In our organization, we’re prototyping rolling out a number of Hyper-V servers, possibly even moving to headless development servers. Microsoft does provide a client that allows you to manage them remotely, but its in a very pre-release state right now. It only works with Vista. Here’s some tips and a best practice or two we’ve settled on for getting started. These links all come from the same guy who seems to know what he’s talking about:

• Download the Hyper-V Client for Vista
• Settle on user accounts. See below!
• Configure the Server
• Configure the Client

The Client requires that the workstation have a user configured with identical credentials to a corresponding server user. Since our plan involves different developers connecting to different servers, we needed to standardize:

• Each server has an account called “hypervadmin”
• Each client has an account called “hypervadmin”
• Their password’s are the same

Unfortunately, at least in this version, the accounts must be administrators on both the client and server boxes.

The problem then becomes what user to work under on the workstation. Each developer needs to be logged into their domain account, and its not acceptable for them to have to log out and re-log in as “hypervadmin” every time they want to tweak something on a server. And of course Vista has removed the “Run As…” context menu item from Windows Explorer, replacing it with the not-nearly-as-useful “Run As Administrator” menu item.

So, here’s the silver bullet:
runas /env /user:hypervadmin "mmc \"%ProgramFiles%\Hyper-V\virtmgmt.msc\""

This little command, run at the command line, from the “Run…” dialog, or via a Shortcut (where you can customize the appearance of the command window) will allow you to “Run As…” a specific MMC snap-in as an arbitrary user in Windows Vista.

I pulled it together in a batch file that made it look a little prettier, put it in a nice Shortcut and dropped it in my Start Menu. Now I can connect to any of our Hyper-V servers without having to switch user’s on my Vista box.

There’s lots of different solutions on the net. I had to collect them all before I could get rid of my problems, which were:

• Error: Package Download Failed
• Error: Main Script Execution Failed

Both seemed to be the end result of corrupt permissions. I used ZiPhone to Jailbreak a clean 1.1.4 install and was disappointed when I hit them. Here’s what I had to do to fix them:

• SSH into your iPhone using Terminal, or Putty on Windows
• You’ll need to login as root with the password alpine
• Type: cd /
• Type: cd Applications/
• Type: chmod 755 Installer.app/Installer
• Type: chmod u+s Installer.app/Installer
• Type: chown -R root:wheel Installer.app
• Reboot your iPhone just to be sure.
• Launch Installer.app and immediately install Community Sources.
• When its done it will want to update Community Sources. Do this.

Everything should work as normal. Note that I think the two chmod commands do the same thing, but I’m not that sure on my command line stuff, and it doesn’t hurt to do them both. Hope this helps someone else!

Its a widely held belief (or at least it is now) that the PS2 was the primary executioner of the Dreamcast. This was not what was observed as it was happening, but they say history is written by the victors, and somehow people have come to believe that Sony was the vanquisher of the DC. Allow me to posit another theory on Sega’s demise — not a new one, but one that has, perhaps, been forgotten.

In the interest of full disclosure, I have both an original XBox and an XBox360. I’m fairly anti-Sony, due to their recent consumer abuse, and I am pro-Sega (although there’s not much of them left to cheer for.) I’m ashamed to say I didn’t buy a Dreamcast until they dropped to $50, but I was a poor college student at the time. I worked in retail at Future Shop (the Canadian equivalent of Best Buy) and was employed in the software and games department.
Since the end of my college career I’ve been employed by various Microsoft partners, whose opinions are not reflected in this piece. I am not “anti-Microsoft” but I think this is a story that should be heard. Feel free to comment with your thoughts…

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This weekend I spent an exorbitant amount of time trying to deal with HD video in the same way I manage my digitized DVD collection. By that I mean, attempting to figure out how to get ripped HD movies into a format that I can play over my network, with the XBox 360, the Mac in our room and a PC as the target players. Things have not gone well, and while some people may have worked out a system they can live with, I’ve not found a solution that can be applied efficiently enough to make it worth the effort. Nonetheless, I’ll document what I’ve learned, in case its useful to anyone. There is no new information here — all of it is on the web somewhere — I’m just hoping to pull it into a coherent form…

 

MPEG4

For starters, high def content is invariably distributed in MPEG4-10 format. The different ways it can be bundled into a file will be discussed later on, but its important to first understand that not all MPEG4 is created equal.

