April 14th, 2008 Mark
I have no idea why, but as soon as a camera is put in front of my face i do one of three things:
1) Point at the camera in some kind of catalogue pose.
2) Stick my tongue out or pull some kind of funny face.
3) …or this new thing I keep doing with my fingers (see image, me on the left)
I have no idea why I started doing this. It has only started to occur in recent months.
And, each time we hit the town, I think, I must look good in front of the camera, then immeadiately after a few beers, I forget, and the 2 fingered salute reappears!
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April 14th, 2008 Mark
Recently, I accidently unpluged my iMac at the power socket on the wall. Not shutting down a computer in the correct way is not recommended, but, it is not normally an issue.
This time however, I powered up the iMac, after a few seconds of a blank grey screen, the hard drive starts making a ‘clunking’ noise. Three ‘clunks’, then a pause, repeated about 5 times, then I was presented with the “unable to find OS partition” icon on the screen. After a few power downs and restarts, I decided to launch Disk Utility from the OS DVD.
This is where my worst fears were confirmed, the hard drive wasn’t recognised, it didn’t show up at all.
Now, I don’t have a lot of important stuff on my iMac that I couldn’t cope with losing, but the one major thing was 5 years worth of photos. How could I have not backed these up? I know why, it’s becuase i’m lazy. Some of them I could get back from friends, and some I had uploaded to Facebook, but there were numerous others that would be lost forever.
I went to bed that night pretty dejected.
I woke up the next morning, and got ready for work. As I went downstairs to make my toast, I thought “what the hell, I will give the iMac a quick power up to see if the Apple repair fairies had paid a visit”. I couldn’t believe it, the iMac booted!!!
First thing I did was copy my iPhoto library across to a network drive and an external USB drive.
Over the next couple of weeks, I found that the iMac hadn’t fixed itself, the ‘clunk’ noise and no OS icon kept appearing whenever I restarted the iMac, but if I left it off for 20-30 minutes, it worked! I have no idea why.
This was getting rather annoying, so I bought a new hard drive. I have Time Machine running on my iMac, so I was just going to install the new hard drive, and restore the drive from the Time Machine backup.
The hard drive arrived last Friday, and I got home and shutdown the iMac (properly). When shutting down it installed some Apple OS updates that had been downloaded. I thought it would be best if a rebooted the iMac and ran Time Machine one final time to catch the updates that had just been installed. But, as I previously stated, the iMac need a 20-30 mintues before rebooting. I thought I would just try it straight away, I might be lucky.
The iMac booted first time. I restarted again, the iMac booted first time. I have restarted a few times this weekend and not once has the problem reoccured.
It’s a miracle!
P.S. I now regularly backup my iPhotos library, i have Time Machine creating a backup every hour, I periodically copy the iPhoto library to a network drive and attached USB drive, and I also upload everything to my newly purchased flickr account.
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April 13th, 2008 Mark
As you may or may not know, I have been playing golf for the last year. Now, I am by no means good, but me and my buddy get by and have loads of fun in the process.
The odd birdie by me hasn’t been unheard of, and they are always a pleasure to g
et, making you feel that you are progressing with your game, only to shoot a 7 on the next par 3.
Anyway, yesterday morning on our weekly golf outing we were having a pretty average round. Up comes hole 6, a par 4 dog leg left, with trees blocking a view of the green. Now, there are two options here, play safe and hit it straight to the corner of the dog leg, or shoot straight over the trees. Obviously, we go the over-the-tree route (it looks better).
I tee’d up my shot with a 6-iron and took my swing. I got loads of height on it and it looked the right direction. I was quiety confident it had landed on the green.
So, we headed off down the fairway, to the make-or-break view you get when the trees clear. I couldn’t believe it, I was about 6-7 yards away from the hole. A great shot by my standards. Immediately the thoughts of an Eagle came to mind…my first ever!!
I walked up to ball with my putter, very nervous at this point. I steadied my self, took a couple of practice swings, then went for it. I hit it, it looked on target, was this going to be the Eagle? No. The ball reached hole, and with too much pace, jumped up and skipped over the hole.
Damn.
Still managed a Birdie though, so it wasn’t all bad.
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April 11th, 2008 Mark
I currently have an NSLU2 with a Terrabyte attached to it at the moment. It is a little sluggish, but i can put up with it as it just stores my movies and tv series collections. Its a bit of a drag copying stuff to it, but onces it is there, it streams around the house to any of the 4 XMBC machines great.
