Mike Pelley's Musings

I am very proud of my son Cameron who did his second Shave for the Brave this year. He is current up to $850 and maybe a little more! Here is his Shave for the Brave entry.

Of course, these are the obligatory before and after pictures 🙂

If anyone has happened to stumble upon this blog you will have noted that I really like Synology NAS products. A couple of years ago I purchased a DS211j (since superseded by the DS212j) and I have been quite satisfied. Since they have added both DHCP management and a DNS server to the official add-ons this is a real nice all-in-one solution. (If you want to see all the features, both native from Synology and via official third-party developers take a look at http://www.synology.com/dsm/index.php?lang=us.)

One things really, really bugged me, though. First, when you dropped a video into a published DLNA/uPNP directory, indexing took forever to allow it to show up. This also applies for music and photos. I have tried various solutions but, frankly, indexing SUCKS!  I guess as part of this – call it part 1 (a) – is that the DLNA/uPNP server seems to crash far too often. And when it crashed it seemed like you had to let the indexing start all over again! And it could take hours!

Anyway, this was not impressing my wife and son very much. So, I went looking for an alternative which turned out to be from Qnap. The model I chose was the TS-219P II. I needed it to be cost effective (hence the two bay instead of four bay – which is my my Synology is also a two-bay…) and have a good DLNA/uPNP server for videos. Qnap’s solution is to use the Twonky product. While not nicely integrated like the Synology package is – Qnap’s is not branded or has the look-and-feel as the rest of the Qnap interface – it indexes almost immediately.

It also gets the media off may main NAS which solves another problem that I had – storage space….

It has been about a month since I upgraded my Asus Transformer TF300 Android tablet from Jelly Bean 4.1 to 4.2.1. The upgrade was relatively painless although it is quite a large download.

The main differences are that you can change the GUI from the traditional tablet layout to the newer, phone I guess, layout. This puts the notifications, clock, etc. on a smaller, upper task bar. The soft buttons for back, home and task manager stay at the bottom and keep their original size.

The layout is similar to the Linux Gnome layout – which I know quite well, being a Linux fan. I am also a BlackBerry Playbook fan! Other than the fact that at the launch the number of apps, well, sucked, and frankly while getting better still has quite a way to go – I think that the interface and underlying QNX OS is really well done. In fact, one of the biggest surprises I had with the new Jelly Bean 4.2 GUI was that the upper tool bar menus are accessed by a downward swipe! Very similar to the Playbook but without the touch sensitive bezel. (And the speakers on the Playbook are great – the TF300, not so much…)

That being said, upgrading from the traditional tablet layout to the newer layout means that all your grouped apps disappear and you have to go about setting things up again. No settings seem to be lost but still is is a pain in the ass.

There is a new multi-user capability which means everyone can have their own login. However, the segregations is NOT as good as one would expect on a full-fledge OS. It is not there yet but is something that I think will get better over time.

Given the cost of most tablets (ahem… Apple – and yes I had an iPad first gen until I gave it to my wife) they are not what one would consider affordable as a single user device – unless you are part of the 1% club….

I just upgraded by Synology DS-211j NAS last night to the latest version of the DSM firmware – version 4.2.

The DNS servers – which is pretty decent – is now out of beta. Thankfully! The old, third-party version I had was alright but pretty rough. The Synology version is quite nice. The DNS server in conjunction with the DHCP service (plus the VPN server – although I have reservations about the VPN server residing on the same solution that houses my files!) make it a really nice infrastructure-in-a-box solution.

Now, if they can only work on being able to create CIFS file shares on other than the built-int disks….

I just downloaded and installed the over-the-air Jelly Bean 4.2 upgrade for my TF300. I didn’t have much time to test it out given that I finished up the installation just prior to going to work.

I didn’t get a chance to see the multi-user functionality but the new login page and task manager seem pretty nice.

Now I have something to play with over the weekend!

Google was going to put up one its famous Google Doodles featuring the Asteroid 2012 DA14 which was passing Earth on February 15, 2013 at 19:25 UTC. But the other meteorite event in Russia caused them to drop the doodle because of the damage and injuries.

No worries – the Internet captures everything! You should be able to see the “frightened g” at this link! Sometimes the animation doesn’t work – but it is there!

I was in the process of securely wiping some disks on a Linux box when I did a df and got the following output:

demo@x225:~$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1 130G 2.7G 120G 3% /
none 1003M 372K 1003M 1% /dev
none 1007M 248K 1007M 1% /dev/shm
none 1007M 96K 1007M 1% /var/run
none 1007M 0 1007M 0% /var/lock
none 1007M 0 1007M 0% /lib/init/rw
none 130G 2.7G 120G 3% /var/lib/ureadahead/debugfs
/dev/sdb1 43Z 43Z 0 100% /u1
/dev/sdc1 4.0Z 4.0Z 0 100% /u2

The last two disks, sdb1 and sdc1 are being securely erased and they are reporting 43ZB and 4ZB respectively – yes, ZETTABYES. I really wish it was true!

According to Wikipedia, a zettabyte is “… is equal to 1,073,741,824 (~ 1 billion) terabytes” and “As of April 2012, no storage system has achieved one zettabyte of information. The combined space of all computer hard drives in the world was estimated at approximately 160 exabytes in 2006.”

Found this online today as I was setting up a new Ubuntu 12.10 server – a quick way to set up the authorized_keys to allow passwordless ssh login.

After you have created public and private keys on your workstation simply run this command:

ssh-copy-id user@server

where user is your username on the other server and server is the remote server (dunh!)

Nice, quick and easy!

I was looking a laptops for a friend and he didn’t want the bilingual keyboards found that seem to be everywhere in Canada’s big-box stores. Personally, I can’t stand them either – the half-size left shift key that always has me typing back slashes, the vertical enter key, not to mention the “mess” of symbols on the key caps themselves.

I even asked Lenovo if you could get the unilingual keyboard as an option. We are right next to the U.S. which generally has unilingual keyboards but noooooo you can’t get one! Toshiba won’t even sell you the unilingual one as an aftersales item.

Arrgggg!!!! Looks like you are stuck with Apple or something like a Dell XPS.

From Ars Technica:

Kerosene lamps face gravity-powered usurper

A London design consultancy has developed a cheap, clean, and safer alternative to the kerosene lamp. Kerosene burning lamps are thought to be used by over a billion people in developing nations, often in remote rural parts where electricity is either prohibitively expensive or simply unavailable. Kerosene’s potential replacement, GravityLight, is powered by gravity without the need of a battery—it’s also seen by its creators as a superior alternative to solar-powered lamps.