On noes.

We really got into FlashFoward. It had an interesting story, and you can tell the writers spent a lot of time getting the story right before they filmed anything. Reminds me of another brilliant show with an complex and over-arching storyline.

Damn. Oh well, at least dropping FlashForward allowed the network to pick up a new sit-com starring Matthew Perry. Which will be just, you know, amazing. Swings and roundabouts eh.

Last night Queenland won Game 3 to secure a clean sweep of the series.

All Hail the King.

I’ve just built a new PC, and decided to turn my old Windows XP PC into a dedicated, headless Linux server. One thing I’ve always wanted to have a server at home that could run apache and samba, but do other things like download torrents and serve media directly to my XBox 360.

I’m using RHEL5 here, but these instructions should work just as well for CentOS. My media directory is going to be called /media, and I’m doing all this via an xrdp session.

First, you need to install ushare to stream media to your 360:

yum install gcc
yum install libupnp-devel # from EPEL
wget http://ushare.geexbox.org/releases/ushare-1.1a.tar.bz2
tar -xjf ushare-1.1a.tar.bz2
cd ushare-1.1a
CFLAGS="-Os" ./configure --prefix=/usr/local
make
make install
route add -net 239.0.0.0 netmask 255.0.0.0 eth0
ushare -D -x -c /media

Once you have ushare up and running, your XBox 360 should be able to stream the files in your /media directory.

Now, for downloading torrents I suggest using Wine and uTorrent. I know, it’s not a native Linux app but the fact is the current generation of torrent clients for Linux are mediocre at best. uTorrent is fast, has a tiny footprint, and more features than you can poke a stick at. So until the Linux clients catch up, it’s uTorrent for me.

To install uTorrent on Linux:

yum install wine
wget http://download.utorrent.com/2.0.2/utorrent.exe
wine ./utorrent.exe /NOINSTALL

This should get uTorrent up and running. Next you need to enable the “Web UI” in the configuration settings, and create a username and password for remote access. Choose an arbitrary port like 8123. Once configured you should be able to access your uTorrent GUI remotely via:

http://<yourserver>:8123/gui/

Now, you probably have other PCs and laptops that you want to use to queue up the torrents on your server. That’s where the “Send to WebUI” firefox addon comes in, install this addon to any computer you usually use to browse torrents.

Once you’ve configured it with your server, and username/password, you can queue up torrents as easily as right-click -> “Sent to WebUI”.

If you don’t use firefox don’t worry, you can still queue up torrents via the uTorrent web-interface, it’s just a few extra clicks of the mouse instead of just one.

And that’s it. Queue up your torrents remotely, and watch them on your XBox soon as they have downloaded.

I sent that last post at 1am this morning. This is a screenshot I took of my GMail account activity.

Looks like the hacker was from Italy…