On Backups

Published on July 20, 2009 in Tech. 0 Comments

(I recently posted the following in a Yelp discussion board – check it out here. It bears repeating, though – heeding the contents can save everyone a lot of time and frustration)

I believe I speak for all those friends who help you with your computer problems when I say the following:

Hi there. I know we’ve been harping on this for a good long time now, and that you’re getting tired of hearing it. Nonetheless, there’s a reason why we keep saying it – and it’s not to annoy you.

Why the hell aren’t you making backups?

Seriously, you’ve got to know enough people with computer failure and data loss horror stories by this point to realize that some kind of hard drive problem or other unrecoverable error isn’t a matter of if, but a matter of when. We all seem to love our notebooks these days, but constantly moving around an incredibly tiny disc that spins at around 90 revolutions per SECOND seems to result in me having to help at least one unfortunate friend every 3-6 months.

Which, don’t get me wrong, I’m happy to do. But every time I do, it takes me forever and a day to try and get the old files off the broken (and rapidly deteriorating!) hard drive, if it’s even possible. You lose data, I lose time, and you wind up having to buy me tons of beer. If you had a recent backup, however… to hell with the old drive, we load a new one in, restore, and you’re back up and running in a matter of hours, not days or weeks.

If you’re worried about cost, don’t be. All you really need is an external USB hard drive – you can get one big enough for all your documents for generally about $100, more if you generate tons of documents. At 500GB, that’s more than enough for your completely legal music collection, your vast selection of home-made high definition movies, and your cornucopia of photos. If you need more space, by all means, spend a bit more.*

Actually performing the backup itself is dead simple these days, too – some of the drives come with software for Windows, and Mac OS X 10.5 or newer (which you have if your Mac is less than about a year and a half old, or you upgraded) comes with a feature called Time Machine which automatically backs up your files and such for you. Windows Vista has a backup utility built-in, too, but you have to run it manually. It’s still better than nothing – which is what you probably have right now.

I’m not asking you to do any crazy offsite backup plan – just, please, make a backup of your important stuff. It’ll make all our lives easier if something bad happens to your computer.

(and if you want to do the crazy offsite pay-by-the-month backup stuff, you’re welcome to it. I might even show you how – for a beer…)

* BUYING TIPS: When you’re buying a backup drive for your computer, buying a reputable brand is best – names like Seagate and Western Digital are good to look for. Also, don’t be tempted by the really tiny ones – they may be more portable, but the small notebook disk drives tend to be more fragile, plus you wind up spending more for the same amount of storage as you get with the bigger ones. You shouldn’t take your backup with you anyways – more chance for damage.

This search doesn’t have any results?

Published on April 5, 2009 in General. 0 Comments

Just after typing up some BS in a conversation with a friend, I decided to search for a phrase I’d used.

There are, however, no Google matches for “enhanced synergistic outcomes”.

That should change shortly.

Interesting New Website

Published on March 25, 2009 in Tech. 0 Comments

It looks like Andy Ihnatko and Scott Bourne have started a new site, focusing on digital storage and managing digital data. The site – http://mydl.me/ – looks really interesting, with a few good articles up so far, and an excellent contest (win a free Drobo!) on right now. I definitely look forward to reading it more in the future!

Logging while I sleep

Published on January 28, 2009 in Stuff I've been up to lately and Tech. 2 Comments

For the past few nights I’ve been sleeping with…

Okay, that came out wrong.

For the past few nights I’ve been heading off to bed with a Wiimote strapped to my wrist.

It all started with reading a patent explaining how wrist and hand movement could be correlated with entering a lighter phase of sleep – lighter sleep leads to moving around. The idea is, if you’re in a lighter phase of sleep, you wake up easier, feeling more refreshed. The goal for this is to build an alarm clock for myself that makes it easier to wake up in the morning, by waking me up up to a half hour earlier if that turns out to be easier. A team at the IEEE Canada Telus Innovation Award in 2006 had done precisely this, but they used an EEG for sensors, and needed paste and electrodes. Yuck.

This whole setup using an accelerometer is already patented and available from www.sleeptracker.com, but that costs “money”.

