I disabled the extra JMicron SATA ports and rebooted. Still, there were the two unrecognized devices and the DBAN crash.

I disabled the Intel fake-RAID. No luck.

There are two USB 3 ports on this board and two unrecognized devices... maybe DBAN is enumerating those improperly. Disabled, and no luck.

Where the hell are these generic SD and generic CF devices coming from???

Then SMACK! It hit me...

The Dell monitor I just bought has card readers on-board. Unplugging the USB cable from the monitor caused the unrecognized devices to go-away, and DBAN is now running as I type this.

I'm not sure why DBAN just doesn't ignore any devices that it clearly knows are "unrecognized" and there's even a feature request for it that was filed back in 2.0 or so. Regardless, it's an excellent tool and everyone should use it before selling/giving-away a drive that may contain personal information.

Oh well... maybe this helps someone else. Oh, and don't forget that many USB printers have card readers on them also, so if you're having problems with DBAN crashing, unplug anything USB and see if that helps.

This sudden failure of the Netflix plugin to stream any shows was pretty annoying. The night before, everything was working fine, and then the next day, it was broken. I had not installed any updates nor changed anything (I was sleeping and at work).

In attempting to fix the "Navigation cancelled" message, I noted that Windows Update had a Silverlight patch. Hmm... I'll try installing that -- maybe it will help....

Nope...

So, I did some digging. I tried logging out of Netflix, deleting the computer from the list of authorized devices on the Netflix site, etc. Reports were emerging all over the web of people having similar problems, so at least I knew it wasn't something I messed-up on my end!

You're asking: OK, OK, yeah, my MCE is broken also -- just tell me how to fix it!

Here's the process I did which allowed my MCE to stream Netflix after the February 16, 2011 problem. This is based upon a Windows 7 64 bit install, but should work fine with Windows 7 32 bit also.

Click images for larger versions.

1 ) Close Windows 7 Media Center.

2 ) Open the 32 bit version of Internet Explorer 8. Note that on 64 bit Windows, there are TWO links for IE. You need the one that does NOT say 64 bit.

3 ) In the upper right of IE8, click the Tools button, and then Internet Options at the bottom.

4 ) UN-check "Enable Protected Mode" and click OK.

5 ) Close IE8. This is important!!!

6 ) Open IE8 again. Not the 64 bit version.

7 ) In the upper right of IE8, click the Safety button, and then Delete Browsing History at the top.

8 ) UN-check "Preserve favorites website data" at the top. Check the rest of the boxes to clear cache, cookies, etc. and hit Delete.

9 ) Go back into the Tools menu in the upper right and select Internet Options at the bottom.

10 ) Re-check the "Enable Protected Mode" and click OK.

11 ) Close IE8.

13 ) Go to www.netflix.com and login as you normally would.

14 ) Leave IE8 open with the Netflix page logged-in.

15 ) Open Media Center and go to the Netflix plugin. Try to play a movie. MCE may ask you if it's OK to send your login info again. Select Yes.

This procedure fixed my Windows 7 Media Center Netflix streaming. Hopefully it can help someone else out there too, as this issue is very frustrating and Netflix is doing very little to fix it at the time of this writing.

Showing the size of the iPad compared to the case

I was down my my local MicroCenter last night and figured I'd stop-in and see what they have. Those of you with Fry's stores nearby don't know how lucky you are. MicroCenter comes close, but still...

Anyway, I wanted a carrying case for my new iPad and I had read that you could use the netbook carrying cases and save quite a bit of money. So, once in MicroCenter, I went to their Apple section and grabbed an "iPad case" and proceeded to the massive shelf piled with dozens and dozens of netbook/laptop cases.

After a bit of digging and thinking about what I wanted, I avoided one of the fully featured "mini laptop" bags as that defeats the purpose of the iPad. Plus, there aren't any ports/etc. on the iPad to speak of, so I figured there'd be little reason to haul a bunch of crap around in the bag.

Thus, I opted for a more slimline type sleeve/case. There were several to choose from in the 7-10 inch "netbook" range which would work for the iPad. However on my way to the checkout, I noticed one last case that made me dump the neoprene sleeve - and it was $5 cheaper!