After a very recent episode with my iMac, where i was very close to having lost 5 years worth of family photos, i’ve started taking data security seriously at home, which is weird, because i take it seriously at work.
I am definately looking at going down the RAID 5 route, but as always, there is a budget that comes in to play.
I have toyed with the idea of getting an cheap machine, or build one from old parts i have and make this into a RAID server, but when you start totalling it all up, something like the N4100+ comes in at around the same total cost, comes in a nicer looking box and uses FAR less power (which is good when it is going to be runing 24/7).
I have toyed with idea of the cheap HP Proliant Server, but for the reasons i just mentioned, i decided against it.
At work, we have a Netgear ReadyNAS NV+ with 3 x 500gig drives in it setup as RAID 5 giving us 1 terabytes of storage. Had it about a year now and have had no problems with it. Great little machine, but as you are probably aware, these are a little expensive. Around £500 diskless.
After reading many reviews and comments, i seem to have settled on the Thecus N4100+. The performance of this may not be entirely a lot better than my NSLU2, but i wasn’t unhappy with it in the first place. I just want something that will allow me to expand my storage capacity and keep my data secure.
With the N4100+ coming in at about £250, i would initially install 3 x 750gig. This would be an initial outlay of about £500 which would give me 1.5tb of space. Idealy i would like to stick 1 TB drives in there, but as i need at least 3 for a RAID 5 setup, this could get very expensive very quickly. I would probably look to maxing out the system to 4TB down the line.
The Thecus 5200 looks very tasty, with its better performance, and 5 drive bays for future expandability, but again you are looking at £500 without any disks.
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April 11th, 2008 Mark
I thought I would put together this little tutorial as it took me a while to get a setup I really liked. I had used Unison in the past but it just didnt seem the best solution in my eyes.
Anyway, here is what to do.
This tutorial assumes you already have a newgroup account.
The application we are going to be using here is called SABnzbd.
Now, there isn’t actually an OS X version of this program. Just a Windows and Linux version. No need to worry though, because some kind person is regulary compiling the source code of the Linux version and porting it to OS X. This can be found here.
On this page, you will see the download links on the right-hand side. Download the lastest version. Once download, extract the Zip file (if Safari didn’t do it automatically for you).
Copy the SABnzbd application to your applications directory (or wherever you prefer). Then launch it.
Once launched, your browser should open at the following page http://192.168.1.1:8080/sabnzbd/
This may differ depending on your network setup. You will probably want to bookmark this page for future access. Now click the “Config” tab, then “Servers“. Here you can enter your connection details. Once entered, click “Add server”.
That is basically it. You are now ready to download. You may want to go through all the sub-settings in the “[b]Config” tab. When on any page, click the “Help” tab, which will take you to the project Wiki to explain the settings in more detail.
Click the “Home” tab. There are 3 main ways to add files to your queue.
1) Upload an NZB.
2) Specify the URL of an NZB
3) Enter postid of a report on Newzbin.com (This option is only available after entering your Newzbin username and password)
Once you have added your files. You can then click the “Queue” tab to see the files in the queue. Here you can reorder the queue, or click a title in the queue to see individual file details.
Depending on your settings in the “Config” tab, and the option you selected when adding the file to the queue, once the download completes, the files will be checked. If the file needs repairing, enough PAR2 files will be downloaded to complete the repair. Once the repair has completed, it will be unpacked. Job done.
Now for the exciting stuff
Obvousily, as this application is all controlled through your web browser, you can access this from any where in the world any time you want. All you need to do is setup your router to forward port 8080 to the machine running SABnzdb. You may need to use a dynamic IP service such as DynDNS. These steps are beyond the scope of this tutorial.
To make things EVEN EASIER, there is a plugin for FireFox called nzbdStatus. What this does is, it adds an icon in the bottom left of the FireFox window that show you the status of your downloads, you can pause and unpause the queue - from anywhere in the world.
Also, this plugin integrates with Newzbin. It automatically adds a new icon on the report listings. Clicking this icon sends the files to your download queue. Again, this can be done from ANYWHERE in the world.
I think that about covers everything. I hope this is a good starter. if there are any queries, please don’t hesitate to ask. Hopefully I can then refine this document.
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I have no idea why, but as soon as a camera is put in front of my face i do one of three things: