Micks' Musings

So I have replaced two disks in my Software Raid in the last month. The first time the disk had reached 2500 reallocated sectors and I decided to replace it before it actually failed. The second time the disk had one pending bad sector but it was causing the whole file server to run slowly! In the first replacement I created a partition on the disk and then made a mistake when I added it to the raid. I left off the '1' - I did "mdadm --add /dev/md0 /dev/sdc". This added the disk rather then the partition. It was easier then creating a partition so the second time I did the same thing. It saved the creating partition step which I got from the tutorial on software RAID I referenced in an earlier blog post. The performance was much better once the second disk was replaced even whilst it was rebuilding!

Everyone is familiar with the standard two position on/off switch. However there is a third position many of these switches have - the Fooled Ya! position. The autofocus on my digital SLR was not working. I could hear the motor working but it would not focus. I took it back to the shop only to find the autofocus switch was in the "Fooled Ya!" position - it was neither on or off as if it was off the motor would not have engaged and if it was on the lens focus ring would have been locked and manual focusing would not have worked! There are many other examples of the three position Fooled Ya! switch in use. Light switches where in the middle position the light is on dimly or where the light does not work but you can hear a buzzing noise. Anything that is almost working is probably a victim of a Fooled Ya! switch.

I have been playing with a SmartQ V7 for the last month. As a toy to learn about Android and to get an idea about what I want in a tablet (or slate as they used to be known) it has been a useful tool. The first thing I have learnt is that a 5 to 7 inch screen is too small to read books comfortably unless care is taken to make the fonts look crisp. I tried out the eReader at Borders (a Kobo 6 inch device) and the books looked good. The letters and words were easy to read. However if you put a PDF document on the same device the experience is not as good unless the same specially optimised fonts are used. When you go to colour graphics such as for comics then the screen resolution becomes more inportant. The iPad with its larger screen and decent resolution will be a good choice for this sort of usage. It will still read books and it may not be as comfortable as an eInk screen and its battery life will be less - some eInk based readers can go weeks between charges - however the iPad stil...

Schoolyard Answer: when you own the ball. Everyday Answer: It is not okay. This is what a certain social media giant has done. Be very careful what you put on to any social media site, whether it is the micro blogging variety or one of the others or the giant. Every week there is another story of an American company using information that they should not have been able to access to decide not to hire someone or, even worse, to fire someone. We need to reclaim our privacy, online and offline, before it is too late. I will be keeping an eye on the diaspora project at "http://www.joindiaspora.com/project.html".

Every now and then the squeezebox software (point web browser to port 9000 on the linux box you installed it on) reports there is a new version available. The first few times I tried to install I ended up uninstalling and having to enter all the settings again. So here is the way I now do it: Open a terminal window or xterm and change to root use "su -" and enter the root password First stop the squeezebox server. service squeezeboxserver stop I check it has stopped and if it hasn't I use "kill -9" to kill the two squeezebox tasks that are running. Next install the update. I use "yum" yum reinstall squeezeboxserver You can try updating it ("yum update") but I used "reinstall" as this works when you have a failed update attempt already. You can use "rpm" but yum will also download the latest version for you. Note: you may need to add the repository for squeezebox server rpm -Uvh http://repos.slimdevices.com/yum/squeezecente...

Recently an update to Microsoft Windows caused some PCs to bluescreen on reboot. The other day my Fedora Core 11 File server installed some updates and afterwards my music share was empty of all our music. Fortunately it was caused by a security update which stopped the soft links working until I added "wide links=yes" to the smb.conf (samba file server software configuration file). The moral of the story? Sometimes shit happens and you have to clean it up.

The kind people at the Australian Media Centre Community offered some advice on the use of the Microsoft Codec for AVIs and the use of Media Control for subtitles. As a result I have enabled the ffdshow codec and I now have subtitles and Media Control working properly.

We have been using a PC to play music, movies, TV shows and games on the lounge room TV for years. We started with Windows 98, flirted with Linux (briefly), moved on to Windows XP, Windows XP Media Centre Edition, Windows Vista and finally on to Windows 7. The hardware started as the PC that was left over after upgrading and finally became a PC built from the ground up to be the Media Centre. Nowadays you need powerful computer hardware for your media centre PC. The ability to play High Definition content and to record multiple high definition digital TV channels means that the PC that drops of the end of the line is not going to cut it any more. Our Media centre has a dual core CPU, 4GB of RAM, a good video card, four digital TV tuners, Blu-Ray drive and lots of disk space for recording TV. To be able to play blu-ray you need a good video card and lots of processing power. To avoid problems at least 4GB of memory is a minimum as you don't want your Media Centre swapping program me...