I found a black nylon Case Logic 7-10.2" netbook case with bonus hard drive case. The actual case the iPad goes into is made from a tasteful black nylon cloth (like a suitcase) with a couple "leather" accents which actually look decent. The case is lightly padded (probably 1/8" or so foam) and almost fits as though it were made for the iPad. It's a bit taller than the iPad (maybe 0.75 inches) but nothing really noticeable. And, even with the InCase rubber protector I've got on my iPad, you can easily slide it into the case because the zipper goes almost all the way around the top and one side.

The bonus hard drive case I figured would be handy to hold the iPad power adapter and USB cord.

Best of all this case was $14.99 retail at MicroCenter and it's even cheaper at Amazon ($12.99 as of writing this)! For comparison, the cheap neoprene iPad sleeve I was using for sizing in the store was $29.99!!!

I'm very happy with this case, it's fit, and just how it feels. With the solid, weighty iPad inside, it fits in your hand like a small text book. Oh, and it's about as thick as the iPad AC adapter when zipped shut with the iPad inside.

A while back, I finally decided to drop the money on a Qnap TS-219P pre-built NAS (network attached storage). It's small, silent, draws almost no power, has a nice web based UI, and features many services such as Windows (SMB) sharing, Apple (AFP) sharing, web server, iTunes server, DLNA via Twonky, and much more. Sure, I could have built my own PC to do all this, but that takes time up-front, and time to maintain it, so I spent a little more to get an "already done for me" solution.

After months and months of owning the Qnap and having it silently and reliably serving up network storage for manual file copies, OS X's Time Machine, etc. I thought things were perfect. But, one day, I ran an automated tool on my iTunes library which corrects bad ID3 data, adds album art, etc.

So, once I had reworked my entire music library with this tool, I copied all of the files to the Qnap so that its built-in iTunes server could offer them up to any machine in my house.

That's when I had a problem. When I copied the music library to the Qnap, an iTunes running on another machine would lose the connection to the shared library. It seems that at least one of the thousands of files in the library was causing the iTunes service on the Qnap to choke and die. I could delete the library and restart the service via the GUI, and it would stay running. But, as soon as I put my library back on the Qnap, the service would again die.

I inquired on the Qnap forums and the official Qnap representative offered to have someone look at my NAS to find-out why the iTunes server was dying. I asked if they had any logs or some other way that I could do it myself, since, well, I prefer doing that myself and then I would not have to either be around when their support person was available, or give them unsupervised admin access. The answer was "no" - I would need to have them look at the problem. Now, don't get me wrong, I DO appreciate Qnap's willingness to investigate the problem, but I would just prefer to know how to do it myself, in case it ever happens again in the future.

Anyway, I figured-out how to troubleshoot the crashing Qnap iTunes server myself, and figured I'd share it in case anyone else out there prefers to self-resolve problems like this.

NOTE: This is not a hand-holding HOWTO, so if you're unfamiliar with commandline stuff, please let the Qnap support people do this for you. I offer no guarantees whatsoever.

First, you need to open an SSH session to your QNAP NAS as the admin user.

Once you have done that, the name of the iTunes server is ' mt-daapd '.

In my case, doing a ' ps | grep mt-daapd ' returned no running processes, so I knew that the service was truly not running. You should run this command also to check that the service is truly dead.

If you run ' mt-daapd --help ' you'll see the usage statement, like this:

So, the next step is to run the mt-daapd in the foreground so we can watch it spew log information to the screen. Use ' mt-daapd -d 9 -c /etc/mt-daapd.conf -f ' This will cause lots of log spew to scroll-by. If the problem you're having is the same as mine, the output will stop with a segfault like this:

In this particular case, I think the "o" with the dots above it are the problem. Nothing I did would allow me to cut/paste that character on the Qnap, so I'm guessing that when that character gets encountered, that's what is causing the segfault. I chose to simply delete the directory/files by that band as they're not one of my favorites anyway:

Running ' mt-daapd -d 9 -c /etc/mt-daapd.conf -f ' again, I saw that the entire library was parsed and the service was ready to accept connections:

Control-C that to stop the foreground debug copy, and then use the Qnap web-UI to restart the service by unchecking it, hitting OK, and then re-check and OK it. Now, when you do the the ' ps | grep mt-daapd ' you should see something like this:

And, your shared iTunes library should be showing-up normally.

I love my Qnap TS-219P, but I wish they'd offer more information on self-resolving stuff like this so I don't have to figure it all out. But, hopefully, that's the last problem I run into and if so, I'm still quite happy with the purchase.