MPEG4-2, or Part 2, is very common, and not really suitable for HD content. DivX and XVid are both implementations of MPEG4-2. DivX is MPEG4-2 with a couple extra features added. XVid is an independent re-implementation of DivX that, while usually compatible, is definitely a different beast. A player with DivX stamped on it can probably play any MPEG4-2 content, and probably play any XVid content. In cannot, however play MPEG4-10 content.

MPEG4-10, or Part 10, is relatively new and most commonly known as H.264. Its based on the same technology as its older cousin, but includes improvements to color handling, and allows higher quality content at lower bit rates.

Bit Rate: Loosely defined, the Bit Rate is the number of bits of data that go into showing 1 second of video. The higher the bit rate, the more information making up the image you see on the screen. Higher bit rates = better quality video.

H.264 can do better picture, with less artifacting, and less “chunkiness” (if you don’t know what I mean by chunkiness, watch a dark scene in any DivX movie) at a lower bit rate. A 2GB MPEG4-10 video will look better than a 4GB MPEG4-2 video.

 

Containers

All video, regardless of the codec (be it MPEG2, MPEG4-2, H.264, etc…) is typically distributed inside a container, bundling up the video track with an audio track, and possibly other features such as alternate audio tracks (containing a different language) or subtitles. Wikipedia has a good entry comparing the different container formats, but here are the common ones you’ll see for HD Video:

Quicktime (.MOV)
Quicktime is an incredibly flexible container that can hold virtually any collection of files, by using plug-in codec support. A .MOV container can hold an H.264 video track plus a DTS 5.1 surround sound audio track without any problem.

Limitations: There’s not many devices with full Quicktime support. Basically you’re stuck with something from Apple. The XBox does have basic support for .MOV containers, but doesn’t have the ability to plug-in codecs to extend its limited offering.

Windows Media File (.WMV)
Windows Media is actually very fully featured, with support for containing high bit-rate HD video and audio tracks with 5.1 surround sound.

Limitations: Its a fantastic format, despite being from Microsoft, but there aren’t many devices that support it, and I frankly hate Windows Media Player. You’ll rarely find any content distributed in a WMV container.

MP4 (.MP4)
By far the most popular, and infuriatingly limited container for H.264 (MPEG4-10). Do not confuse “MPEG4″ for “MP4″ — one is the video track, one is the container it travels in. MP4 supports H.264 video at all bit rates (but not all bit rates can be played on all devices, read about levels here) and can hold an AAC-LC audio track (probably more than one.) But herein lies the biggest problem with MP4: AAC-LC means “Low Complexity” or in other words “no digital surround sound.” You can encode Dolby Pro Logic II into the stereo track and thus get surround sound that way, but it won’t be DTS and it’ll basically suck.

Matroska (.MKV)
The Matroska container is the most common one you’ll see — both from ripped optical media, such as Bluray or HD-DVD discs, and online. Its very flexible, and can hold super high bit-rate H.264 video tracks as well as multiple audio tracks, including DTS (Digital Theater Surround).

Limitations: Apparently its a poorly defined standard and there are lots of different interpretations on how to implement it. No OS or media player software supports Matroska out-of-the-box. Few set-top devices can support Matroska. The XBox 360 does not.

 

Useage

None of these containers formats are really mature enough to be considered ready for consumer use. Different devices can handle different containers — but each with restrictions on what’s inside the container. Here’s a list of what the XBox 360 can handle.
The best standardized container, MP4, is missing a pretty critical piece of the home theater puzzle: digital surround sound. This is not a new feature here, folks. It needs to be supported for MP4 to be useful. The other containers, which do support surround sound, are either too proprietary or too disorganized to be useful yet.

If you were to obtain a MKV file with HD video inside (H.264) and a surround sound audio track, and you wanted to play it on your XBox, you’d basically have two choices on how to proceed:

Extraction and Re-bundling
Using an array of poorly-made tools and hacks available online, which I won’t cover here out of disdain for them and the hours of time I wasted on them, you can extract both the H264 video stream and the AC3 (digital surround sound) audio track into separate files. Then you can modify them to be playable on your target device, and re-contain them in a supported container.

