Building a home NAS/Backup/Media/seedbox server, part two - unpacking and assembly.

So the car was misfiring on one cylinder and it’d done 100,000km+ so I thought it was time for a good solid service. And obviously that means a citroen garage where they’re used to seeing citroen cars coming in and doing this sort of thing, thinks me, and goes into Gowan Motors with my little car.

Some of you are already facepalming. Wait for it, it gets better.

A few hours later, the nice lady calls me at work to tell me that *everything* on my car (an 05 model that passed the NCT with flying colours on the first pass five months ago) was broken and needed to be replaced, they had no parts in stock and would have to order them in specially, and that they’d like €2,000 please.

Well that was nice, I’d like €2,000 myself. So I said thank you very much, came in and collected my car, paid the €50 or so for the inspection and then the €50 or so for the 6 hours of hiring a car while they inspected mine and left.

And called Myles Reilly, my local mechanic (22 Croke Park Industrial Estate, 087 242 7785) who said he’d be happy to give it a second opinion. By now the engine warning light was on and I was a tad worried, so he said to call by the night before I left the car in to be serviced with him, and he plugged the diagnostic computer into the car and sure enough, cylinder #4 is misfiring, but everything else is grand and so I drive away, reassured that my car isn’t about to die on me.

The next evening I drop it in and a day or so later I get a phone call. Did they say they ran an emissions … Read the rest

There’s something terribly nice about a box full of stuff Scan got the parts to me right on time so Thursday night was to be assembly night, with the goal of getting to a working POST by the end. So out came the boxcutter and I started unpacking…

So here are all the components, less the CPU which is hiding off to one side, just out of shot:

Looking at the case first of all (nice solid construction on this…):

The assembly went relatively smoothly, though it did take a few hours, mainly because I wasn’t really pushing myself. The PSU went in first, then the DVD drive and the hard drive, then the motherboard pillars went in and then the motherboard, then the graphics card, then some swearing, out came the graphics card and the hard drive was moved two bays down so the graphics card didn’t poke it, then the graphics card went in, then more swearing, the motherboard came off its pillars so I could pull it back an inch to fit the I/O facia panel, then back goes the motherboard and in goes the CPU and then I assemble  the CPU heatsink/cooler assembly and lots of swearing and poking later, it’s latched onto the mounting lugs. I’m rather paranoid about those lugs not being sufficient in a tower configuration – some tiewrapping is due there I think just in case. After all this, it was wiring time.

The less said about wiring time, the better, but put it this way:

Eventually, everything was where I wanted it, with everything plugged in, screwed on, clipped, latched, tiewrapped, twisted, pushed, poked, pulled, prodded, bent and scrunched as appropriate.

It won’t be winning any build awards for neatness, but it’s in, it’s secure, and it’s tidy enough. So … Read the rest

The old and fairly reliable Sennheiser RS40′s I was using up until a few weeks ago finally gave up the ghost in the run-up to Mobile World Congress this year – or to be more accurate, the battery packs finally gave up. Despite overnight charging, I was getting only about three hours of operating time; and since the charger in the headphones themselves wasn’t working, I only had the charged battery in the base unit, so I was getting maybe four hours a day from them.

The RS40s were (and are) really lovely headphones, with the great feature that if you stood up to walk to the printer and forgot you were wearing them, you didn’t treat the rest of the lab to the cartoon Yoink! Thud! sound effects as you nearly strangled yourself with the headset cord. Shame they were let down by the powerpacks…

You can’t even find the BA151′s easily anymore So the hunt was on for a better set of ‘phones for the lab…

Thing is, the lab can be a bit noisy at times – not enormously so, but enough to distract when you’re working. I’ll often work from home for a few hours each day when doing design work, just to get some quiet time. So I need my headphones to be good at reducing the office noise as well as being good at playing music or whatever.

And I hate the new in-ear bud headphones. I have a set, they work great for blocking noise and playing music, but they also work great for blocking any air movement at all so my head feels very stuffed up within an hour of plugging them in, even on a good day – and the next thing you know, I’ll have a headache from them. Not … Read the rest

So for CS7004′s labs, I wanted to have one large-ish, deep-ish, multi-step, interesting project. And I’ve thought of one and I’ll write it up as we go through it (no fair readers here learning before the students!).

But here’s a sneak peek at the hardware they’ll be using

(Assuming, of course, that I can get the sodding thing to do what it needs to do!)

So I turned 33 the other day and for a birthday gift, my parents bought me one of these:

A DeLonghi Lattissima 660 Nespresso coffee machine.
For those who are not coffee purists, these are usually catalogued under “Evil” or “Wrong”
….but when you’re bleary-eyed in the morning….kindof convienent….

In fact, they’re pretty much designed for use by the bleary-eyed early in the morning. Take a coffee pod, lift the machine’s lever, drop in the pod, close the lever, push the button, get coffee. Want Cappachino or Latte? Stick on the foamer attachement, filled with milk, and press a different button. All automatic. And while it’s not as good as the hand-made stuff in a decent coffee shop, it’s not horrible, and it’s better than you’d get in a bad coffee shop. And early in the morning, you don’t care so much

However, there’s a major, major drawback. Specifically, it’s a Nestle product. Now their (rather heinous) ethical record aside, they’re fairly much dead set against the idea that they’d sell you the machine and then you’d buy the coffee elsewhere; so if you want pods for this thing, you can only buy them via Nespresso. This isn’t a major hassle if you find you adore the taste of one of the nespresso coffee blends, but to be honest, I don’t particularly find any of them incredibly good (“pretty okay” seems to be as far as the tastemeter goes with them) — and more, I don’t like the idea that if they decide the pods aren’t profitable anymore, I get stuck with a machine I can’t use.