I finally decided to bite the bullet and bought a real NAS for use at home. I decided on the QNAP TS-219P for a number of reasons I'll discuss in the post. Also, I have plenty of screenshots showing the QNAP UI and a couple simple benchmarks comparing the performance to a USB disk attached to an Airport Extreme.

When it comes to a home server, I've usually gone the "cheap" route. That means building my own server from old PC parts, setting up my own OS, and maintaining it myself. I've had good luck with this and certainly learned a ton about FreeBSD, Linux, and other stuff doing this.

But, the problem is that those old PCs take up space, make noise, and eat electricity.

One day, I decided that I was tired of paying the electric bills and having that big mid-tower server sitting around in my way. After all, for a home "server" I just need network storage to dump files on for the most part. Sure, it's nice to have an SSH server or the occasional thing like that, but not critical compared to the storage component.

That's why I've been using a Guardian MAXimus hardware RAID 1 USB disk attached to my Apple Airport Extreme (AEX) router. The Guardian Max gave me the mirrored RAID I wanted for my network storage since the AEX doesn't do anything with RAID at all.

Since I had the router turned-on all the time, attaching a disk to it for network use seemed like a good solution. I could ditch that huge PC and just have the AEX "airdisk".

This worked fine for about a year, and then I got fed-up with the slow Time Machine backups and the fact that the AEX router spins the disks down after some ridiculously short period of time like five minutes. Every time I tried to access the disk, I had to wait for them to spin up and become available. Then, once they were up, the performance was, uhh, shall we say "lackluster" at about 3-5 MB/sec.

One day, I stumbled across the QNAP line of dedicated NAS (Network Attached Storage) appliances. These were exactly what I wanted. Small, very low power, handled RAID, and could even do stuff like run SSH servers, websites, and other stuff. And, the key thing: they were reasonably priced (note I said "reasonably" not "cheap").

So, after much research and basically finding only good reviews of the QNAP series, I opted for the $400 TS-219P. This toaster-sized box features two hot-swappable bays and an ARM processor. The OS is Linux under the hood, but the appealing thing after adminning my own boxes was NOT having to admin this one! It is basically a plug-and-chug storage appliance.

Today, after upgrading to the QNAP, my Time Machine syncs are super snappy, I can set the disk spin-down time, and my direct SMB transfers are in the neighborhood of 25-32 MB/sec. Much better! The QNAP works with my Mac, Windows and Linux machines for storage, plus it provides an SSH tunnel server for private surfing on the road. I can also use it to share files with family members using a web interface rather than FTP or something like that. I generally don't even log into the admin interface for weeks at a time -- because the QNAP just sits there, day in and day out, doing its thing exactly as I want it to. It gives me no hassles - I get enough of those from my day job!

Anyway, I wanted to provide some screenshots showing the UI as well as a couple simple benchmarks using Xbench.

First, here is the old benchmark using the Airport Extreme router with the disk attached. Note that the hardware RAID1 enclosure was not the limiting factor in any way:

Now, here is the new and improved benchmark using the QNAP on the same network/etc.:

Much better, huh?

Here's a random screenshot I took to show how the QNAP appears in Winbloze since the rest of my screenshots are taken from OS X:

QNAP includes a program called the QFinder which locates the NAS when first run and allows you to configure it even if you don't know the IP address/etc.

Next up, we see the pics of the actual QNAP administration UI. I went through every menu so that you can see what the various options are. I forgot the System Administration menu, so that's last. I was too excited setting-up my new toy and taking all the screenshots was getting tiresome. Note the nerd goodliness of iSCSI, remote syslog, etc.

Well, I hope that all this work answers a question someone has or helps them decide whether a QNAP NAS is the right choice or not. If you buy one (or not), I'd appreciate your using the link to Amazon below as a means to say "thanks for all the screenshots"!

"TS 219P- NAS (Network Attached Storage) Superior Performance All-in-One Server with iSCSI for SOHO and Home Users" (Qnap Systems)

"TS 439 Pro- Turbo NAS (Network Attached Storage) - Superior performance server with iSCSI for Business" (QNAP Systems)

P.S. this is my first post written with Ecto. I had to do some stuff manually in WP that I couldn't figure-out in Ecto. Let me know if you have any trouble.

The Apple Safari logo

Mac OS X has a built-in tool called Preview that is lightning fast. Compared to Acrobat, Preview is a Ferrari while Acrobat is a Yugo. Thus, I prefer to open my PDF files in Preview and not inside a bloated web browser. I also like to save them, as I often will save a PDF and look at it later.

