William Goodall's Blog Occasional mutterings

July 6, 2010

The Girl Who Played With Fire

Filed under: Books,Movies — William_T_Goodall @ 21:56

I see the UK release of the movie, the second in the trilogy, has moved two weeks earlier to 27 August from 10 September. So that’s nice 🙂 I guess the third part will now be released earlier too.

July 3, 2010

D-Link DNS-323

Filed under: DIY,Insides,IT,Unboxing — William_T_Goodall @ 13:57

The box containing the DNS-323 and the cheapest compatible drive I could find (which was a 500GB) arrives and is unpacked.

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NAS and HD in boxes.

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Western Digital Caviar Blue 500GB.

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Eco-friendly cardboard packaging on the DNS-323.

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It is even smaller than I expected.

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Cables, power brick.

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It seems quite nicely made.

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Side by side with HD before installation.

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Another view.

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Rear view.

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Front cover just slides off to slide in drive(s)

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Assembled and hacked in short order. Got lighthttpd mySQL and PHP running. Just a bit of tweaking and hardening and then I’ll find a place to tuck it away out of sight and save some desk space 🙂

Later

Tucked away in the home theatre cabinet with other fan-bearing gadgets.

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June 29, 2010

Dead Server part ii

Filed under: DIY,IT,www — William_T_Goodall @ 22:10

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 26, 2010

Dead Server

Filed under: Apple,IT,www — William_T_Goodall @ 14:55

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

Filed under: DIY,IT,Television — William_T_Goodall @ 19:39

Previously.

The mechanical timer did the job but was a bit too noisy.

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So I replaced it with this.

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I shall find out tomorrow if I managed to program it correctly 🙂

Duct Tape

Filed under: DIY,Greyhounds — William_T_Goodall @ 19:34

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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

Filed under: Apple,IT,Microsoft — William_T_Goodall @ 01:26

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

Filed under: Movies — William_T_Goodall @ 22:11

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

Filed under: IT,Trivia — William_T_Goodall @ 18:27

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

Filed under: DIY — William_T_Goodall @ 13:02

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.

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Pair of new ball-bearing drawer runners.

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Bits of old runners after removal.

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New runner drawer side.

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New runner desk frame side.

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Screw holding drawer runner in place from inside.

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