Past 2 weeks summarized...

With work and classes for masters, I am back to my old schedule despite graduating... It's a shocker! I know... And yes, being a graduate student does give you a lot of time to do stuff like, oh I don't know, play games, socialize, have fun? Add work into that mix and the end result is same as last 4.5 years of my life. Anyhow, I've been saving some juicy stuff to put together in a blog post, turns out this one is going to have a video-plosion (you've been warned).

First of all Vikings is back!!!! With 2 episodes out it is already getting more amazing :D


So is Hannibal, right after Vikings:


Today I watched 300: Rise of an Empire:

It turned out to be more of like Spartacus v2.0, 3D version having blood, arrows, spears, swords and explosions coming at you. 300 vs 300: Rise of an Empire, overall both were good stories with some amount of goriness in each, none near matching those in Spartacus.

And of course the next Transformers movie, Transformers: Age of Extinction:

I don't know, after watching it, it looks more like the first Transformers movie combined with a bit of Real Steel elements.

And next movie I'm looking forward to is Transcendence:


And finally, Karen Gillan (Doctor Who) & Katee Sackhoff (Battlestar Galactica & Longmire) is back in a horror movie Oculus. Anyone interested?:

Also there was a moment around Sunday midnight, Monday morning, when TigerDirect, had a price error on their site, roughly $2 for 2-3TB NAS drives... Of course I ordered a ridiculous amount of drives all to be rejected by TigerDirect later during the week... sigh.... Earlier this week, I meet Ace, a police canine, and he was humongous... literally could take down anyone by his sheer mass. Also got Hadoop to finally work on a single-node cluster (guide coming up later on), now to attempt it on a cloud instance and make a multi-node cluster out of it.

Almost done with the Guild Hunter series, and now to pick with series to listen to next... suggestions anyone?

Courtesy: The Mary Sue (for making me aware of the Oculus trailer)

P.S.: My Bachelor's diploma finally came in, whee....

Plex

So my last post was about setting up a NAS to store and access your files from the Internet, and in this post I shall bring to you Plex. Plex is multi-platform application that can arrange your (ahem! messy maybe?) media libraries and host them and so that you can watch them from anywhere and it also gives you the ability to share it with family and friends.

For every movie and TV show it gathers information from imdb and tvdb for every episode and also each TV show it also downloads the theme song and plays it on the background when one accesses the show.

Network Attached Storage (NAS)

In this digital media age, people have tons of photographs, videos - movies, TV shows (if you are anything like me), and music. But to store them we resort to space on the drives in our computers, some go for external hard drives (hopefully keep multiple copies of them across different drives to safe losing them if a drives fail - yes that happens!). Now accessing these files when touring or from outside home/work or on a trip can be a hassle with setting up dns, web-server, etc. for non-tech pros.

I found a simple and quick solution for this problem - a network-attached server. There is plenty of network-attached servers out there now for household use such as Synology (I just bought one!), ReadyNAS by Netgear, QNAP, Buffalo, etc.. Don't forget when purchasing drives make sure you get a NAS drive, and yes there is a difference - the typical drives are not meant for 24/7 usage whereas NAS drives are meant to be abused for 24/7.

Now if you have a Synology NAS with the drives, here is the setup instructions for creating a folder to store and share files and here is the setup instructions for making your server accessible from the Internet. Make sure you have your firewalls up!