Until recently, I have been using FireFox on my Mac. But, due to some crashing, slowness in the Gmail RSS reader, etc. I have been trying to use Safari 99% of the time. So, while I had an add-on in FireFox to force downloads of PDF files, I couldn't seen an obvious way to do this in Safari.

After a bit of digging around, I found this little gem. As of this writing, I'm using Safari 4.0.4 on Snow Leopard 10.6.2, but the tip has worked for years, so it should work with most other combinations.

Here's how you stop Safari from opening PDF files inside the browser and instead save them to the disk:

1. Quit Safari
2. Open a Terminal (in Applications -> Utilities)
3. Paste this into the Terminal defaults write com.apple.Safari WebKitOmitPDFSupport -bool YES
4. Restart Safari

It's that easy! Now, when you click a pdf link, the file will be downloaded to your normal download location on the disk and you can open it with whatever tool you want.

NOTE: This will NOT work with the Windows version. There probably is some similar tweak you can do, but the above tip uses OS X specific commands!

FPGA Replay board uses an FPGA to play classic arcade games

There is one project, though, which is attempting to create a single hardware platform that you can buy which will run many of these independent projects. Currently, the board is still in the design and debug phase, with only a few developers having them, but eventually, the FPGA Replay board will be offered as a pre-assembled unit which you can download the various games onto, or work on your own pet projects.

Currently, the games supported by the FPGA Replay include:

• Scramble
• Frogger
• Asteroids Deluxe
• Pac Man
• LadyBug
• Space Invaders
• Galaxian

I'll be keeping an eye on the progress of the FPGA Replay as I think this would be really fun to play around with, if only for the games. But, it could also be a challenging project to take one of my favorite games (like Robotron or Joust) and try to create the VHDL code to actually run it. I suppose that's something to add to my ever-growing list of "long term to-do" projects

Digital Apollo book covers the computer technology of the Apollo space missions

One of the amazing pieces of technology which resulted from their work was the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) on-board computer which helped the Apollo missions navigate properly. These ancient (in computer time) machines were built from individual transistors and used a type of memory almost nobody has heard of which uses magnetic coils wrapped around a piece of iron. The AGC processor module even had interrupts like modern processors, which allowed certain events to grab the computer's attention for immediate handling.

These computers weight upwards of 70 pounds and had the computing power available today in a small $2 AVR or PIC microcontroller. It's amazing how far computers have come in the past several decades. Yet, while I do enjoy using microcontrollers to build my projects, there's something "utilitarian" about them -- they're not exciting or pushing the envelope like the Apollo Guidance Computer did. Those engineers that got to work on the Apollo missions truly were leading the charge into the future and we are the benefactors of their work today.

Check-out Digital Apollo and read the excerpts to decide if you want to take a tiny step back in time.

Thanks to SparkFun for letting me know this book is available.

Many of you have already heard about the issues with the Seagate 1TB hard drive firmware problems. Basically, if you are affected by the bug, you will not be able to access ANY data on the drive. It's a MAJOR problem that affects a HUGE number of Seagate users.

So, as one would expect, Seagate should provide reasonable support to fix a design defect in their own products, right?

Well, the common knowledge base article from Seagate mentions the bare drives that you would install directly in a computer. What they don't mention, however, is their extensive line of external drives and how they are affected.

I recently bought a 1TB FreeAgent Xtreme and can't find any information on the status of the firmware for the drive, so AS INSTRUCTED, I e-mailed them with my serial number, firmware version, etc. Here is my e-mail:

Hi,

I recently bought:

FreeAgent Xtreme 1TB ST310005FPA2E3-RK
Serial: [deleted]
Revision: 4115

The Drive Detect program does not tell me what model drive is inside the case.

Do I need to update the firmware for the recent issues?

Thanks,
Mike

I purposely made my e-mail clear and concise since I know they are inundated with e-mail regarding this support issue.

And, you're wondering, what was their reply? Their reply was COMPLETELY USELESS and indicates they did not even read the information I provided AT THEIR REQUEST!

from DiscSupport@seagate.com
reply-to donotreply@seagate.com
to
date Fri, Jan 23, 2009 at 7:18 PM
subject Seagate Firmware Update
mailed-by seagate.com

hide details 7:18 PM (1 hour ago)

Reply

Thank you for contacting Seagate Support.