For example, you could drop the bit rate on the H264 stream down to at least level 4.1, outputting it to a new, slightly more compressed, but certainly still “Hi-Def” file. Then you could pare the audio track down to Stereo, with Dolby PL2 intact. Finally you could combine the two files together into an .MP4 container and play them on your XBox 360, PS3, etc…

A friend claims to have this process down to a few clicks done in less than 10 minutes (he says 6 minutes or less, but I’ll chalk that up to bragging.) Using a Mac with Windows running in a VM, then later, after much frustration and waiting, using a well-equipped physical Windows PC after sneaker-netting the files, I was unable to complete all the steps of the process after 5 hours. The “software” is buggy, has poorly documented dependencies and 0 troubleshooting information if anything goes wrong.
My friend calls this operator error and says I’m technologically inept. I call it really bad software being used to do something it wasn’t really intended for. I finally gave up.

Down-sampling
The less attractive, but much easier option, is to simply down-sample the whole contained file into a MPEG4-2/DivX file. If you have a Matroska file, you might still want to do some conversion first — Quicktime Pro can ‘Save As’ a MKV file into a MOV in a couple seconds.

From there, many mature applications, like Handbrake or FFMPEGx on the Mac, will be able to convert the whole thing into something playable for you. It may take some time, and you’ll want to compress at a high bit-rate to keep as much of the video quality as possible (and don’t fool yourself — you will loose quality), but it’ll be a usable, decent-looking file that can play on a wide-range of devices, AND it can contain DTS 5.1 audio.

 

Conclusions

HD Video is the biggest screw-up in consumer technology history. We’ve been waiting for this for years… Waiting while they sort out 720p, 1080i, or 1080p as the resolution we’re supposed to buy. Waiting while the cable companies struggle to get a trickle of 720p content to our sets (then screw their customers around trying to save money on it.) Waiting while big companies publically fight over which optical format we’re supposed to go out and re-buy all our movies on…

In fact, “HD” video (eg: 1080p) describes only the resolution. You can have a 268kbps bit-rate video in 1920×1080 and call it “HD” if you want. It’ll look like crap, but it’ll be big!

Learning about the different container formats and how they’re still a fractured mess of incompatible technologies only makes me angrier. Here I stand, ready to jump on the Hi-Def band wagon, with my brand-new TV, my brand-new XBox 360, cash in my hand… and the only reasonable and affordable way to get HD content is the now-defunct $50 HD-DVD add-on player I bought on clearance.
Bluray is ridiculously expensive. No one offers 1080p downloads or subscription content. Even the pirate world can’t figure out how to distribute content playable on any common device…

Its a disaster. I spent the better part of a day trying to make it useful, and I’ve decided that, for now, I’ll be storing my content in high bit-rate DivX with my surround sound intact, thank you very much. I’ll re-visit this again sometime in 2009, and hope they’ve got their crap together…

Anyone have any corrections to this, or suggestions to make this space more understandable and usable?

So I did pick up an HD-DVD, but both my Mac and my XBox do such an awesome job of upconverting DVDs that I wasn’t sure this whole next generation optical format war was even worth it. You can see lots of screen captures online, but those are usually under optimum conditions, and often biased. I wanted a real-life comparison, under normal home-viewing conditions — a real, human comparison.

So I set up a little tri-pod, put my Batman Begins DVD in my XBox, and my new Batman Begins HD-DVD in the XBox HD-DVD player, found the same scene on both, and took a picture. I didn’t get quite the same frame, but its close enough. Don’t look at actor — look at the stuff around him. The keyboard, for example, or the other things on the desk.

Even to my unscientific eye, HD-DVD does look significantly sharper and more detailed. What do you think? Click the picture for a larger version, and excuse the moire effect — that’s the fault of the camera, not the source…

A while back I picked up a used HP LaserJet 1200 printer for my church. I got it for $120 and paid another $30 for a toner cartridge. I’ve long been a LaserJet fan, but I wasn’t expecting much out of this used piece of kit. We just needed something to occasionally print out schedules and notes to volunteers.

Boy did I under-estimate it. Despite its age, the beast began pounding out the pages right away. No warm-up times, drivers built-in to Windows. It was a near zero-maintenance work-horse. I wanted one for myself.

Well at lunch today I stopped by the local computer shop where I’d picked it up, and they had a whole new supply of used HP printers. Including this cute little guy: a LaserJet 1012. It was lightly used (less than 50,000 sheets printed) came with a nearly-new toner cartridge, and was listed or $99. That was almost enough to convince me to grab it — then I noticed a sign that said “All used HP printers $30 off!” A laser printer for $70? I’ll take it!

