Category: Topslakr

Posts by Topslakr

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Book Review: The River Cottage Year

As mentioned in a previous post, I bought two of Hugh Fearnly-Whittingstall’s books, The River Cottage Year and The River Cottage Meat Book. While I finish reading about raising my own meat I thought I ought to post some of my thoughts about The River Cottage year.

The book is pretty good, it’s well written quite concise. It’s a bit more of a cook book then I was expecting though. Basically it’s broken up into 12 chapters, once for each month and Hugh talks a little bit at the beginning of each chapter about what he is doing at this time of year for his farm, usually about 2 pages worth.… Click here to read more!

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Server Woes: Part Two

So, the site has been down a lot lately. Pretty crappy. I’m a cheap guy and have been putting off replacing my UPS for a while now. Basically, even though it’s batteries are old it has always had enough juice in it to smooth over the quick power glitches that happen from time to time. Recently it has failed at that task. I should also add that it was never designed to be used for servers as I’m using it. It was designed for desktop use, a single tower maybe a monitor and a printer…Not three servers, a Raid array and a computer converted into a router.… Click here to read more!

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The Road to Mac OS X Leopard

AppleInsider has been posting a great series of articles about Apple’s upcoming operating system release. They posted one today talking about OS X Leopard Server that is really excellent. They go through the history of Apple’s servers and where they came from right up to present day and what to expect in this upcoming release. If you’d like to read more of their ‘Road to Leopard’ posts just scroll to the bottom of their article, they have links to their other posts there. I can’t find a good way to directly link to a full listing of all of the articles but a search on their site will bring them all up.… Click here to read more!

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Back to My Mac

As I mentioned in an earlier post, Back to My Mac is a feature offered by Apple through thier .Mac service. Up until today we had very few details but now that OS X Leopard has been officially announced the info I so much desired has come pouring in. Basically, everything I had hoped for made it into the final product.

The first part that I was looking for was the ability to easily get files from or send files to my other Macs from anywhere. With Back to my Mac you can do that easily. Once you’re online all of the Macs you have associated with the .Mac… Click here to read more!

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OS X Leopard Release!

Apple has announced officially that the new version of Apple’s operating system, OS X, will be available on October 26th. If you buy it in a store you can get it at or after 6pm of that day, if you pre-order online it will arrive, via Fedex, on the 26th.

Yes, I have pre-ordered and will be waiting with bated breath for it to arrive. Apple has of course updated their website with loads of new information about the upcoming OS, you can take a peek at the feature overview or the huge list of 300+ New Features.

I’m obviously pretty excited, but new OS versions will do that to a geek.… Click here to read more!

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One Laptop Per Child

The One Laptop Per Child project is nothing new in the world of us geeks. What is new is that they will soon be available for purchase in North America during a narrow window in November.

If you are not familiar with the project then by all means check it out, it’s pretty amazing. Basically, a group of people got together and decided to put together a super durable machine for children in 3rd world nations. This thing has battery life from 6 hours to 24 depending on use. It had no internal moving parts to break like fans and hard drives.… Click here to read more!

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The Recording Process

When a band first approaches me to record an album the first thing they mention is how they want to record the band playing all at once. It takes everything I have to not roll my eyes. Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to record the album like that, there are a lot of benefits. It will absolutely give you a better performance over all and a lot more energy, it really does add to the vibe of the record. The problems these days is that bands are much too unrehearsed to actually pull this off.

In order for you to be able to record the album like that the you need to know the songs, perfectly.… Click here to read more!

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Website Down Time

We are back online. Seems we had a power issue and the servers didn’t come back online when the power was restored. Biggest surprise is that the Thecus N5200 came back online just fine… Didn’t see that one coming!

Topslakr

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Blog Enhancements: Header Image Rotation

For a weekend project I’m going to try and get an image rotation for the header working. CodeC11b set this up once before and I’ve been meaning to set it back up. I tried a few months ago but was unsuccessful. We’ll see if I have better luck this time.

The static image with the grass and tractor is great but I have a few other images I’d like to use and it would be a nice thing to keep adding to. I’m always out shooting new pictures and every once in a while I see something that would work pretty well for that sort of short wide format.… Click here to read more!

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Followup: Thecus N5200 – Perfect in Failure

Right, so 56 days after the massive failure I have another degraded RAID on my hands. This time I didn’t get any emails to tell me about it. Not sure why, I’ll assume the email part is my fault to give Thecus the benefit of the doubt…

I happened to load up the admin website for the device as I’ve gotten into the habit of doing and noticed the Array was degraded. I took a look at the disks and drive 5 was missing. Strange… I took a look at the logs and it showed the array going into a degraded mode but no mention of the drive falling off of the face of the earth.… Click here to read more!