A firmware issue has been identified that affects a small number of
Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 hard drive models which may result in data
becoming inaccessible after a power-off/on operation. The affected
products are Barracuda 7200.11, Barracuda ES.2 SATA, and DiamondMax 22.
Based on the low risk as determined by an analysis of actual field return
data, Seagate believes that the affected drives can be used as is.
However, as part of our commitment to customer satisfaction, Seagate is
offering a free firmware upgrade.

Please follow this link
(http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/crm/selfservice/search.jsp?DocId=207931)
to enter the Knowledge Base article(s) detailing the steps to update your
drive.

In the unlikely event your drive is affected and you cannot access your
data, the data still resides on the drive and there is no data loss
associated with this issue. If your drive is no longer accessible, contact
us directly for further assistance at

http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/about/contact_us/.

NOTE: If you have contacted Seagate Support regarding a separate issue or
about another product, please visit
http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/about/contact_us/ to submit an email.
Thank you.

Seagate Support

Hmmm... OK, so they are providing me with the EXACT SAME information I was reading when I got the e-mail address to send a message to if my question is not addressed by the KB article.

Fail, Seagate, you fail. Your tech support is truly as bad as I've heard on every review site. Cross me off your customer list if you can't do better than this crap. I don't need to take the time to find and include my serial number/etc. in an e-mail as you requested only to have it completely ignored and receive a generic, complete garbage cut-and-paste response. No wonder your reputation is falling like a rock.

Oh, and let me say that I know a bit about "support" since I work in the field.

Anyway, that is my response to their "response" (and I barely give them that). If they won't even read my e-mail I took the time to send, I will make sure that everyone I possibly can communicate with knows this and not to expect any sort of real support when buying a Seagate product. All of the other reviews that you've read regarding Seagate's incredibly poor tech support - they're true and this is the proof.

Mike

Many readers of this site will have had at least a bit of experience with the personal computers of yore, such as the Commodore 64, Apple II, Atari, or any number of other similar systems. The machines from that era were simple by today's standards but they had a certain charm and there was certainly a level of variety in the computer 'ecosystem' that made the various models vastly different from each other (for you young'uns who've only ever used Windows, there was a time in the ancient computer past where programs would not run on every machine you could buy!)

All of those early computers had several things in common. You'd turn them on and almost instantly, you were at a prompt ready to begin writing a program or doing whatever else you wanted. There was almost always a BASIC programming language that formed the base of the user interface. There was often an "expansion port" where you could hook-up either home-brew circuits or store bought goodies. It was very different from today.

Well, if you want to re-live those glory days of the simple computer, Multilabs has you covered with their new Retro Computer System. It's a simple 8-bit system that boots straight into a BASIC language prompt, just like the old C64. There are numerous ports such as a PS2 keyboard port, DB9 digital joystick port for use with Atari style sticks, and of course an expansion port. Video is output via an ezVGA chip, so you can use the Retro with a regular VGA monitor rather than tracking-down an ancient composite monitor which most of us don't have any longer.

The BASIC language used on the Retro will look familiar to anyone who's used any of the computers I mentioned above. It even uses line numbering! Here's a sample from the sample Eliza-esque demo:


430 COLOR 57:LOCATE 0,9:PRINT CHR$(128)
440 LOCATE 4,8:PRINT CHR$(129)
450 COLOR 22:LOCATE 0,11:PRINT CHR$(130)
460 LOCATE 4,12:PRINT CHR$(131)
470 COLOR 63:LOCATE 26,0:PRINT "USER INTERFACE"
475 LOCATE 19,13:PRINT "DOCTOR RETRO RESPONSE"


Multilabs sells a blank PCB that plugs into the expansion port and allows you to interface relays, sensors, and anything else to use with the Retro. Since there isn't an over-complicated gigabyte-sized operating system getting in the way, you can address your expansion port hardware directly without any drivers, so you can really get down to business working on your projects!

The Multilabs Retro Computer System is $100 which is relatively cheap for the functionality you get. If you don't have any PS2 keyboards, don't forget to order one (I think I dumped all my old keyboards just over a year ago - it figures!) I may put a Retro in my ever-growing to-buy list but if Multilabs wants to send an eval unit, that's cool too . I certainly miss the simplicity of my C64 and being able to trivially write programs and just have fun with a computer. If you have any experience with the Retro, please leave a comment below!