I ordered a D-Link DNS-323 NAS on Amazon for under a £100 with the cheapest supported HD I could find without looking for too long which was a Western Digital Caviar 500GB for £36. Should arrive Thursday and once I’ve hacked it will have a web server, PHP, MySQL and such on it and will serve.
June 29, 2010
June 26, 2010
Dead Server
The ancient G3/350 “Kihei” iMac from 2000 I was using as a server on my home network expired sometime in the last week. I don’t know when because my network monitoring software, which emails me when there are faults, was running on it 🙂 It also ran a cron job to send some automated email reminders to places, and hosted some bits and bobs of DAMP web pagery I had experimented with over the years. And a chatroom that seldom saw much use that I hosted for a moribund mailing list I’ve been on for many years.
I’d upgraded the HD and RAM on the iMac but I’m not going to try fixing a power supply or whatever it was let out the magic smoke.
I’m thinking about what to replace it with. A Sheevaplug or hacked NAS type solution for less than £100 would be good.
June 25, 2010
SKY HD reboot part 2
The mechanical timer did the job but was a bit too noisy.
So I replaced it with this.
I shall find out tomorrow if I managed to program it correctly 🙂
Duct Tape
Pip managed to smash the dog gate but fortunately I had a roll of duct tape and some metal rods to splint it with.
Intel preps x86 Android for summer release
There is no joy in Redmond Microsoft got some more bad news today: Intel is porting Android 2.2, née Froyo, to the x86 architecture.… [From Intel preps x86 Android for summer release]
I’ve never understood why anyone would pay for Windows when Linux is free and OS X is better.
June 19, 2010
The Brothers Bloom
Saw The Brothers Bloom today. It was a little slow in parts, and the plot wasn’t entirely clear. But I did recognise most of the locations in Prague which was neat. It’s always fun to recognise the locations in a movie or TV show.
June 17, 2010
WordPress 3.0
WordPress 3.0 was released today so I upgraded this blog to use it. Needless to say I ignored all the instructions and then it didn’t entirely go smoothly. I had to ftp in and manually fiddle with things to get it working. It all seems to be going now 🙂
June 16, 2010
Drawer Repair
A while back my desk drawer fell off in a shower of ball bearings. I had to keep papers in a cardboard box on the floor. Today my replacement drawer runners arrived and I fitted them.
Pair of new ball-bearing drawer runners.
Bits of old runners after removal.
New runner drawer side.
New runner desk frame side.
Screw holding drawer runner in place from inside.
June 14, 2010
Large box
Mrs Wife bought a new 30l Brabantia bin from Amazon as they had them half price and the 20l bin was just too small. It arrived next day (Prime) in a large box.
SKY HD reboot
My SKY HD DVR needs to be rebooted every day or it develops issues like not recording things. To avoid the hassle of digging around in the cable mess behind the home theatre I plugged it into a RC socket so I could reboot it by remote control.
However remembering to do that every day was a bit of a pain so today I swapped in a timer switch to reboot the box at 6AM every day (a time I’m never recording anything at anyway). Lets see if I got that set up right 🙂