I wanted to gather some data of my own to try and devise an algorithm for translating data from a 3-axis accelerometer into an indication of being ready to wake up. This meant logging a night’s worth of accelerometer data, importing it into something like MATLAB, and playing with the numbers. My initial idea was to make a little board with an Arduino, an SD card, an accelerometer and a battery. This would take a lot of design, building and debugging on my part, and would take money.

I then remembered that my desktop machine has Bluetooth, and that I have Wiimotes.

The Wiimote is just about ideal for this: it has a 3-axis accelerometer, it can relay the data back over Bluetooth, and runs on batteries already. It’s a little large for this application, but it already exists, works and is in my hand right now, all of which are amazing benefits over basically anything I can or would build. Why do the work yourself, when someone else has already done the work for you?

I found a program called G-Force Logger that came with C# source. It logs values on each axis from the Wiimote’s accelerometer at a user-defined rate. I modified this code to write to a comma-separated file rather than a TextBox control, and let it run overnight. I’ll discuss the results later – but I can tell you it works nicely!

Our Home Network

Published on January 28, 2009 in Stuff I've been up to lately and Tech. 0 Comments

When we (my family and I) moved into our current house nearly 5 years ago, there were a few issues that we knew we had to take care of – the poor furnace, the lack of a proper bedroom for me, the colours of the walls, etc. One thing we’d counted on waiting to finish, though, was the wiring – while we wanted to properly network this house and avoid the “50ft patch cords through vents and tucked under baseboards” we’d used before, there were more pressing issues.

The rather strong AM reception on nearly every telephone in the house changed that pretty quick.

When we started looking into the phone wiring in the house, thing got pretty murky pretty fast. We found that some jacks were using the standard Green and Red pair, and a couple used Yellow and Black – but we could NOT find where they switched. One phone wire ran under a baseboard and under the bathroom floor – the tile bathroom floor. The phone wire was embedded in the thinset cement. Other rooms had the standard “dorm room” wiring job, holes drilled in walls for phone wire, with 4 baseboard jacks in one room alone. Fixing it was proving to be too time consuming and too difficult if we were going to be replacing it anyways, so we headed off to Sayal Electronics in Burlington and came home with two spools of CAT5E cable – Blue for Data, Grey for Voice – a spool of RG6 Coax cable, and assorted hardware (keystone jacks, keystone plates, and compression crimp cable plugs).

This upgrade had been planned for a while – we’d picked up an inexpensive compression crimper on a trip to the US since models that cheap weren’t available north of the 49th, and I’d obtained a few Leviton media panels fairly cheaply on eBay, all prior to moving in. So when the decision was made to go ahead, we were ready. We slowly started running wires to the rooms that were easiest to get to in order to get good at setting up the cables, and wound up rerouting and redoing a few runs as we went. About a year and a half after moving in we started a big basement renovation that required we be very careful with our already-installed cables, but also gave us the opportunity to pre-wire the basement for surround sound and build in a cabinet for the equipment to go. It’s this part of the story that we’re working on now – adding AV wiring from the cabinet to behind the TV so that we can clean up that area and make use of the new surround sound system we got for the basement.

(The system in question was a prize in the Rogers Customer Appreciation Event – thanks Rogers, we appreciate you too!)

The state of our home network now is a great deal better than it was when we moved in:

  • Each room has a wallplate with, at minimum, two CAT5E runs – one voice, one data – and one RG6 cable run. Most have two RG6 runs in case we want to move to satellite TV. Each of these is a keystone wallplate.
  • Every cable run is a “home run” back to a media panel in the basement. Each CAT5 cable and RG6 cable terminates at a patch panel. All of the voice jacks are on one patch panel and all of the data ones are on another – and jack 1 on the Voice panel is the same destination as jack 1 on the Data panel.
  • There are about 12 panels around the house – every bedroom, the living room, family room, study and a few in the basement.
  • Every cable run is documented as to where it goes and takes a rather direct path to get there.

A bit of a footnote on the phone wiring issue: when we were doing some further renovations, we drilled into a joist in the basement, and saw phone wire on the other side. We pulled about 30 feet out before it stopped – all of which was live. This possibly explains how our house acted as a giant antenna…

Some photos of our current setup:

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One of the keystone wallplates. Two coax, one RJ45 CAT5E, and one RJ11 for telephone

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The basement data centre: two SMC switches (ugh), the Linksys WRT54GS router (hacked), RCA cable modem. Underneath is the homemade Cable TV patch panel, and under THAT are the Leviton media centres – Ethernet on the left, Phone on the right.

