Paul’s esoteric meanderings

I’ve been trying to reduce the power of my Home Server and Media Centre. Since my Power Meter debacle, I am now re-testing all the equipment and getting some rude shocks.

One of the positives out of this is that my 1TB Western Digital  My Book Essential and 300GB Western Digital My Passport Essential both spin down and save power. On USB, this is a nice feature, as many of the generic external cages don’t spin the drive down.

The WD’s spin down on XP, Vista and Windows Home Server which is based on Server 2003. The timeout appears to be independent of the OS settings.

I wanted to fit a winch to my ‘98 HZJ105 without wearing a huge  weight penalty, or spending too much money. That ruled out walking into ARB and handing over the Credit Card for a new Bullbar and Warn. It meant I had to DIY this little exercise.

I wanted to keep the weight down, so decided a 9500lb was smaller and lighter than a 12,000lb. If I needed more pulling power, I would use a pulley block.

When I first heard about Windows Home Server (WHS) - I was pretty reluctant to bother. I was happily running Server 2003 with a 1.5TB software RAID 5 array and am not a fan of NAS, so didn’t get the point.

With the release of Power Pack 1 (PP1), and support for external USB backups, I decided to take another look. I have not looked back.

OK - at it’s simplest WHS does three things

When I upgraded to Vista, I lost the ability to run one of my favourite XP Power Toys - Image Resizer.

I like to be able to resize stuff easily and quickly for a number of uses. It’s one of the main reasons I use Live Writer for this site - it’s quick and easy to to the image management.

Luckily a free replacement with all the simple “Right Click - Resize” features turned up - VSO Image Resizer. And it’s free for personal use.

I like music in my house and have a mild audiophile fetish, not as bad as some, but enough. I wanted a nice system for the main living room that would be used for background music, the loud stuff being out on the deck, or in the home theatre room. Despite being quiet, it still had to be “nice”.

It also needed to be small an un-intrusive, and fit on some small bookshelves. This ruled out most amplifiers, as they just don’t come in small sizes.

Speed, I need speed, and speed with coverage would be good. I was using a Netgear DG834G previously, and had a pretty good run out of it. I know Netgear kit ain’t the best, but it beats DLink in my experience, and is probably the biggest selling home and SOHO kit in Australia.

It’s rather simple really. When the ink refill leaks and you have to wash it out, use Methylated Spirits. A few days sitting in metho to soften the old ink will result in the pictures below. Note, it wasn’t my pen, but I did supply the metho. Nothing on the web I have found so far indicates the special Mont Blanc resin they use is not alcohol stable. Not a bad effort for a several hundred $ pen. I’ll stick to my Fisher Space Pen.

”

At $245 + $35 postage, the fridge slide from 4WD Systems seemed like a decent deal. I later found out that the genuine Waeco was about the same money, and probably a better unit. The Waeco slide is spec’d at 15KG.

The one I bought is worth the money as scrap steel however - weighing in at 20KG, it weighs more than my entire drawer system. I’ll be “modifying” this to reduce weight significantly when I can afford a plasma cutter.

It’s a fridge slide. The fridge slides in and out. It kind of stays out, depending if the locking mechanism lines up that time or not. The straps it came with were a joke.

I purchased a pretty average fridge slide to complement my home made shelf / drawer system before a trip over XMAS. The straps it came with to tie the fridge down were a simple “loop” type with a plastic tensioner, as you tend to find on kids school bags etc. The problem with these is two fold:

1. They are difficult to tighten as the lop just goes round and round as you try and tighten it.
2. They make it very difficult to remove the fridge as each strap has to be unthreaded back through it’s buckle. A tedious job for the rear ones.

A while ago due to a combination of circumstances I decided to build a Windows Media Centre PC. A few friends had them and spoke highly and being stuck on an island it seemed like a bright idea to pass the time between dives, fishing and drinking. I started, but never had the time to get it completed.

Then I moved back to Oz and it got put in a box for 12 months.

I recently resurrected the project and decided to fire the thing up with Vista. This is the story of woe that followed.