I couldn’t be more pleased. This will be hugely useful for my new home office. I plugged it into my Mac and went to System Preferences to add it — but it was already there. The Mac knew what it was, put in the right driver and even shared the printer automatically. It could be because I had another HP printer already installed (a PSC inkjet) or it could just be that 10.5, despite its flaws, is such a mature and user-centered OS. Whatever it was, my printer was up and working in seconds.

Like its big brother the 1200, there are no warm-up times. It does up to 15ppm at 600dpi, with a 5000 page per month yield. Windows Vista also already had drivers, although I had to tell Windows what it was first. In short, its another pain-free printer and I love it. HP may suck hard in other areas, but I heart their LaserJets…

PS - Plug for the computer shop: If you happen to live in the Capital Region of New York, Nextwave Computers is a little shop run by some really decent guys. They don’t keep much inventory on-hand, but they can get pretty much anything you need in short order, and their prices are quite competitive. Highly recommended.

What I really want out of my job, aside from the pay check, the potential for advancement, and a regular challenge for my problem solving skills, is to be able to use a Mac as my primary machine. Being a Windows developer, though, that’s not very likely.
For awhile I had a MacBook Pro, which ran Windows via Parallels Workstation like a champ, and let me have the best of both worlds. Alas, that machine is no longer available to me. Replacing it would be too costly, and my needs dictate that I’d require a high-end Mac to be able to keep up with me, so a cheap little Mac Mini wouldn’t do the job.

It occurred to me then, that maybe I could try (again) to build myself a Hackintosh, using the latest hacked release of OSX86 10.5. I do run a Mac VM image on my PC, that lets me use my favorite mail client, but it’d be nice if I could reverse the situation. I figured I’d be more than happy to purchase an additional Leopard license, to make my use (mostly) legit. So I went out and got a new hard drive to dedicate to the experiment. Here are my findings…

At work I have a Dell Optiplex 745. A nice machine, well equipped with a Core2Duo and 4GB of RAM. I checked the OSX86 Hardware compatibility wiki and verified that most of my hardware was on the list with either a “working” or “working with patch” status. I figured at a minimum I would need network and video card drivers on a stable OS capable of running VMWare Fusion for the project to be worthwhile. Things looked promising, so I began the download.

OSX86 Hacked install discs can be found on PirateBay and other fine Torrent websites. Again the legality of it is questionable. While you’re required to have an OS license for each machine, the OS X EULA does state that it can only be run on Apple branded hardware. But that sounds more like a challenge than a rule to me.
Downloading should be fairly easy — Kalyway seems to have the best builds right now — but I did find a couple suggestions on community websites. Use WinRAR to unpack the archive, as there have been some problems with other .Zip programs not opening the file correctly. The ISO itself should be burned on a Mac, or on a PC using TransMac, so as not to corrupt the files with any traces of Windows… or something. Burn it slowly! I’m not sure why people recommend these things, but I know I tried this with a 10.4.6 hack install and did it the easy way, and ended up with a coaster. This time I was super careful.

The install disc booted right off the bat for me, and following the suggestions on the Wiki I formatted my new drive as HFS Journaled, using the GUID partition scheme. I did a Vanilla install, adding the SSE3 extensions and ATI drivers for the 1×00 series cards (my Dell has a X1300 Pro)
The install completed successfully and I was ecstatic when I rebooted (don’t forget to remove the install DVD) and saw the Apple logo on the gray screen… then crushed when it promptly kernel panicked.

I rebooted with the -v switch so I could watch what was happening, and eventually realised it was the video card drivers causing the problem. I rebooted off the install DVD, formatted again and installed without the NATIT ATI kexts… only to have it kernel panic on another driver.
Finally, I tried it all again, this time with the Vanilla Kernel, SSE3 extensions, the ACPI fix, no video card drivers, and using the MBR partition scheme. And it STILL kernel panicked at loading drivers.

This time I read a little more online and figured out that I could boot into the install DVD, get to a terminal window, delete the NATIT kexts, and reboot. I tried that, and low and behold, I was into the “Welcome to OS X” wizard!

