So it looks like if all goes according to plan I will get some time to attend to technical matters at home this weekend. I have not even glanced at the stuff there for a long while now and things are still running fine, but there’s some crusty stuff I really want to clean up.

For one, I am going to finally get some disk for the server at home. It’s nothing all that special, technology-wise since I live well behind the curve of new technology, but it will be a large increase in space (~5 fold) for the media library, and it will probably cost me $100. Yeah, things are not that cutting edge at Vallentyne.com. Don’t get me wrong, I work on the cutting edge, but I live way back on the handle.

Then it’s time to start a fresh new music library. I have been muttering about this for years now, but this is the time, the time is now. I’m going to take some shortcuts, but it will still be a long time before I’m all done. The music folder has something like 5500 songs in it now, and I am not all that happy with the quality of some of them. So I am starting again and will be taking much greater care to get good quality MP3s from the beginning. That means hauling the huge box of CDs up from the basement and ripping my heart out.

Another change which I should have done long ago was to have a single iTunes library for everyone in the house. I originally started off by taking a selection from the main library and storing it on my workstation. That in hindsight was a huge mistake and is more or less why I need to fix all of this crap now. Similarly, when Nikki got her own iPod I had started a new library just for her workout stuff. Needless to say I have made a mess of things and it’s time to fix it. So I will be doing something similar to this article at Lifehacker, and have just one iTunes library for the whole house. This will let us all share playlists and song ratings, etc. The hard part will be finding ways to not lose my ratings to date, since there’s just way too much time invested in those to lose altogether.

Once we get a nice solid library of songs, then I can take some care and fix up our photo library in much the same way. Well, I can’t actually go back in time and take better pictures of our kids when they were young, but I can organize those pictures better and have meaningful names and tags. That way I can maybe actually find them when I am looking for them. Of course one weekend is simply not nearly enough time to do all of this, but the main thing is starting a job. Then I can plug away at it bit by bit later.

Finally the whole point of doing all of this work is so that one fine day I can buy something like this or this and easily use all of my music and pictures, and eventually, videos with ease.

It’s good to be a geek.