Simkin.Org

Category: Tech stuff

  • Finally Getting into the Christmas Spirit

    We finally have the decorations up and the tree is lit-up. I also managed this week to get the Vista Media Centre configured and unplugged the DVD player. The PC does a better job. I just never got around to persuading the household to convert. In the end, I just switched it over and it is pretty much doing a good job. Need to tweak the DVD player to spin slower/more quietly and a bit of acoustic baffling would be good too. The fan noise is not noticeable really but I feel I can do better. One interesting fact to share with my reader is that the Australian Media Centre forums are the most useful of the lot.

    The other bit of news is that we invested in about 40 new tropical fish as the local fish shop is closing down. We have neons, guppies, tetras and a new catfish to replace our recently deceased one. The are all behaving nicely together and none of the three large fish have turned carnivorous either. We had one scary moment as the blue shimmery tailed guppies disappeared one by one. Turned out they loved swimming behind the fauz-rock backing. We have lowered the water level a little to solve that one….

    For the picture album, I thought Kookichoo had better get festive too.

  • N95 Video Centre Fail

    So I ripped some new movies and my Nokia refused to play them. It seems there is an obscure bug with the Video Centre where if you just copy movie files onto your memory card and for some reson, the phone cannot generate a preview image, it falls over. Quick solution is to create a small JPG file with the same name as the video file and put it in the same folder. The added bonus is that the movies now have nice “icons” when browsing on the phone.

  • 007 Shaken not Ripped

    I went to see Quantum of Solace last night with my god friend Dom. I thoroughly recommend the film. Ignore the critics, just go see it. Fewer gadgets and one-liners this time but a seamless progression of the story from Casino Royale.

    Needless to say, I thought I’d put CR on my N95 for casual out-and-about viewing. It is however the first DVD that DVDecrypter had trouble with. Darn it. Luckily there is a nother free tool called RIPIT4ME. This breaks the reading of sectors down to only valid ones and rips those. The copy-protection trick of chucking in duff sectors is thus overcome.

    I do not in any way condone film piracy but if you have the DVD already and want to watch it on your Nokia, plough through my blog to get a copy of DVDecrypter and for the settings to use in Handbrake. If DVDecrypter struggles, use RIPIT4ME instead and it will fix the problem.

    DVD piracy is taking money out of the pockets of good honest people working in the film industry. Copy legally owned DVDs onto another device for your own viewing pleasure is a neat idea. Know the difference, stay legal and happy ripping.

  • VirtualBox Rides again

    After discovering that my stack of intel-based 2U servers will not run VMWare, I’m going to revert to running VirtualBox on them. Either on a WindowsXP or Ubuntu host. Either way I want to be able to:

    Create a template VM with just WindowsXP on it

    Create a template VM with WindowsXP and XAMPP on it

    Start a specific VM on host OS boot

    Automate backups

    Transfer a VM to another machine (ie. bring a VM live on a second machine after the first one fails)

    Some ramblings here might be useful: www.derekhildreth.com/

    So that’s another project then…..

  • New York and the Nokia N95

    Nokia have snuck out the 16GB micro SD card and it is compatible with my N95. Oooh.

    I found this out whilst updating my firmware and loading new maps before heading off to New York for a few days. It’s times like this that I really like my trusty N95. Sure my wife has an iphone with a far superior web browser but I have my maps, my 5Mega pixel camera, my music and a collection of movies to watch on the flight. I still have room on my 6GB memory card because I’m not greedy but with 16GB I could pretty much get every episode of Babylon 5 on my phone. If only I had the time to sit and do it…..

  • Thecus N299

    I finally bought a NAS. The chirpy little Thecus N299 (Those marketing guys earnt their money the day they thought that name up) now hums away to itself under my stairs. I loaded it with 2x500GB Seagate disks and then unloaded them and shipped them back to Scan as they were duff. I now have 2x500GB Hitachi disks in it I bought from PC World. (It cost me an extra £5 but I don’t care as this time they got home safely.)

    It has a rudimentary web GUI but is perfectly functional. I currently have it as a CIFS server called “Imp” on my home network. All our “Documents” and “Pictures” and similar shell folders now live on it. I had to build batch files for everyone’s login to connect to it with no persistence otherwise Vista moans at every logon. Files can also be accessed using the “webdisk” interface but it is not iphone friendly. So I have defaulted to the FTP variant for now.

    It also supports NFS so I will finally fire-up that rack server I have been quietening down and give VMWare a shot at home.

    I have also moved the Mercury mail queues and mail folders over to it along wth Windows Mail folders. IMAP mail has proved to be less friendly than I would like with trouble creating subfolders in RoundCube or WindowsMail. Shame really as I would prefer to just leave all hte mail on Mercury and read it from RoundCube. Future job now though.

    My masterplan (mwhahaha) is to build a simple php front-end for mail and ftp. Ideally I want FTP to stay on the LAN and use a PHP interface to wrap around it. That way I can control the authentication and don’t have to expose any (as yet unseen) potential flaws with the ftp daemon.

    By also loading my website data and (as stated above) Mercury folders on it, the active data on the web/mail server (Pixie) has reduced which helps in times of failure/recovery/upgrade and reduces the replication burden I had previously with the two server model. I’m not quite brave enough to move MySQL onto the NAS as the web server talks to the NAS over wireless and I don’t really know hoe IO intensive my websites are. Another future job. In the meantime, I’ll amend the backup/export scripts to dump to the NAS.