I had the well-documented problem with it getting caught in a loop after the “Import from another Mac” step, and again had to boot with the install DVD, drop to a terminal, and poke in a few commands to tell OS X that I’d already set-up my account. None of this would be so bad except booting from the DVD to a terminal window took nearly 20 minutes each time.

Finally I was able to boot into the Finder. It was glorious and looked as beautiful as a Mac should look… circa 2001. Without video card drivers I was stuck at 1024×768 mirrored on both my monitors. I poked around the ‘net a little bit, but decided my priority needed to be network drivers. My Dell has an on-board Broadcom NIC, which seemed pretty common, and although it didn’t work out-of-the-box, there were plenty of forums with solutions for hacking support for my particular DeviceID into the built-in drivers.
Alas, none of them worked. I got as far as getting OS X to recognize the card, but hit the issue with it not knowing its own MAC address. I tried the solution that basically has you telling it the MAC from the terminal at each boot, but that failed. I gave up and bought $30 D-Link card with manufacturer’s official drivers available.

Side note: that card never worked either, but thats because I had forgotten that I’d disabled my PCI slots in the BIOS, intending on turning on all on-board devices one-by-one once I was up and running. Note, that the on-board NIC WAS turned on. There were just no working drivers.

I turned my attention briefly back to the video card, hoping to get at least one thing working properly. I was able to download a bunch of drivers using the Craptop and burn them to CD for use on the Hackintosh. All of them installed, none of them worked. I finally hit upon a forum post that pointed out issues with the Radeon 1300 cards. Despite being a member of the 1X00 family, these particular cards were not supported properly by NATIT.

Sound wasn’t working either, and there was no solution, or potential solution online. And here I gave up.
I do wish I had gotten it working — it was pretty darn cool. But at > 20 hours invested and nothing to show for it except the Finder, and no hope in sight for Video card drivers, and problems reported running VMWare on a Hackintosh, I decided it wasn’t worth investing any more time in. Still it was a righteous hack, and if I had a machine with compatible hardware, it would probably have been worth it.

Oh well, I’ve been running Vista SP1 for the past week or so, and its actually not that horrible.

Digital photography is great because it allows the normal, every day user to have power over how their photos come out. Unfortunately, most of the time I don’t spend much time ‘developing’ my photos, and kind of just keep them raw.
Now I’ve used Photoshop for a long time — I think the first version I used on a Mac was 3.0 — but I’m far from an expert. I just have a collection of little tricks I know that have come in handy from time-to-time. I’m only recently getting to the point where I can pull those tricks together for a particular project.

This is one of the tricks I learned somewhere on the web that, when used on photos, can quickly improve the result. Here’s an example:

Before. A picture taken on a Kodak Z740, at 4 megapixels, in decent light with the flash on:

After. A couple quick steps applied to it in Photoshop:

My son has incredible eyes, but their color sort of gets washed out on my camera. Also the background grabs more attention that it should. The dresser he’s fishing around in was a Craigslist purchase intended to hold us over for a couple years, so its not terribly attractive.
The “after” picture helps correct these problems by bringing out the color, but reducing the severity of the other imperfections. I’m sure there’s more you could do, but this is quick and easy. Here’s how I do it:

• Open the original photo in Photoshop. If you can’t do that, this is probably the wrong tutorial for you!
• In your Layers on the right, duplicate the photo layer…
  
• On the newly created, top-most layer, choose Blur > Gaussian Blur from the Filters menu…
  
• I usually use a Blur of around 5-6. This will look weird, but don’t worry…
  
• Double click on the new, blurry layer (still the top-most) and change the Blending Mode to Overlay
• Now drag the Opacity slider until your image looks good. Usually between 40-60% looks right to me, but it will depend on the image…
  
• Bonus step: Select the eyes, and copy and paste them into their own layer, between the original and the new blurry layer. Set the Blending Mode of the eye-ball layer to Overlay as well to really bring them out even further
• Save the completed image!

I still consider myself a Photoshop newb, despite having used it for nearly 10 years, so if anyone else knows any other quick/simple tips for bringing out photos, I’d love to hear them!

Update: I just realised that Dooce has almost the exact same tutorial here. Hers is slightly different than mine and you end up with a darker background, but you could pick which Blend Mode to apply on a per-image basis.

My iPhoto library was huge! And that’s an over-statement, cause I’m not talking about twice or even three times the size of the actual photos. I’m talking nearly 10 times.

