Monthly Archive for February, 2007

Long Range Wireless Link with $10 Wok

Published on February 23, 2007 in Techie and fun. 0 Comments

Yesterday afternoon I found a story about a New Zealand TV station using a $10 Wok to connect their studio to the transmitter. The idea was originally for doing a wireless link to get internet access and they were able to tune the signal to get it out 20km. When it came time to connect up the local UHF station they didn’t have the $20,000 needed for a proper antenna so they improvised.

The good news is that they have posted the information on the Internet so others can use it, the bad news is that I cannot find that linked anywhere and the new article didn’t give any pointers to a location. Hopefully some people will find it and link it around the net.

I am interested in it since we are doing something similar at Christ’s church in the next few weeks, but we are not using a wok and it will cost much more than $10. We are addinga 70ft tower to our main building with a 4ft dish to reach another dish and tower at one of our satellite campuses. We will be adding another dish to connect to our school 3 miles away. Finally, that building has a good use for the steeple.

I’ll post pics and info here when it is up. And if you find the wok instructions please post a link in the comments.

How to Investigate a Windows PC

Published on February 20, 2007 in Personal Notes. 0 Comments

I hope I never have to use this and I hope nobody ever has to use it on a computer of mine, but this document from Microsoft looks very interesting.

Fundamental Computer Investigation Guide For Windows

The document includes information for building an investigative toolkit as well as good practices. I was hoping that they would have some good partition duplicators available. Before digging into a drive I would like to make a duplicate of it in order to go back to a fresh start if anything should go wrong. Something like GParted would be good for that.

Google Studies Hard Drive Failure

Published on February 17, 2007 in Techie. 1 Comment

A hospital posted a notice in the nurses’ station saying: “Remember, the first five minutes of a human being’s life are the most dangerous.”
Underneath, a nurse had written: “The last five are pretty risky, too….”

Once you have seen the birth of your own child you quickly understand how risky the first few minutes can be. I saw my daughter come out during the C-Section and watched as they quickly whisked her away to another room before I got a good chance to see her a few minutes later.

Not to make light of the risks of childbirth, but the same is true for hard drives. This week I installed a stack of expensive 147GB Seagate Cheetah SCSI drives into two Raid-5s. 8 drives fired up nicely, 1 conked out almost immediately (the other spare will be tested this week). The fear I always have with these is that we take several identical drives and run them in nearly identical circumstances so that we risk them all dieing around the same time (just as Brett Anderson).

While I, and most likely you as well, can only judge hard drives based upon a very limited sample; Google Inc. has studied the lifespans of more than 100,000 drives in their own controlled environment over the last 5 years. The result: Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population (via TGDaily).

Heat and usage are factors. If you run a hard drive in a cool environment for a week then store it away properly for 7 years there is a good chance it will still run nicely. However, they don’t seem to be the primary indicators of hard disk failure which seems to be more idiopathic than than anything else.

After studying the information on environmental variables and SMART (Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology) status they found that drive make and vintage are key contributors to failure, and surface errors noted by SMART are important signs of subsequent failure.

Now for something sort of on this same topic, but not quite exactly. For our important machines we run Raid 5 and keep external backups, but occasionally a small system may go down with some useful data that never made it to the network. This is where something like SpinRite comes in handy. Hopefully it can rebuild some of the data enough to let you get it back.

Update: StorageMojo has some good comments on this.

Old School Tech Support: Introducing the Book!

Published on February 14, 2007 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

This is more realistic if you have ever spent an inordinate amount of time explaining the forward and back buttons in a web browser.

UPDATE: The original linked video was removed by the person who posted it, I have found another copy.

Such a quandry: Windows Home Server Beta

Published on February 13, 2007 in Misc Othr Stuf and Techie. 0 Comments

Windows Home Server Beta is available for public testing.

To test it I would need to set up a second computer at home (yes I normally only use one), and another system as the server. Unfortunately I have no spare time for this, but I really want to sign up.

Cheap LEDs from Best Hong Kong

Published on February 12, 2007 in Personal Notes. 0 Comments

This is another note to myself that others may be interested in.

http://www.besthongkong.com has some really good prices on LEDs. 50 IR LEDs for $5 with $3.87 shipping is pretty good.

Publishing at the speed of Links

Published on February 11, 2007 in Misc Othr Stuf and Techie. 0 Comments

This sort of thing still amazes me.

Sometime in the last few days the name mwesch appeared on my screen in a way that I noticed it, but so that I remember how. Today I saw a YouTube video by this same Michael Wesch: Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us (link found via Tony Dye).

Watch the video and pay attention to the content of the news sites he visited. mwesch posted the video on January 31, 2007 (just over a week ago now) and the content from the pages is filled with news items that happened after January 24 (about a week before then).

In less than week an interesting piece of content was put together and published online. Just about a week later it has been viewed more than 800,000 times on YouTube.

With good content you can get information around the world quickly and easily.

Virtualizing your computer . . . LIVE!!!

Published on February 7, 2007 in Techie. 0 Comments

I like virtualization. I first tried software virtualization for testing programs, but I have had problems with that. Then I was excited by using MS Virtual PC, and even more excited when it was made free.

I have been watching Jason Powell’s virtualization topics with a lot of interest and his post last week about the Free VMWare Converter really got my attention. We have a server on my desk that is about to be wiped out so I thought I would use it as a test platform. It worked great, but my shortcuts caused a hassle.

Continue reading ‘Virtualizing your computer . . . LIVE!!!’

Can you test the “Cheerful Giver”

Published on February 6, 2007 in Religion. 1 Comment

We are preparing to do e-giving at the church, and this has caused me to think a lot about my weekly offering. Don’t worry, I’ll yak on that too long in a few lines.

First, you need to check out a post from the Freakonomics blog about a coffee shop with no prices. The Terra Bite Lounge is a purely capitalist venture, with no political or religious motivations, that relies on people doing the right thing for them to continue their business. You choose what to pay for your food and drinks, and you choose when to pay for it.

While a church would have spiritual motives for its work, I believe the concept here is similar in most cases.

“We teach and train you and your family while carrying out God’s work around the world. In order to continue with this venture we need you to give what you can when you can. We do emphasize tithing, but it is not required for fellowship or salvation.”

Continue reading ‘Can you test the “Cheerful Giver”’

Picnik.com Note to self

Published on February 5, 2007 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

I am posting a link to http://picnik.com in order to remind myself of it later.

It is an online photoediting site that will be useful if away from a good editing program or for people who don’t want to buy/learn an editing program.

 Via Lifehacker.