    The Thecus also has an iTunes server. I moved all our music to it but am yet to use that feature. I told both Julie’s iTunes and then mine of the shift to a new location and iTune dutifully cloned a load of the music. Bugger. Capacity is not a problem currently but I need to put some time aside to trash my iTunes, delete the duplicates and rebuild it again. Thanks iTunes.

    But in short, I am happy with the little fella. It just works. My files are available to my laptop, my server is not a worry so much for me now and my data is generally much safer. I will be investing in some more cat5e so that I can move him to live in the porch. It is north facing, so much cooler than the study and his little fan will go uheard there. It also puts him further away from the desktop and both less likely to get engulfed in a fire as well as more likely to be recoverable. It will need anchoring for security but will live in the corner away from sight anyway.

    I actually bought a third Hitachi to sit in my USB caddy where a suitable desktop script pulls incremental data changes over to it when I remember to run it. The Thecus is RAID1 so hardware failure is covered well but the USB disk gives me a sense of reassurance. Especially when I go away for any period of time as it lives in my sister-in-law’s house away from the NAS.

    So next job is to tell Apache to read the website data from imp directly. iTunes needs a cull and then it is time to play with NFS….

  • A future without Windows

    http://www.itpro.co.uk/605136/microsoft-planning-a-future-without-windows

    A glimpse into the future. We currently have a full O/S on dedicated hardware. Virtualised O/S platforms finally make the benefits of the micro-kernel concept achievable. In other words, a small footprint hypervisor/kernel with guest systems above it.

    Currently we consider these guests to be full Windows clients. In future they will be smaller, more agile, purpose-specific lumps of code. Some locally hosted, some sourced from remote servers. All either available, limited or full featured based on the hardware and connectivity available.

    Give it ten years and we’ll all be saying “I used to carry a laptop around with me all the time” and laugh. At ourselves.

    Footnote: (Strictly speaking micro-kernels and virtualisation are totally different concepts but the end result at the macro level is the same if a microkernel is used as a hypervisor – look it up).

  • Convert M4V to MP4 (Music Videos on Blackberry)

    Ever downloaded a great video from iTunes but wished you could play it on your Nokia or Blackberry? Yep. With my wife downloading like a demon onto her iphone, I thought I would get a few videos for me. But of course I don’t have an iphone. It would be perfectly legal to circumvent the DRM for my own personal use so long as I don’t actually try and crack the DRM. Mmm.

    Roll-up Tunebite. It emoves DRM from audio and video files. It can also resize on-the-fly as it bascially captures the output from iTunes and encodes it. You will inevitably lose some quality but let me put it into perspective, my PC is faster, has a bigger screen and more codecs than my Blackberry. If I lose the odd frame here and there, I will not notice. If I want top spec video, I’ll buy a BluRay disc. For my Blackberry, it just has to not suck.

    Use the following settings and you’ll be watching your favourite videos on your Blackberry in no time:

    If you have better settings or want to let me know the best ones for my Nokia N95, please post a comment.

  • London to Cambridge – Real time

    I dragged Martin and Ben along on the London to Cambridge ride today. We met Simon and his wife, Britney on the route as well. So it was a good team effort. Martin had been out the night before (naughty boy) and so his pace was a little below par at first. He finally cleared his head though and kept up a good pace with me as we maintained a rearguard about 20minutes or so behind the others.

    Simon, Ben and Martin at the rest stop, Hadham Ford(?)

    The temperature was in the high 20’s and we felt it all the way through. We started at around 08:30 and finally finished around 14:00ish. It was slow going (13mph average) as we pretty much had to stop and take on fluids at every refreshment point along the way. I decided to try out the Nokia Sportstracker, knowing the battery would probably die along the way. The good news is that I captured the first 2 1/2 hours of the ride

    .

    A good ride however. I enjoyed it.

  • Post Office Credit Card – Victim of its own success

    It was about time we switched credit cards. Moving cards allows us to take advantage of zero interest for a while on an oustanding balance and also adds a level of security by effectively resetting our credit card number (so long as you cancel the old one).

    The main reason for moving from Egg to the Post Office card was the fact that the Post Office card does not levy a foreign exchange fee on purchases from abroad (in person or online). Being fed up with being fleeced 2.75% on avergae, finding a card with a 0% foreign loading fee was a must. We found one.

    The other thing I wanted was a card that I could manage online. Yep. The Post Office Credit Card does that too. You get sent a user id and a security number seperately in the post and have to call in to activate it.

    That duly done, I try and log in. No joy. Maybe we typed it wrong? No. Definately correct. Do it really slowly this time… hang on. Out user id is seven digits long and the userid box is six digits long. Ah! It seems they have issued enough cards to exceed the maximum customer count of 999,999 customers. Obviously they are being very successful. They must have been signing customers up at quite a rate for nobody to notice the arbitrary “1 million” ceiling figure arriving and flashing past until customers like myself started to ring in.

    It must have occured in the last few days too as when I called to activate my unnaturally high user id, the chap in the call centre did not batter an eyelid (not that I could see him – maybe he was batting away but being reserved in his conversation with me).

    The lady I spoke to about my login problem was very apologetic and declared there was a “technical problem with some recently issued numbers”. From my user id, I’m reckoning about 20,000 of them. That’s 20,000 customers who cannot login to the online service. Quite a good feat – denying access to your own service.

    So there you have it. Post Office credit card. Very successful. Lots of new customers every week. Shame their website developers have a very small abacus.