Last 5 mins from World Cup 2006, Italy vs. Germany Semifinals
Watching the first few matches of the 2010 World Cup made me think about the 2006 World Cup and that Italy v. Germany match. This was a great game. It was into double-overtime and it was just a marathon in Germany. Then, these last 5 minutes were great. Recorded off my Tivo back in July 2006...
Madie D. Brown Re-Dedication at Mount Davidson, June 5, 2010
It was a very nice ceremony. Pictures below. We love Mount Davidson and are very happy it is protected.
Synology DS410 Review and Experience
Here are just a few initial notes on setup of our Synology DS410.
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- Packaging
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- Out of the box
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- Installing the drives
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- Drives in and chassis off
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- Running LEDs
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- Building the RAID-5
Drives: Installing easy, one drive lower than fans, notice it runs a littel hotter too. To install the lowest of the 4 trays, you need to remove the back fans, but no biggie. The sleds are nice and simple. The kit comes with little baggies of screws so that is great. Also, the drive sleds slide right in and the SATA connector is aligned perfectly so you can just nudge the drives into place without any stress on the drive or sled. I went with some Western Digital 2TB Green drives. I have never had great luck with WD, but the power consumption on these newer drives seemed like a good call and the price point was great.
Operation: It is just amazingly quiet! Geez, you put in 4 2TB drives and you expect the thing to be noisy, but it is super quiet. This is a huge benefit for me as I hate the electronics sounds around the house, so this is great even though it will be the garage. I have a Nextstar simple RAID-1 with a couple of SATA drives and it is super loud in comparison.
Building the RAID: RAID-5 took forever due to size of the logical volume. I could have gone with the fast/rapid option, but anyone who has ever been burned by a bad RAID setup because they did the quick format only to have to do a full low-level format later knows why I went this route right off the bat.
Little Things: There are many things to appreciate throughout their setup process I wanted to note. After setting up a ton of different network devices, we all know changing network address is a pain because the device can get confused during the process and if the configuration is web-based, it can get messy when you lose contact with the old address. I was waiting for that to happen when I went from DHCP to fixed IP through the web GUI, but to my surprise it redirected to the new IP address (nice!). I am so used to HP, Cisco, Linksys and other that don't care to take this into account and force the admin to enter the new URL / IP address but when it is done right, it is so nice to see. Nice GUI touches throughout. They use AJAXy stuff, but not overdoing it. Linux support in documentation. Date and time already correct due to network time.
Initial Setup: The box came with CD with a Mac, Windows or Linux installer. I am really happy that Synology has Linux 'baked-in' to everything they do with their products and I really want to support that. My DS410 came with DS v 2.2, so had to upgrade to latest 2.3. I downloaded the updated firmware (v2.3) and in the expansion process, Archive utility expanded a little too much so it didn't keep the .pat file in-place for the GUI to recognize that the update was a legit firmware update. But, in going to their support site and FAQ, they had an article for that and I had change archive utility to not expand more.
Support Site: As mentioned above, their support website rocked. The FAQ area was great and exactly what I needed. They have this down.
Testing: after initial setup, I went to move the DS410 and the power cable was loose causing the DS410 to lose power. Plugged it back in and all was well! Copied some files across the network and the drives and throughput felt great. I also turned-on the various applications and have been testing with a great success on the internal network, from work and from remote on my iPhone using the Synology iPhone Apps. Being able to consolidate music and stream anywhere will be awesome the more I consolidate it on the Diskstation.
Very happy camper right now...
MPIC Newsletter Article Mentions Miraloma Park FUF Effort
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Really nice to read the June edition of my neighborhood newsletter from the Miraloma Park Improvement Club, Miraloma Life, and Mary Catherine Wiederhold's article on the recent planting we did with Friends of the Urban Forest in the Miraloma Park area of San Francisco. I scanned it for viewing. You can click on the images to the left to read.
Please check out the MPIC website for more information about the Miraloma Park Improvement Club and other stuff that is going on in the area.
Install and Run Handbrake on Ubuntu Lucid Lynx
I have been backing-up our DVDs to file recently and been using Handbrake a lot. Handbrake is a great tool and runs great on Windows and Mac OS X, but it also runs on Ubuntu. After encoding a few movies on our Macs and then transferring them to our storage location, I thought that it might just be best to encode the video on the linux server itself. Here is a quick guide if there is not one out there yet. Handbrake can be installed via the PPA structure in Ubuntu. Big ups to John Stebbins for working on this.
1. Login to your Ubuntu Linux 10.0.4 system. If your system does not have a GUI (Gnome) then you can use Handbrake via command-line , but not for the average user.
2. I would run a command that makes sure your system is up to date, package-wise prior to adding the PPA.
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get upgrade
Then allow everything to be run and updated and reboot if needed.
3. Add the PPA for John Stebbins personal archive to your apt-get repository
$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:stebbins/handbrake-snapshots
4. Then run the update to get the apt-get available packages so you can get handbrake
$ sudo apt-get update
5. Then, since your system knows about John's archive and has the package for Handbrake, go ahead and run it.
$sudo apt-get install handbrake*
This will show you that you are going to install the command-line and the gtk (gnome) gui version. Screenshot shows the step 5 install process but I am root straight-out (the sudo stuff gets old when you have to just get stuff done so having a root password is important for me).
This sort of process is constantly changing and this is just want works at this point in time, so best to check this for new/better ways to get to the solution.
https://edge.launchpad.net/~stebbins/+archive/handbrake-snapshots
6. I would also make sure you have the latest version of vlc installed.
$ sudo apt-get install vlc
7. You will be able to run the GUI version of Handbrake via the Gnome menu structure under Sound & Video or just running this command via Terminal
$ ghb
Another nice way to run this on your linux box would be to just run it via VNC or X over SSH. Here is a screenshot running Handbrake on Ubuntu Lucid Lynx on X over SSH from my MacBook 10.6.3 with X11.
Handbrake on Ubuntu Lucid Lynx 10.04 run over SSH via X