Personal blog of Chris Ergatides » Technology

Totally awesome » A Swarm of Nano Quadrotors.

Chris Ergatides — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 14:37:56 +0000

You must watch this, especially from 00:26 onwards… so don’t just click and run!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQIMGV5vtd4

Bluetooth

Epson Stylus Photo PX830FWD

Chris Ergatides — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 12:34:20 +0000

I’ve recently purchased an Epson Stylus Photo PX830FWD which doesn’t seem to want to stop impressing me. Following the death of my last desktop PC, I needed a way to be able to scan again since there’s no way I’d ever be able to use my SCSI scanner. Wireless was the way to go as our lives are surrounded by laptops, tablets and smartphones not to mention the whole internet. Yes, this is a Google Cloud Print enabled printer which means I can print to it from my Android devices, or from Chrome, etc… wherever I am in the world. Epson have their own cloud print service if you prefer, but I haven’t tested it yet.

I was very happy to learn that I can use this device wirelessly from my Fedora machines as well since booting Windows just to scan wirelessly was not something that I was looking forward to have to do. If you do use Windows, the Scan-to-PC feature is pretty cool. It means that you can scan a bunch of documents at the scanner without touching a PC. I stuck Windows inside a VirtualBox guest, mounted a folder on my Synology NAS and scan to that directly. This way my scans are immediately accessible on my local network, remotely via scp/sshfs and even via the NAS’ web interface.

I haven’t tested the fax capabilities yet, but over and above manual mode there is a Print-to-Fax driver under Windows with it’s own address book. And if you ever run out of ruled or graph paper, stick a blank A4 sheet in it, press a button and hey presto. Stick in an SD card with pictures and it will even use a photo as a background. The 32GB Transcend Class 10 SDHC which I bought for my Canon EOS 550D Rebel T2i worked no problem with the printer.

I no longer have a need to print on CDs or DVDs myself, but it has it’s own built-in tray which sounds like a Transformer transforming as it moves around the internal parts of the printer during eject/insert. All in all, an excellent piece of kit which I would recommend any day. Now I need a good shredder (minimum DIN/Level 3). Any recommendations?

Do yourself a favour, move your domains tomorrow. #SOPA

Chris Ergatides — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 12:59:04 +0000

SOPASucks

That’s the word over on Namecheap today. Namecheap is my domain registrar of choice and I can therefore unreservedly recommend it to anyone and everyone. Especially godaddy clients who have to deal with all those annoying popups and keep asking whoever is sitting next to them how to do this and that and why can’t they do this or that, etc. But this post, isn’t about godaddy, it’s about SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act). A recent incident of a friend of mine prompts me to quote:

SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act, is a proposed bill that would allow owners of intellectual property to block or disable any website that they consider infringes on their intellectual property.

Unfortunately, the bill takes a “carpet bombing” approach to piracy and gives intellectual property owners unprecedented powers in being able to take websites down without any sort of due process.

The bill goes so far that many people have renamed it the “Stop Online Privacy Act” because it infringes on both privacy and freedom.

Many people are worried, and rightly so, about how SOPA can hurt the internet. SOPA hurts consumers, SOPA hurts service providers, and SOPA hurts freedom of speech.

And I don’t think I have anything to add to that, it’s pretty clear. If you want to read more about it, head on over to Namecheap’s MoveYourDomainDay page. I have no gain whatsoever from your click but if you do choose to change registrar tomorrow, you can enjoy a $6.99 per transfer with coupon code SOPASucks and Namecheap will donate $1 to the Electronic Frontier Foundation to boot.

New Google Navigation Bar

Chris Ergatides — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 08:58:10 +0000

Google have rolled out a new feature, the navigation bar. Basically the Google logo on whatever Google site you are currently on turns into a menu of other Google sites. I’ve noticed that some of the sites I’ve clicked through to don’t have it implemented yet, which makes it rather pointless in some ways and I hope that they will update all of them so that it works across the board. Here is a screenshot of it.

Synology adds MKV transcoding support for PS3 with firmware 3.2-1922

Chris Ergatides — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 07:50:21 +0000

I don’t have an HTPC at home. Back when I bought my Synology DiskStation DS410 NAS in May, it was either that or an ASRock NetTop ION 330HT.

I bought the NAS over the HTPC as I had more use for it thinking that the NAS would stream anything to my PS3 anyway. Boy was I wrong. It took me a while to find the settings to enable FLAC and APE transcoding for music files, but MKV support was simply inexistant.

I tried many different workarounds, PS3 Media Server and MediaTomb mostly, but these struggled at best and therefore nothing was watchable. I had finally found a working solution by converting all mkv files to m2ts files, but this was a pain to have to do. Built-in transcoding from the NAS was what I needed. And now I have it!

