Messing with Windows 8 Music Library

The journey started when I opened Windows 8 Music (Metro) App, and I saw the sentence "It's lonely here", saying that there's no song in the music library on the Windows 8 machine.  I was puzzled, because I indeed added a whole darn folder of music (like 100Gb+) in the "music" library on that machine.  How come it said it has nothing in it?  So I launched Windows Media Player, and ALSO FOUND that songs are not showing up UNTIL I do the following:

- Right click on "Music" in Windows Media PLayer
- Select "Manage Music Library".  In the window my see the folder that I already added.  Click [OK].

Interesting enough, once I closed, the the "Updating media library" started happening.  And I started to see songs showing up on Windows Media player.  BUT when I switched to Music metro app, still nothing.

Since I am not particular interest in using Metro to listen to music.  I'll just let it slide for now, and forget about it.

Rebuilding server Rebuilding server

Since I am still sick and not feeling like doing any real work, I decided to spend sometime to rebuild my closet home server since I constantly have problem access that machine thru my iPad and Android devices, and it's getting so extremely annoying.  

I started by drafting a list of items that I need to configure based on my current setting, and put them in Google doc.  Then I need to decide which OS to install.  I finally decided to use Windows 8 Release Preview because by the end of this year I will have Windows 8 and by then I will install the final version on it. Plus the Release Preview is stable enough that I think it's a good enough to use it as server OS.  And finally, I like a Windows 8 environment that is always there whenever I need to do any Windows 8 Related R&D.

The whole process went great.  I found my server machine working very well despite the fact that it is 5 year old machine.  I found out that there's some problem with the Windows Media Center on Windows 8 regarding to searching TV program, but I found a way to work around it so it's not a show stopper.  And the most important thing is that now my iPad and Nexus 7 can access files on my server without any problem.

I am about to install Visual Studio 2012 RC and Office 2013 Beta on it as the 2 final pieces of software I will use on that machine.  I hope they won't be the one that messed up the network set up which I tried so hard to fix in the first place.  We'll see.

How I deal with my router problem

I have a Asus RT-N16 wireless router and was pretty ok with it's performance UNTIL recently.  I found that the connection with WiFi becomes crappy, and have similar problem on wired connection too (like when I use my XBox 360).  So I finally decided to do something.  I checked the Asus firmware site and found that the latest version for my router is 3.0.0.3.108 while my version was 1.0.1.9.  It pretty obvious that I should do a firmware upgrade now.  So I followed the instruction, but failed for a few time until I realized that I need to expand the unzip file to "RT-N16_3.0.0.3_108.trx".  Done that, uploaded, and the firmware update was completed after a while.

Then I need to update the SSID of the router from default to 192.168.2.x subnet, and also need to set the passcode for my WiFi setting back to the old one.  In fact, the moment it boots up, I didn't know it, and couldn't access it using my MacMini.  Instead I found that the default UUID "Asus" showed up on my iPad 2, and I used it to setup the router.

I still don't know if it will really solve my router problem.  But at least it's a start.