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A different view of the same, showing a few cable runs coming in.

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A closeup on the Leviton media centres. We’re only using one of their splitters as that’s really all we need.

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See? Even our power setup is clean! My Linux server’s tiny monitor at the bottom.

Soon, I’ll talk about how we’re going crazy again, this time with home theatre wiring.

Updated Portfolio

Published on January 16, 2009 in General, Stuff I've been up to lately and Tech. 0 Comments

I just updated a bunch of stuff on the Portfolio section of my site – check it out here.

Obviously there’s still a lot more to be added, but that should happen fairly soon.

LINKDUMP: Laser Ranging

Published on October 21, 2008 in Tech. 0 Comments

Some interesting links on inexpensive laser ranging:

http://www.eng.buffalo.edu/ubr/ff03laser.php

http://techref.massmind.org/techref/com/cyberg8t/www/http/pendragn/actlite.htm

http://www.pages.drexel.edu/~twd25/webcam_laser_ranger.html

http://techref.massmind.org/techref/new/letter/news0310.htm

Managing Spectrum at a Political Convention

Published on October 21, 2008 in Tech. 0 Comments

Something I’d never thought of before – how spectrum is managed at a big political convention. With all the different groups participating, wireless microphones, video links, cell phones, walkie-talkies, etc. being used, it’s no small task. Two links “recently” came to my attention that shed some light on this:

All in all, some interesting stuff I wouldn’t normally have thought of.

Rock Band for Wii: don’t bother

Published on June 24, 2008 in Tech. 0 Comments

My sister got Rock Band for her Wii today, after having tons of fun playing it on the XBox 360. She’d bought the Wii largely because she wanted Rock Band for it. Imagine her disappointment when the Wii version of the game came out with key features (custom characters, custom world tour, etc.) missing.

Others might say that she should have done research – but this is a consumer item, which carries the same name as a game people have seen and fallen in love with on other systems. Most reasonable people aren’t about to research the game they’re buying to see if it has all the features that they’re looking for – if they’ve played it on one system, why would it play THAT differently on another?

What Harmonix shipped is not the same game, and I think it’s deceptive to pass off such a weak effort as the same thing.

Thoughts on a new Arduino-like platform

Published on June 11, 2008 in Tech. 2 Comments

I’ve been giving some thought recently on designing a new Arduino-like board using the more powerful ATmega644P rather than the ATmega168. I’ve reached a bit of a dilemma: what to do with the connector layout of the board. The problem is that the pinouts of the two chips are vastly different, to the point where shoehorning the ‘644P to work with the existing Arduino layout could be quite tricky. In addition, various features (PWM outputs mostly, but also SPI and TWI) are on rather different pins on the ‘644P than they are on the ‘168.

This presents a bit of a dilemma: how to lay out this new board? A few options seem to be available:

  • Run the ports on the ‘644P to the same pins that the ‘168 uses on the Arduino. Digital code is easily ported, layout is somewhat simple (but not exactly straightforward), but the PWM outputs are suddenly on different physical pins, and we retain the somewhat odd connector spacing used on the Arduino. Shield compatibility is questionable.
  • Make sure that the analog output pins line up, and patch the Digital outputs to be the “right thing” in software. This requires a lot of messing around with the Wiring libraries, and will make it difficult for people to embed their designs into their own boards. Also, layout becomes tricky to downright nightmarish, but we retain shield compatibility.
  • Start from scratch. Set up the headers in a way that makes sense for this chip, and make the layout easy and clean. Shield compatibility goes right out the window, but the software remains clean.

So it’s a bit of a tossup right now. I’m leaning towards starting from scratch, but abandoning the existing shields is a touch decision to make. It would be REALLY nice if there were enough resources on the new chip to make two complete shield ports, but that doesn’t appear to be the case. It would, of course, be ideal to maintain compatibility with the software that the folks over at RobotCraft have come up with.

Maybe some jumpers could allow a best of both worlds implementation… layout would be hellish, but it could work…