For those who are curious about what I use to maintain this website, here are all the ugly (?) details:
The Main System
My main system is a home-built PC based on a MSI K8T Neo-series mainboard with Via K8T800 chipset, AMD Sempron 2800+ CPU, 1 GB of PC2100 DDR RAM, two Western Digital 160GB IDE hard drives, one Western Digital 80GB SATA hard drive, and an ATI Radeon 9550 video card. It's got a broadband Internet connection (cable), and I use it for most site-related tasks, including thumbnailing/gallery creation (using IrfanView), image editing, scanning (with a Canon CanoScan N670U USB flatbed which is light and portable enough to carry with my laptop on library trips - see below), HTML editing (using EditPad Lite), and uploading images to the server. This machine also has a LiteOn DVD-ROM drive which I use with PowerDVD to vidcap stills from DVD's (and also stills from MPEG clips).
The Digital Video Box
Until the beginning of 2005, I used a separate computer for recording digital video, which is to say, MPEG's from videotapes which I then make video-capture stills from for posting. This machine has an ECS K7S5A mainboard with an AMD Athlon XP 1800+ CPU, 512 MB of PC2100 DDR RAM, a nVidia GeForce 2 video card, and one Western Digital 80GB IDE hard drive. As I said, I use it mostly for recording digital video, though some vidcapping is also done on it as well. It has a LiteOn DVD+/-R/RW drive that I burned MPEG's or vidcaps on for transfer to the main system (it has a network port but I haven't hooked it up to the router as of this writing). Since early 2005, however, I have used a Sharp DVD recorder/VCR combo unit for recording items off TV, so the DV box is currently in storage as a backup system. The main system (see above) also has a Hauppage WinTV card installed, though it has not been used to date for recording video.
The Mobile System
I own an IBM Thinkpad 600E laptop for the purpose of working on the site when I'm away from my primary systems. This machine has an Intel Pentium II 366MHz CPU, 128 MB of RAM, a 6GB IDE (notebook-style) hard drive, and a Toshiba DVD-ROM/CD-R/RW combo drive. I use this machine, in the context of work on this site, primarily for capturing stills from videos on DVD (both commercial and home-recorded), and scanning (using the Canon USB flatbed scanner listed above).
The main system uses Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2, though Mandriva/Mandrake Linux is also installed separately. The laptop uses (now formally obsolete, but still in fact highly useful) Windows 98 Second Editon. Back in 1999, I created For the Love of Opera Gloves on an OS/2 Warp 4 system, based on an AMD 486DX4/120mhz CPU with 32MB RAM, 1.4GB of hard-disk space and a 2MB PCI video card!
The Server
For the Love of Opera Gloves is hosted at Vault Networks on a dedicated Linux server. The machine is based on an AMD Duron 1.3GHz CPU with 512 MB RAM and a 40GB Western Digital HD, running RedHat Linux 7.3. As the site grows, I may (finances permitting) upgrade the server.
Email me at webmaster@operagloves.com or jadmirel@earthlink.netwith comments, questions and suggestions
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