My collection of photos from 2001 until now weighs in at 6.4GB, but my iPhoto Library was 76GB. I’d always just assumed it worked that way and kept backing it up from Mac to Mac. But finally I got fed up and took a look inside.

If your iPhoto Library is huge and you’ve had one or more iPods with which you sync photos, you might want to follow these steps:

- Find your iPhoto Library (usually in your Pictures folder)
- Right-click on it and choose “Show Package Contents”
- Open the Contents folder
- Find the iPod Photo Cache folder
- Right click on it and choose “Get Info”

If its huge, its gotta go! iPhoto can rebuild this if it needs it, but odds are you’ve got caches of old sync pairings with a previous iPod or an iPod that you’ve since restored. Its totally safe to delete, and aside from a long sync next time you plug in your iPod, it will self-heal (to a smaller, more manageable size…

Once we move back to Ontario, I’ll be working from a home office. Add that to the fact that we’re not using anything more than basic cable, but digital distribution (both the paid and the found-automatically-on-the-internet-and-you-can’t-convince-me-I-shouldn’t-have-it kind) for our entertainment, and I think I have some unusual problems to solve. Here’s what I’m dealing with:

• I want a reliable and dedicated “business” connection with no WiFi access so that my company’s source code is secure.
• But I want access to my stuff from my iPhone and my Craptop, and visitors and passers-by should have free access to Internet, because that’s the spirit of the thing, but they shouldn’t have fee access to my files and documents, so I want both a secure and an open WiFi network.
• The XBox 360’s method of getting shared content is incredibly noisy and resistant to QoS. The sharing program, in my case Connect360, uses broadcast messages to toss bits all over the network. The only way I’ve found to ensure Quality on this is to have a dedicated network just for sharing between the computer and the XBox.
• My media is going to be stored in different places depending on primary usage. High quality movie rips (legally obtained, of course) shouldn’t be transcoded by Connect360. Daily TV downloads and recordings using EyeTV (and can be transcoded since they’re already pretty low quality), MP3s and Photos will be frequently revolved and updated and should be managed from a PC (manually, or by script.) All of these files need to be available from anywhere in the house.

The solution to all of these problems can be seen in this diagram (click for a larger version):

As you can see, there will be no less than 3 individual networks, with bridge points between each, where appropriate.

• The green network represents the dedicated XBox network, allowing us to stream content from a PC regardless of the activity of other devices. We’ll open it up for free WiFi since there’s really nothing accessible on that network, but QoS all other devices as low priority.
• The blue network is the primary home network, your typical file/print sharing setup. Living on that network is a sweet little LaCie Mini NAS drive, which will share all our high quality movies and will also have a direct USB connection to HDTV via the XBox to avoid transcoding. Other media: recordings, downloads, MP3s and photos will be shared from the home Mac to all devices over this pipe. Two touch points in the home office will allow me to listen to my music while I’m at work, and sync my calendars and e-mail with the home Mac.
• Both the blue and the green network will be coming off a standard home Cable Internet connection, but each router will have its own public IP.
• The purple network is a dedicated 7+ MBPS DSL connection (shooting for 10MBPS, but we’ll see what’s available) used only for connecting my home office to the Internet. It will have no wireless connection, and won’t leave my office in any way. The Blue network connection into the home office will be firewalled and won’t be set-up for Internet — SMB file sharing only, but if something goes wrong with my DSL, I can re-configure for Cable over the blue network and still do my job. The purple network will allow communication between my work computers, both of them running Synergy so I only need one keyboard and mouse. And the little iMac will by my jukebox/Photoshop/personal mail rig.
• The two work computers will run up to 4 Virtual Machines each, but my primary VMs (represented by the monitors — and yes I’ll have 4!) will be: an e-mail/IM computer for connecting to work, a development workstation with occasional VPN access to sync source code, and a test server and client — more added as my current project dictates.

  My newest work computer will be running Microsoft’s new Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V virtualization, allowing incredible performance of the Guest machines.

• Any capable device can also get VPN access from any network, since its secure by nature, but only 3 machines will be configured to do it most of the time. My touch points with the physical office will be fairly limited, since I’ll be able to have local VMs of current server builds that I’ll refresh whenever I’m in the office for meetings.

I think that’s ambitious enough… but if you have a better home network, or ideas to improve this, I’d love to hear about them!