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To Bike Or Not To Bike

Jan 25th, 2013 by

The bicycle barometer takes account of the weather and the status of selected London Underground lines.

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ReadyNAS Replacement: Synology DS413

Nov 27th, 2012 by

I missed a chance recently to fill in my religion as “Backup” when completing a form.

My data had a brush with mortality not long afterwards.

After a recent power outage I restarted an APC 650 UPS and then my ReadyNAS NV network storage box; almost immediately there was a bang. The UPS was kaput, likewise the power supply of the ReadyNAS. I’m not sure which, if either, was to blame.

The ReadyNAShas been humming away, 24 x 7, running up the electricity bill for 5 years (55W in idle mode). It had a midlife upgrade a couple of years ago, but replacing it wasn’t high on the TO DO list.

I groaned and felt some shame at the fact that it was not properly, i.e., 100%, backed up. The holy trinity is:

If it’s not

  • automated
  • redundant
  • regularly rotated off-site
it’s not a real backup.

My computers are subscribed to the first two precepts but the ReadyNAS, though baptised into this creed, has lapsed from observance. Offsite backups fell off the wagon, mainly because backing up over a USB 2.0 port is tedious and needs too much manual intervention.

Thankfully, I had a spare power supply.

The original had a serial number in a range that was potentially defective, on foot of which I got a free replacement a few months after getting the device; and I kept the original, just in case.

Running with no spare power supply and no UPS felt a bit like driving on 4 bald tires, and as 5 years was a good innings, I looked into getting a replacement. Ideally, I could partially retire the ReadyNAS, keeping it as an additional backup system.

DS413

Synology DS314: up to 16Tb

It didn’t take me long to decide: I ordered a Synology DS413.

I considered building a box of my own and running FreeNAS and may still do so someday, but for now the DS413 looks, compared to the ReadyNAS, almost like going from DOS to Windows. Storage hasn’t just continued to get cheaper, it can sling data in lots of new and fun ways.

More about that shortly.

 

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PC Hub: Lenovo X200 Fan

Aug 15th, 2012 by

My Lenovo X200 died and spent a few weeks in pieces lately. The fan gave up after 3 years, not long after the warranty expired.

I bought a replacement laptop  (an X220 with 8Gb RAM) earlier than I wanted to because I couldn’t afford any downtime, then I set about trying to revive the X200. I ordered a spare fan from a UK supplier but they sent the wrong thing entirely, and it was the last they had in any case.

Next I stumbled on and tried PC Hub in Singapore.

It took a while (regular mail), but I got what I needed. My X200 is now running Ubuntu, quietly. Total cost: $33, with free shipping.

Fortunately I had some thermal paste as the fan is attached to a copper heatsink that is fitted directly over the CPU. The replacement was a recycled, not a new unit (it had some old thermal paste on it). This was not clear from PC Hub’s site.

I encountered two problems.

I had no idea at the outset how hard it would be to replace the X200′s fan — especially when I made it a bit harder by not keeping a careful record of where every screw came from! I ended up with a desk covered in bits and little piles of screws, 4 here, 2 there and so on. When the first fan turned out to be the wrong thing I had to just tidy up and hope I’d remember or figure it out later. Let’s just say I ended up with a few screws left over, somehow, later.

Annoyingly, the default with Ubuntu was for the fan to run a maximum speed, making an insufferable noise and threatening a need to repeat the fan replacement sooner rather than later. I found a solution, an application called Thinkfan, eventually, with some instructions in German here.

For a while I feared that this story would end badly but it turned out all right in the end, thanks to PC Hub.

PC Hub has an interesting back story.

The X200 has only two moving parts: the hard drive and the fan; one replaceable in seconds and the other… grrrr

It makes a bit of a mockery of this

 

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Bring On The Roast Potatoes

Aug 15th, 2012 by

I’ve let a lot of stuff pass under the bridge unremarked lately.

This evening I was cheered by Mike Tomasky’s suggestion that the Republican ticket has the makings of a disaster. My thoughts exactly.

Bring on the roasted potatoes!

Or roast potatoes as we call them in this house.

Sullivan is off the grid for a couple of weeks, proving it can be done, whereas Tomasky is still sneaking in posts while he’s officially on holiday.

In his absence Sullivan’s underbloggers are minding the shop. This turned up today

This is silly in a good way, even without the line about roasted potatoes that tickles my tubers. I gather from her Wikipedia page that Julia Child was much parodied and loved this Saturday Night Live sketch. I think she’d have enjoyed this. I just know I’m going to end up saying

Bring on the roasted potatoes

one of these days. Forget popcorn. A feast beckons. There may even be some meat.

The starter on special today is The Swiftboating of Mitt Romney disgraces Barack Obama.

The horn-honking, floppy-hatted clown show was predictable and few voters will ever see or care about The Economist’s bucket of water. But out-Roving Rove… who’d have thought the Democrats had it in them?

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Radio Paradise

Jun 10th, 2012 by

I can’t remember when I last listened to music that wasn’t digitally encoded and streamed over an IP network, apart from occasional use of an iPod when traveling. Not just is it years since we used a record, cassette or CD, it’s getting on for a year since we listened to a radio — for anything at all. The iPad or iPhone, or in my case my Android phone, all with TuneIn Radio Pro installed do the job more elegantly than any radio. Choosing stations, pausing, or recording are all better with an app that costs $1.

As radio goes it’s almost radio paradise.

And the station of that name is worth a listen, and a look (web site). The idea of a radio station run by two people with a worldwide audience is appealing, and the choice of music is easy on the ear without ever approaching celestial elevator music. I might like it enough to contribute — it’s listener supported. In the meantime, I’ll give it a plug here. See what you think.

Often I listen using an Android app to control a Logitech Squeezebox Duet in my study. The phone goes back to sleep and would need to be unlocked to change the volume or read the display, but the Duet handset displays whatever’s playing and has controls that can be used in an instant (buttons!). It’s an oddly satisfying combination, though I suppose a wi-fi enabled picture display with a touch screen could be better still. The day is surely coming soon when the barometer, the clock, the TV, the radio, the burglar alarm panel, even locks on doors become apps. The Roomba is an app in a hoover and has been for years. So where is the lawn moving robot? An insurance problem? Shouldn’t hackers, in the proper sense of the word, have lashed a Roomba and a lawnmower together by now?

 

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