Synology have added this in their latest firmware and I have tested two mkv files, one 12GB and one 8GB in size. Although they are slighty slower to start than say, an avi, they both played nice and smoothly. The scene search thumbnails didn’t work but that doesn’t bother me at all as I only use scene search to skip to a time where I know I stopped watching something.

So if you are missing mkv support on your Synology, head on over to the Synology Download Center and upgrade to the latest firmware. Alternatively, login to your unit and upgrade via DSM Update.

Bluetooth

Chris Ergatides — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 08:44:02 +0000

Warning: There is swearing in this video clip.

Lee Evans brilliantly reminds me of a recent ex “boss” and makes me laugh no matter how many times I watch it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OXxkhP_M58

WOWee ONE Portable Speaker

Chris Ergatides — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 10:59:43 +0000

This looks pretty cool.

The WOWee ONE is a compact portable speaker that delivers incredible quality sound, including low-end bass frequencies and handles a dynamic range of signal inputs. Compatible with iPod, iPad, iPhone, and mobile phones. Includes built in rechargeable battery.

Might buy myself one!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KoFV_tO29G4

12th Annual System Administrator Appreciation Day

Chris Ergatides — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 06:17:56 +0000

Today, and annually on the last Friday of July is sysadmin day.

A sysadmin unpacked the server for this website from its box, installed an operating system, patched it for security, made sure the power and air conditioning was working in the server room, monitored it for stability, set up the software, and kept backups in case anything went wrong. All to serve this webpage.

Head over to sysadminday.com for more.

Synology – A customer service success story.

Chris Ergatides — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 19:25:57 +0000

I’ve recently purchased a Synology DiskStation DS410 and stuck 8TB of storage in it. Although I am slowly coming to grips with it and all of the features and flexibility it offers, I did have an initial problem with it out-of-the-box. The unit would not power up properly either by means of pressing the power button on the front of the device or by WOL (Wake On Lan). WOL is used to send a magic packet to the device whilst it is in a low power state (1W) to make it start up, which can be done remotely from anywhere with an internet connection with properly forwarded ports.

The issue that I was facing is heavily discussed here and there are even youtube clips which demonstrate the issue here and here.

I was not so bothered at all about the unit not powering up by means of the the physical power button, but it really bugged me that the WOL would stop working altogether after some time after being shut down and left in the low power state. Apparently the problem lies in the factory shipped power supply to the unit.

For this reason, and as per the suggestions in the forum thread above, I decided to contact Synology to get this issue resolved. What followed was nothing short of perfect when it comes to talking about customer service which I will outline below.

Initial email sent to Synology support with reference to the problem and link to related forum thread.
Response from Synology (Tashi) politely apologising for the inconvenience caused and to check a few things on my setup and to provide a shipping address.
Response to Synology that I confirm the issue is still present.
Response from Synology (Tashi) thanking me for my confirmation that the problem is still present and for providing a shipping address and to wait for a shipping tracking number.
Response from Synology (Tashi) with a UPS tracking number.
Replacement power supply received 3 days later.

5 days later and after heavy testing, I am happy to announce that the issue is now totally solved and that I am extremely happy with the way Synology handled this, wishing that many more companies would treat their customers like this. On the same note, it was nice to be handled by a single support representative (Tashi) all along the whole process as opposed to having to exchange faceless emails with different people. It may not be relevant, and I can only compare the experience with calling my ISP’s (CytaNet) customer support line whereby you get to speak with at least 3 different people and need to explain everything from the very beginning each and every single freaking time – a highly frustrating thing to have to do in my book.

For the record, I will add that the replacement power supply was totally free including shipping.

Tashi, thanks!!!

Sick and tired of inability to use PS3.

Chris Ergatides — Sat, 18 Jun 2011 13:54:39 +0000

I finally got sick and tired of trying to reset my password on my PS3 and trust me, I have tried everything under the sun to just reconnect myself to the ~~play~~station network (not the store, the network).

As I hate having stuff that doesn’t work on any of my gadgets, it is time to reset the damn thing to its factory defaults and then yes, just register the stupid thing with a fake address (way to go sony, NOT!).

Would you believe it? 14 hours and 26 minutes at 2% to format a measly 250GB hard disk. Don’t believe me? Check it out:

As you might have guessed, I bought the wrong television too. I really liked the idea of ~~bravia~~ sync so that I could use my television’s remote control to start/stop/pause/rewind/forward a movie on the ps3, but hey… this will no longer be a deciding factor when I am next shopping for a tv. Sony do not seem to understand the knock-on effect that their failures have caused… and when the consumer has nowhere else to turn to, this is the result. I could somewhat come to terms when they disabled OtherOS but only because I didn’t get a chance to enjoy it before it was disabled.

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