Category: Topslakr

Posts by Topslakr

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NAB News: Red Scarlet

NAB, or the National Association of Broadcasters, is holding their annual conference in Las Vegas this week. It’s a place for a number of companies to show off their new products ect. Standard conference stuff. Something quite interesting has caught my eye though, it’s the Red Scarlet.

I’m not usually a big video guy. I prefer sill images to video but the camera looks amazing. It shoots at 3k, well above current HD video standards, and will sell, as a complete package, for somewhere around the $3000 range. Time will tell how close they come to what they have announced, we won’t know until next year, but if it does hit the $3000 mark I may just have to pick one up.… Click here to read more!

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Traffic Lights – Time Wasters for All!

I few months ago my route to work changed and now includes about a dozen traffic lights. I used to have to commute 90+ minutes down toward Boston in traffic but since my office has moved I now have the option of taking a more rural route. I’m not complaining.. it’s a huge improvement over the traffic and truth be told I could still cover most of my current commute on highways if I wanted to. It’s not that I’m unhappy with the lights, it’s just that I think they could be programmed to work more efficiently. Let me also preface this by mentioning that all of these observations are likely null and void in a more urban area where traffic is ubiquitous.… Click here to read more!

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Macbreak Weekly with Patrick Wilson

This weeks Macbreak Weekly has guest Patrick Wilson, the drummer from Weezer. During the show they do talk a bit about technology and Mac’s but a good portion of it turned into a great interview with him. He has a lot to say and I have to say, he says it well. I’m not a great fan of Weezer but he has a lot of insight and it’s a great listen.

To listen or download:

Macbreak Weekley Ep82

Topslakr

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Review: Norco DS-1220

The DS-1220 is great. It was dead easy to setup and has caused me to trouble at all. I installed Fedora 8 in the days leading up to the delivery the the DS-1220 based solely on the fact that I saw something on the web that said the controller card worked in Fedora. Come to find out the drivers for the card are actually available in the current kernel and most distributions are coming with the driver available as a module. I did nothing to setup or install the Norco DS-1220 at all.

Let me take a short step back and bring you through the torment that got me to this place.… Click here to read more!

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Grow You Own: Good News Update

So, We grabbed the two drums I have and stuff the end of the sump pump hose into the barrel. I thought that we might fill a barrel over the course of a few days. I had been monitoring the amount of water flow from the pump for a few days and while it was a good bit of water it just didn’t seem like all that much. Little did I know we could move 55 gallons in about 90 minutes.

The house we live in was built in 1899 and has a dirt basement. The water pours down the walls when it rains, and especially in the spring as the snow melts.… Click here to read more!

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Grow Your Own: Collecting Rain – Planning

Well, up here in the northeast we still have a bit of snow on the ground and it’s still dropping well below freezing at night so it’s much to early to start planting, but it’s time for my winter thinking and planning to start coming together. The first step is finding a source of water to use to water the garden. We have a well that works great to meet our needs as a family but general consensus is that it won’t be sufficient to water the garden as well. To that end I need to get water from somewhere else..… Click here to read more!

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Storage Update: Picking up the Pieces

Well, I have placed an order for the Norco DS-1220. I ordered it from Newegg.com as an open box item. It’s a bit of a gamble, for couple of reason. The first is because open box from Newegg means someone sent it back. It may have all of it’s parts, it may be missing some parts. Newegg will not help you out if the package is incomplete.. but it did save me $180. Newegg does offer a 15 day return policy on the item though so if it shows up and is missing some critical I can send it back and buy the non-open box version, albeit it at te $180 premium.… Click here to read more!

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Thecus: Dead again….

You would think I’d have learned my lesson already. I’ve been using my Thecus N5200 for a while now and, like clockwork, every 6 months it just dies. I’ve blogged about it before here, a lot, here are some of the posts.

Briefly, I had the drive in bay 1 fail again. It’s always that drive. No errors on the disk the Thecus just looses it. No errors in the logs, no bad sectors, it just disappears. So, I pull the drive out, format it, test it and put it back in. I log into the interface, tell the Thecus to use the disk I just put in as a spare which causes it to rebuild the array.… Click here to read more!

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Review: JBL Onstage II

When I ordered my 160GB Black iPod Classic I also ordered the JBL Onstage II desktop iPod speaker system. I can’t think of another way to describe it. The feature set of the device is fairly benign, drop the iPod in and you can play back music. It comes with a basic remote to handle some functions such as volume, play/pause, and track skip. Media is chosen by manipulating the iPod itself. It also has a 1/8″ jack on the back to allow for device other than iPods such as computers, ect.

The crazy thing about this device is how good it sounds.… Click here to read more!