Category: Topslakr

Posts by Topslakr

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In Remembrance…

Well, it has finally happened and though I have never mentioned anything about it on the Blog, my mixing board has died. While I do enjoy servers and photography my first love is audio. I am in the process of building a recording studio and was using a older mixing board made by an English company called ‘Soundtracs’. I had the 16 channel version of the Solo series. It was a very basic board lacking any kind of automation or other advanced features but it had a rich punchy sound that I just loved.

I bought it I would say about a year ago on Ebay for something like $300 USD and had no idea what to expect from it.… Click here to read more!

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Review: Thecus N5200

I’ve had this device for about 6 weeks now and at this point I think I’m ready to post a fair review. The Thecus N5200 is essentially a NAS RAID box. It’s built around a Intel Celeron 600Mhz chip and runs linux. It holds 5 SATA drives up to 750GB which was is the largest available when I bought the unit (It may have been updated to support larger drives by now). Not being a glutton I installed 5 500GB drives in a RAID 5 giving me about 2TB of storage once it is all is setup. Unfortunatly one of my drives was faulty on arrival though so I had to do a bit of extra waiting before I could really start to use the unit.… Click here to read more!

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Server Woes

Server Downtime. Yeah, I know. No one noticed. I’m going to explain it here anyway… I won’t go into detail here about my actual server setup, that is a post for another time but I’ll outline the basics. Starting my day on Saturday I was running three physical servers and an additional four more virtual servers plus a 2TB NAS array. One of my servers handles for the most part email, and that one is running fine. The other two were storage/Virtual Server hosts. Those two were in a bit of trouble and needed to be given the once over and combined into one server that I thought we be enough to get me through another few months.… Click here to read more!

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Ice Storm Pictures

I have posted my final pictures from the ice storm that happened at the beginning of the week. I pulled down all of the originals and replaced them with the ones I liked best. I did do some cropping and light editing in iPhoto but nothing serious. I am also going to try and get some shots where the sun is shining over the next few days so keep an eye out for those as well. I stopped on my way home from work today to try and get some but my camera had been in my car all day and the battery was dead after being held at about 5 degrees Fahrenheit for 10 hours.… Click here to read more!

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Nikon D40

Well, I bought it. No regrets. I love the camera. It’s honestly no more work to use then my Canon Powershot and I get such better pictures. It is so great to be able to grab the camera pop in a couple of settings and snap off 100 pictures.

As I’ve mentioned before this is my first SLR of any kind. I have no other lenses (though I do have my eye on a couple) and aside from the camera it self I have made no other serious investments for it. I use my Apple Macbook and iPhoto to edit the images for the most part and dabble in photoshop or whatever else when needed.… Click here to read more!

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New Year… so new and fresh

What is the point of a New Year celebration? Is it really that big of a deal to change the calendar on the wall? I mean iCal and Outlook don’t pop up on January first and scream about the change from one year to the next. New Years is simply a time for people to get drunk and nothing more. Sure lots of people make ‘resolutions’ but what is the point of that? If you have something that you should be doing to better yourself do you really have to wait for the 1st of the year to do it? Let’s me honest, it’s just convenient.… Click here to read more!

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New Raid Array

In a not so distant past I had 1.5 Terabytes of storage on one of my servers. That array met with it’s sad end one day and all my data was lost. I had bought a raid card and 6 250GB Western Digital drives(I know, thats not 1.5TB the server had some other storage not on that array). The drives didn’t do well in the array and needed to be reinitialized every couple of weeks. It is now a well know issue with certain WD drives in RAID arrays. The card I bought was also not as good a choice as I had hoped.… Click here to read more!

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The Nikon D40 is for me

Well, I went down to a local photo shop (Eagle Photo, New Hampshire) and took a look at some cameras. I have decided to get the Nikon D40. When I went down to the shop it was the middle of our first(if very late) snow storm. I had never been there before and Portsmouth isn’t a town that I get out to very often so I took a few wrong turns. I may have also accidentally turned into a few vacant unplowed lots and perhaps had some fun with my car… but that is neither here nor there. The fact of the matter is I loved the camera and am going to have to buy one.… Click here to read more!

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A Journey into Photos

Photography, not something I ever thought I would enjoy. I’ve had a camera for a few years and I used to bring it out for the usual School Band Concerts or awards night but little else. Then over the summer I went on Vacation with a friend of mine and we took upwards of 800 images in about a week and I had a great time doing it. Maybe it has something to do with my new Macbook and how fun and simple iPhoto makes it to edit photos, or perhaps I just caught the photo bug but I just can’t stop taking pictures now.… Click here to read more!

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New db400971999 Blog

I used to be a Drupal user but I have switched (back) to db400971999. Sometimes the easy way is the best way. I had been looking for a good way to integrate my image gallery into my blog and db400971999 seems to have the best plugin. It’s called WPG2 and it integrates db400971999 with an existing Gallery2 Image Gallery. Ideal for me.

I have had some luck getting it to work but at this point it’s not 100%. I have the integration far enough along that the right side navagatio bar shows an image from my gallery but when you click on it the interface it brings up doesn’t work correctly.… Click here to read more!