So I was rather happy when I noticed a post in the Boards.ie coffee forum describing the NexPod, which is a third party pod for the Nespresso machines:

for those who like their

… Read the rest

I used to be a great fan of the “study sim” genre – flight sims which tried to model their aircraft as accurately as possible. The acme of the genre (and simultaenously its nadir thanks to system requirements and a plethora of bugs and instabilities) was Falcon 4.0, a simulation so accurate that F-16 pilots reported no discenable difference between the simulation and the real thing (beyond the obvious). They even took one player of the simulator up in a real Block 52 F-16 and had him fly for a few minutes, and he was able to do so successfully (not to trained professional fighter pilot standards, true, but for a guy who trained on a home PC, it was a definite succes).

Well, the new laptop can finally handle the computation load that went with Falcon 4.0 (which was enormous back when it was released), and a new version with all the patches and updates since 4.0 was released recently (Falcon 4.0 Allied Forces), so all I need is a new USB joystick (my old thrustmaster kit was wonderful to use but needs a joystick port my laptop doesn’t have).  Away to Maplin and I buy this utterly ridiculous-looking thing, seemingly the last USB joystick in Dublin (none in PC World, none in Game, none in WH Smiths even – maybe Petes had some but they had closed):

Don’t get me wrong, to get the job done it’s grand – stick, throttle, a few buttons (sorry, but five thumb buttons, a pov hat and a trigger is not a lot for a flight sim joystick when you’re used to the Thrustmaster HOTAS systems ) and rudder through twisting. But look at it. It looks like an extra from a Transformers fight scene, and not in a good … Read the rest

After a week spent testing one of our development models, I took the plunge and bought one for myself. No regrets so far!

At the moment, I use a Sony Ericcson k750i as my phone. It’s solid, has good reception and audio and battery life. It has an easy-to-use camera with a flash which is important for me because that’s how I record and store whiteboard sessions. It has bluetooth for file transfer (of the whiteboard photos) and hands-free headsets (it’s illegal in Ireland to drive while using a mobile phone, so the headset – and the voice recognition dialing – are quite useful). It has an FM radio and an MP3 player for when I’m on the train. I’ve got Opera Mini installed on it so I can even check my email and websites, though writing anything with T9 is something a sane person only takes on in extremis. It’s even red It’s been a very good phone for me and I have almost no complaints about it.

But it’s time for a change.

Why? Well, the most cosmetic thing is that it’s not exactly shiny anymore. I’ve had it for two years now, and two years living in my pocket next to keys, tools, pens and general lint has taken its toll. The lens is still fine, the sliding cover was a good design idea and more phones should use one, but the facia around the keypad is almost paint-free and is coming loose and while the joystick is still functioning, it is starting to finally show glitches. A friend who had the k750i before me had the same problem – and it very quickly stopped working alltogether.

There’s also the issue of SMS messages. For those not in Ireland, you have to understand that SMS messaging in Ireland is enormous, it’s almost as big as email and in large swathes of the market it’s bigger than voice. So when … Read the rest

Some people get better ones

Seen in the Science Gallery this morning:

Bought for the RCMS project, it’s a hand-held tablet PC (seen here in its docking station). Celeron processor and 256Mb of RAM and a whopping 60Gb hard disk space. Back when we got one for the CVRG robotics lab in 2002, it was the best thing available and cost thousands – today it cost me just over €160 by the time it landed on my door, with customs and vat and whatnot.

The plan is, get the touchscreen working (the fpit driver works but it’s not calibrating properly), and using python, the QT4 library, QT Designer and pyqt, to build a program that could replace the venerable RO Report form used in the rifle club:

It finally arrived!

My old laptop, a Dell Inspiron 1150, is still functional (and yes, a bit slow, but perfectly usable under kubuntu – I’ve even done basic video editing on it), but the screen hinges have both broken, and by cannibalising one I was able to make the other barely fixed, but it’s only a matter of time for it. So it’s getting a noble retirement alongside the Toshiba Tecra 850 and I’m getting a brand new machine with some sweet specs:

CPU is a T8100(2.1GHz), there’s 1GB RAM (I’m ordering more from memoryC right now), 160GB HDD, 14.1in 1280×800 LCD, Intel X3100 (yeah, the graphics won’t play CoD4 which is a shame, I’m wondering if an upgrade is even possible), CDRW/DVDRW, Intel 802.11a/b/g wireless, Bluetooth, Modem, 1Gb Ethernet, UltraNav, Secure chip, Fingerprint reader, WinXP Pro. I’ve kept XP Pro in its own partition (split the HDD evenly because I keep all my mp3 and video stuff in the Win32 partition so both OS’s can play video), but I don’t do any work in XP anymore (except for IE testing and a single project in Visio that I’m trying to migrate to something more usable like Xfig ) so all the work files and data goes into the Kubuntu partition. Might try to get compiz to work just for kicks at some point as well.

The laptop itself is about the same width as the old Inspiron, but not as deep by a good few inches, and while the screen is not as tall (giving a kindof squished look to it), it’s got higher resolution overall and per square inch, so when you actually look at what’s on the screen, the R61 wins out fast. Speaking of fast, it’s shockingly faster than the old Dell. Even with just the … Read the rest