Category Archives: InfinitePursuits

Anything related to the Infinite Pursuits website

Back to the Text (and perhaps some Video)

It has been some times since I have posted to this blog. Mostly because my efforts have been focused over at TLPShow.com. There the TLP Network is growing, and I am in the process of restructuring out websites, and looking at new ways of presenting community. These changes will be evidenced in the launch of TLP v3.0.

I have been itching to write more lately, and the influx of technical questions have spurred me to write some How-To articles on some topics I have covered previously, but with some refreshments towards other operating systems.

I realize that perhaps some of my previous articles and papers were a bit of a high level view and took certain assumptions on the reader. Well with the assistance of my friend Alejandro, I will try and break things down into easy to consume components, and run series on how to do things one step at a time.

Much of this will find its way onto the TLP, and some of it will remain here on this blog. The TLP has been geared mostly towards Music, even with my Geek Out segments (which are technical in nature, but tend to relate to music production, or organization).

That is going to change in the near future with the introduction of a new show, and perhaps some veering off of the path for the TLP Show. What I mean by that is, I intend to keep our main theme of “Scenes behind scenes” but I am going to try and include many more scenes in the interviews, outside the realm of music.

Along with more technical articles, I am going to be writing more about applications and how to do certain things on Mac OSX. WHAT!??!

Yes, that is right, I am join the cult, or as I like to put it, exploring BSD.
But my reasons are simple ones: I am recording video in HD, and my camera records using the h.264 codec.
This results in smaller video files, while maintaining good quality. The problem is that my current computers cannot handle decoding the video, let alone allowing me to edit the video.

So my new Macbook Pro is to me a video editing tool, that will be able to handle my various other computing requirements. It certainly has a premium, and the Final Cut Pro Studio software package also has a hefty premium, but for my purposes, this is justifiable.

More to come, and look for a revamp in serial form of my how-to document on using SSH to create a VPN tunnel to your home computer.

If you have any suggestions, or requests for how-to documents or articles, leave a comment or email me.

Wiki work begins

I have started my work on filling out the Wiki, and learning all the tricks to working with MediaWiki.

One thing for sure, is there is a lot to learn as far as Wiki formatting. Its a shame that the default setup for Mediawiki is such a blank slate. What I would love is to find an easy way to import all the help and template pages into the wiki.

I am learning a bit about Template wiki entries, but it would be so much easier to find a concise resource on importing them.

So far I have migrated my documents about a few of my travel/hiking kits, as well as setting up a structure for the rest of them. Also I have posted my article on SSH within the OpenSource section.

A few of the lists I am keeping are what applications I am using actively, and what podcasts/vidcasts I am iistening to.

Its just been interesting learning about what I can do. Now for the few things I want to do with it, and haven’t figured out yet, is where the challenge lies.

Deconstruction of Falling Stars

In another fun change, on the course to learning something new, optimizing resources, and consolidating information, my website will be changing again.

A long time ago in a Inter-sphere far far away, I had a website that was hand wrought. Then I moved to the CMS system called PHPNuke, then to a fork of that project myPHPNuke. The next stage was to a paid hosting service, and I used the opensource project Drupal, a modular CRM. I have been using Drupal for a few years now, but I truly haven’t been using all of its functions, since its more than I need.

So now I am breaking the site down. I am going to attempt to retain most of the content, and the current site will exist as a legacy site in the interrum.

Here are my reasons.

There are 3 things that I feel can contain all my content: a Photo Gallery, a Blog, and a Wiki. All of which make use of a MySQL database.
The photo gallery is alive and active. I am running the Gallery package for that. Its a pretty simple setup, just drop the files on the server and have a database.

The blog is running on WordPress, which again is just as easy to set up.

And finally, the place to store articles, how-to documents, lists, tidbits of knowledge and information I am planning to use MediaWiki. The back end of the Wikipedia project. This component is not set up yet on the server, but its coming.