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.

I had been seeing a few posts for this "Murata Boy" bicycle riding robot on some of the tech sites I frequent. I looked at the photos and thought that it might be neat, but ultimately, I was envisioning the old Evil Kineval gyroscopic motorcycle toy I had as a child and figured it was nothing worth looking into. Then, I found some videos of it and was able to appreciate the precision and control which this robot exhibits even while not moving.

As if that's not enough, it appears to operate the bicycle using a vision system where it can discern the path it wants to ride along and then steer the bike to follow it. You can observe the balancing mechanism in the chest especially well in two of the videos.

Anyway, watch the videos below and appreciate the Murata Boy bicycle riding robot for yourself.

This particular setup (shown in the video below) uses a horizontal line of 3,000 valves with a 1,000 gallon reservoir to create the waterfall effect. Much like a printer, each valve is actuated at exactly the right time to release a drop which combined together, can display text, graphics or interesting "moving" patterns.

There are pumps and control systems in the columns on either side of the waterfall. The water is collected at the base, filtered, and returned to the valve-head at the top. Approximately 20 gallons of new water must be added per day to account for losses due to splashing and evaporation.

The technology is pretty standard stuff but the application is very creative. How cool would it be to have a job where you got to play around and invent stuff like that?

Here's the video.

Anyone who builds their own hobby projects is probably familiar with the concept of CNC (computer numerically controlled) rapid-prototyping machines. These machines can build parts, layer by layer, out of a material (usually plastic, but sometimes powdered metal which is later sintered), eventually creating a fully-formed part. Because of the way the parts are built, you can create parts which are physically impossible to manufacture in any other way. These prototyping machines are typically extremely expensive and therefore limited to university labs or commercial ventures who charge outrageous per-hour fees to build parts on their machines.

A new open-source project called Fab@Home aims to change all of that. Fab@Home provides you with the plans, parts (if needed) and knowledge to build your own desktop "fabber". This fabber can be used to build chocolate bars (presumably for fun gifts), silicone parts, project cases, brackets, and pretty much any smallish part you can think of. It's neat technology that really opens the door to your creativity and with the inexpensive setup that Fab@Home is explaining, it's in the reach of the kitchen-table inventor or any other hobbyist.

Check-out the Fab@Home wiki for more information. If you're not familiar with the concept of "printing" objects like that, it might take a bit of effort to understand, but once you do, it's amazing what can be done!

The 1980s had a different Radio Shack than we have today. Back then, RS was known as a place where nerds could get parts to build projects, intellectual toys, and other nerdly stuff. It was a far cry from the lame cell-phone store they have become today.

Anyway, one of the things that Radio Shack had, which I spent many an hour lusting after in the printed catalog when I was a kid, was the Armatron robot. It was a plastic battery-powered robotic arm which was fully articulated similarly to a robotic arm you'd find building cars on a modern assembly line. The Armatron had what seemed to be hundreds of tiny gears inside it (as you quickly found out if you took it apart never to get it back together again) and ate C sized batteries like no tomorrow. However, it was VERY cool.

Today, if your kids are interested in robotics, finding something like the Armatron is going to be tough. However, there are many kits available which allow you to control the robot via a computer and the Lynx 5 programmable robot from Hobbytron is one of them.

The Lynx 5 features the usual mobility one expects from a robotic arm including elbow, shoulder and gripper movements. The movements are repeatable, which is of extreme importance if you're trying to do anything more than play around, thanks to the computer control system. The control system is programmed using DOS (yeah, kinda ancient) and Quick Basic. This seems somewhat lame at first, but if you think about it, the use of Quick Basic allows young kids to successfully program the arm to do fun and interesting things, thus teaching them about electro-mechanics in addition to programming.

The Lynx 5 is priced at $269, which seems high, but if you can encourage a kid to learn about robotics, computer, electronics, and programming with one purchase, that seems pretty reasonable to me.

A friend sent me this and it's been in my inbox for a few days now as I didn't take the time to watch it until today.

A team of Harvard faculty worked with a professional Lightwave animator to create this video depicting the inner workings of a living cell. Believe it or not, the animation is mostly accurate based upon current scientific data according to the article.

• Things were made more orderly and organized, such as the disassembly sequence. Normally, these events would be mostly random.
• The space between the structures in the cell were expanded and excess "junk" (water, amino acids, etc.) were removed to clarify the view. Without this change, things would be too jam-packed to see anything going-on.

The video is about 3 minutes long and can be found at this site by the "Watch the video" text.

I have to admit... after watching this, the process to make CDs is much more involved than I expected. I see some strong similarities to the manufacturing processes used to make semiconductors (computer chips) such as the spin-on resist/developer.

The one thing that I did not expect was that the data is actually contained on the plastic layer and not the metal layer. Like most people, I expected that CDs were "stamped" which meant that the metal was stamped with the data pattern and then bonded with the protective disc. However, the plastic disc contains the data and the metal is just for reflectivity and some protection.

No matter what, this is a super cool video showing how something we all take for granted is manufactured. It still does not explain the ludicrous prices that the recording industry demands by any means, but at least you know what your $18 is going towards.

Being a drone in a corporate environment, when I first saw this video, I imagined how cool it would be to have an electronic whiteboard like that. From a nerd perspective, it's just a pretty cool use of a projects and fancy input system to duplicate the functionality of the time-tested pen and drawing surface that costs 1/1000th as much.

However, several seconds into the video, you see that the MIT system is much more than just a fancy whiteboard. The computer software that reads the pen positions is capable of interpreting the lines you draw and turning them into logical objects such as boxes, wheels, and axles. Once the system has a collection of these objects, it can manipulate them and use them in simulations.

Overall, I think this is a great demonstration of what you can do by combining normal, existing technologies with a bit of creativity. It'll be interesting to see what becomes of something like this when it's used for more than simple carts rolling down hills.

The stats on the new specialty digital camera are pretty impressive. 160 megapixels, insane shutter speeds, and everything else you could want (maybe even a Mac Mini for the studio version).

However, what got me was the photo of the guy holding it! Seeing the camera by itself just does not convey the enormous size! It looks well designed and easy to hold, but it's freakin' huge!