We had to move Neuralfibre at Doteasy had gone to crap. Wordpress and Tikiwiki both had Bluehost in their list of recommended providers. As we wanted to use both, and the features, price and other reviews were fair to excellent, went with it. These are my comments.

Package - Excellent
Price - Good
Features - Excellent
Auto Install Scripts - Excellent
Upgrades for Hosted Products - Yes - Scripted
Multiple Domains / Shared with mates - Yes
Heaps of space - Yes
eMail Limits - Good
WebMail Interface - Bad - only on weird port (But you can install and run Roundcube, and that is a good webmail client)
Help / FAQ - Excellent
eMail responses for Help - Excellent

 The website is here

These things are excellent. 15W each. AU$40 for a pack of 4 from Lighting Illusions.

They are a reflective compact fluorescent downlight. The glass cover keeps the bugs out from between the tube elements as a bonus.

Startup is electronic and nearly instant. Warm up time is minimal, about the same as your eyes.  

The bulbs are 5000K colour - Daylight. It is a very white light, makes the 50W halogen downlights look dull yellow in comparison. They look far whiter than the 3800K Warm White reflective downlight I tried.

Being a keen experimenter and open to new ideas, I decided to try the cheaper HIR bulb option in my ‘98 100 Series Landcruiser High Beam as opposed to the HID kits. The ‘98 Cruiser runs a traditional glass multi segment fresnel lens with two parabolic reflectors. The reflectors are separate for High and low beam with separate bulbs. The later year cruisers have changed to a faceted reflector with a clear polycarbonate unbreakable lens.

The High Beam bulb in my cruiser is a 9005 HB3, Low beam 9006 HB4. These can be swapped with a HIR 9011 bulb that is very similar in design. A small plastic tab needs to have about 3mm of plastic trimmed to fit in the socket.

I first saw Hella Predator HID’s back in 2000. I *nearly* managed to steal a set from Possum Bourne’s (RIP) support truck in 2001, but the mechanic got suspicious when I borrowed his spanner to work on his truck. It was a good Rally Qld. Unfortunately at $1200+ / piece they were out of my league.

The camera that goes EVERYWHERE

Pro’s

• It’s Very Small
• It’s Waterproof to 3M
• It’s Drop/Shock Proof to 1.5M
• It looks Normal - not all clunky and rubberised.
• There is NOTHING else on the market like it.

Con’s

• Battery Life is “acceptable” - about 100 - 200 shots, many with flash.
• Video is very average. 15fps max and fills 1GB card in 15mins.
• Video is Quicktime output format - yech.
• Shot to Shot is 3 secs - slow.
• Switching to Video invloves a lot of menu buttons.

1. It works
2. Nice Size / shape
3. Heavier than corded notebook mice due to batteries. Recommend Lithium’s to reduce this.
4. Battery Life - 3 to 6 mths depending on use
5. Little fussy about surfaces - doesn’t like gloss - more fussy than MS USB optical mice.
6. No dongle is nice - Bluetooth straight to laptop
7. Includes batteries and soft case
8. Could be smaller / lighter, but quite acceptable.
9. Have to remember to switch off before putting in bag
10. Runs fine on one battery if you want to reduce weight

Impressive looking external AP.

They SUCK. 

Look like they should perform. Great blurb, solution looks good - BUT they fall over all the time, whatever firmware you run. If you like your wireless Up and Down - these are great. Hope you like night drives to power cycle equipment. (I have 12 of them - it’s not just 1 faulty unit)

1. Nice AP for the price - not much else out there to compete

2. We have about 50 - expect a 20% failure rate / year. They do NOT like the sun, very heat sensitive (even in aircon room)

3. They have major issues talking to IBM Gigabit Ethernet. Took me AGES to track this down. They will respond (ping, HTTP), but will NOT pass from the Ethernet to the Wireless interface if you are using an IBM Laptop or PC with Gigabit interface (running on a 100MBit switch). Yeah, I tried cables, switches, different PC. Same results. Talk to it, not through it.