Connector trail!

At that point we completely stopped and tried to get our bearings. It turned out that between all the maps we brought, there were at least two versions. We scrambled to find one that showed this cross-connector trail. One of us had it, and it indicated that that trail met the East loop about 2 miles from where we thought we had started the day. We then realized that we hadn’t parked at the correct parking lot; and had never verified our starting position with GPS or another indicator. It was time to make a decision about how our day and weekend was going to play out. It was about 5PM, we had already hiked though about an hour of thunder showers (it was drying out now), and we faced the prospect of hiking back 12 miles to where our cars were parked; we had hiked about 15 miles in at this point. Instead of stopping to eat dinner, we decided to trudge up SR 144 to the parking lot we should have used (the parking lot we used was ~10 miles up the same road, on the same side of the road). This part was particularly grueling for me, walking on a mix of gravel and pavement, but the old man of the group made it OK.

Once at the closer parking lot we figured we could set up camp there and then hike back to our parking lot in the morning, or try to flag down a ride and shuttle back for our cars. Although SR 144 isn’t a very busy road, We managed to get a kind woman named Linda to stop for us. Once we explained our situation, she agreed to shuttle me back to my car. I was one of the two drivers on the trip. Linda is a nurse at the Renovo Hospital who was headed to work and I let her know how kind she was to offer us help. It wouldn’t be the last help we’d need this weekend. Keep reading!

I got to my car and drove back to the other parking lot. Linda had driven back up there and stopped to talk to some of the other guys before resuming her trip to work. At some point I had found out that one of our group’s family had a cabin about 45 minutes away from where we were, and we had decided to trek up there to camp for the night. Since I had brought marinated chicken for our dinner, I was given the decision as to whether we’d eat our camp food or go into town for dinner. Exhausted by this point, and the clock at close to 7PM, I opted to go to town.

We shuttled back for the other car and trekked about 20 minutes up to Renovo, which our “semi-local” was familiar with. He directed us to Yesterday’s Restaurant, and we settled down for cooked meals. The place was dead and we had the full attention of our friendly waitress, which was welcome!

After the meal we found our way out of Renovo and up Summerson Mountain Road — way up — to get to the cabin, which was about a 15-minute drive from the main roads. At this point it was close to 9PM and we started setting up camp by the cars’ headlights. The other car had some music mixes playing from its stereo for a while. Several of us, including me, settled down quickly. The others hung out for a bit before turning in.

I woke up first on Sunday morning and began preparing for breakfast. I had brought pancake mix for the group and started getting those cooking as the others were rising and starting to break camp. After we had all eaten and started the final pack-up around 8:15AM, the other driver tried to start his car. It wouldn’t turn over. Too much of the power had been drained from the headlights and radio the night before, and neither vehicle had jumper cables. My car started OK, so our “semi-local” and I went down to town to try to find a place to purchase jumper cables. Several places weren’t open yet, but we stopped at the local Weis Markets right around 9AM, when they were opening. The manager said they didn’t have jumper cables, but she immediately offered to loan us hers. The people in the town of Renovo were exceptionally helpful and friendly.

Jumper cables in hand, we drove back up to the mountain to get the other car fixed. Getting the vehicles in place and connected, we noted that we weren’t getting a spark from the cables even after confirming that they were correctly connected to my car’s terminals. Taking a closer look, it appeared that one of the two cables had been cut and re-crimped on each end without any of the wire actually making contact with the terminal connectors! Luckily, we had enough tools with us and on-site to fix this (hey, we know passive electronics, right?) and a few minutes later, had a spark. It took a while for the dead car’s battery to recharge, but we did finally get it going and were back on the road a bit after 10AM. We dropped off the cables at Weis and headed to our lunch destination, Selin’s Grove Brewing Co. in Selinsgrove, PA.

This was my first visit to the Brewery, and their selection of beers and organic foods was great. It’s definitely a great reward after a weekend of challenging one’s endurance. We’ll be stopping there again. After enjoying our lunch and confirming to share this tale, even with all its warts, we headed back to Harrisburg with a desire to come back and hike the trail we had originally targeted later this summer or in early autumn. Thanks to the guys for making it fun even with all the unexpected situations. After driving over 400+ miles that weekend, I’ll let someone else drive next time!