Whose life is it, anyway?

A Massachusetts telecom company is offering unlimited VoIP calls for life. What's left unsaid is whether that's your life, or theirs. (Thanks to A Welsh View for the link.)

A jukebox of my own

For the fourth or fifth time, I'm ripping our CD collection to MP3s. The first time I did this, I burned them to CDs to take to work. That was before I learned about ID3 tags, so they're basically a jumbled mess of files that depend on the file system for structure and identification.

The second, third, and possibly fourth times (I lost track somewhere) I ended up having to dump the MP3s to make room for something more important (and more ephemeral—at least the MP3s are backed by CDs). We have a decent amount of hard drive storage in the house; the problem is that it's spread out over 10 or so disks. That, and I could never figure out how to get iTunes to look both on my local drive and a remote drive for MP3s.

A couple of weeks back, I bought an 80GB drive for a terrific price after rebate. Even after replacing the three drives in my Linux box with this new one, I still have plenty of space left over. Enough, in fact, to comfortably hold our entire CD collection as MP3s.

Last night, the final piece fell into place—I finally figured out how to turn the Linux box into an iTunes server. There are instructions to be found in several places around the Web, but the simplest turned out to be from the guy who built a Debian package for the necessary software. One thing I had to figure out on my own is that the path to the MP3 directory in /etc/daapd.conf can't contain spaces—even if you escape them with backslashes.

Picking knits

Shortly before Halloween, links to the Hallowig—a knitted yarn wig—made their way around the blogosphere. Now, those wacky crafters at knitty.com are back with another, um, unusual project: a knitted yarn model of the human female reproductive organs. (Internal, not external. This is a (mostly) family-friendly blog.)

Angela just had her first knitting lesson on Monday, and while I'm not anticipating a spate of wigs or uteri any time soon, I do think it would be cool to have a knitted Tux for the top of my monitor.