Ready so say “hello world” proper? In order to access your DIY NAS or home server or game server or whatever that is hosted at your house, you will need to do something called “port forwarding”. Port forwarding is usually performed and set up at the router level. Since there are hundreds and thousands of routers, I will be recommending you a few sites that you can take reference from. I will be using a popular custom router firmware (DDWRT) to illustrate the different steps that you will need to take in order to forward your ports correctly.

This guide will still be useful because the option names and the way you go about entering the values are somewhat similar. After you have successfully forwarded your ports, I will be teaching you how to setup a dynamic DNS service. This is to ensure that your service is accessible at all times.

Port forwarding in layman’s term is simply to direct a port on your WAN IP (wide area network) to a port on your LAN IP (local area network). The only way you can access a LAN service from outside the local network is via the WAN. Thus, port forwarding allows access to your NAS or server or whichever service you host from the outside.

To start, navigate to your router page. It usually is 192.168.1.1 but if you have it configured otherwise, access it accordingly.

Locate something along the lines of “port mapping”, “port forwarding”, “forward” or simply anything that contains the keyword “port”, “forward” or “map(ing)”. It might be a sub section under another main category so try opening all the options till you find the port forwarding options.

There should be the following options (your option titles may vary but their functionalities remain the same); name/application, protocol, source, port from/port range, ip address /client/local ip, port to/local port.

Here are some explanations as to what each option does:

Name/application: to title what that port forward does. For your own reference.
protocol: there are usually three options, UDP, TCP and both. Google up the terms for more info.
port from: the WAN port that you want to forward.
ip address: your local ip address. For example the ip address of your NAS.
port to: the LAN port that you want to forwarded to.

Everything is pretty much self-explanatory. Say you have a web server on the standard port 80. The LAN ip address of the server is 192.168.1.10. You want to access the web server on the port 8000 on your wan ip address (this is given by your ISP. Simply google “what is my ip” for your wan ip address. Make sure you aren’t tunneled or using a proxy/vpn). The options will thus be filled in as follows:

Name/application: web server
protocol: both
port from: 8000
ip address: 192.168.1.10
port to: 80

Once you’ve done that. Save the settings and apply them. Restart your router if necessary. Once that is done simply use the following site to check if it is opened: http://www.canyouseeme.org/ (enter the wan port (port from) that you have opened). It should say that the port is open or something along those lines.

That is it! You have access to your local service from outside your local network! Now some tips if you are still unsure on going about it. The following site: http://portforward.com is amazing. You should be able to find your router there. If you still cannot find your router or something similar, simply google “[insert your router model] port forward”. You can also check your router manual for any instructions.

Now that you’ve learnt how to forward your ports, it is time to ensure that you have a static “wan ip address”. Most ISP will not provide home consumers with a static WAN ip. Usually when you reset your gateway/modem, a new WAN ip is issued to you. This meant that if you only have your WAN ip bookmarked or stored, you will not be able to access your local service should your WAN ip change.

Thankfully there is something called “dynamic DNS”. In layman’s term, dynamic DNS allows you to have something like a domain name that will always be updated to your latest WAN ip. Thus by accessing that domain name, you will always be directed to your current active WAN ip.

Dynamic DNS is usually setup at the router’s end as well. Most routers support such a feature. If it doesn’t I would suggest you upgrading your router to one that supports it. Firstly, navigate to your dynamic dns options page. The option should be called “ddns” or “dynamic DNS” or something along those lines. Check to see if there are any preset services available. I’ll be using the free service http://freedns.afraid.org/. Create an account if you haven’t done so already. If you’re using any other service, do use google to find tutorials on how to set it up.

Once you have your account set up, go on and create a new subdomain. Select “Type: A”.

Once you’ve done that, access the “Dynamic DNS” page. Located the subdomain and copy the url in “Direct URL”. From what you have copied, copy just the portion after the “?”. In the “Host Name” on the DDWRT (router) page, enter your domain name (e.g swiftnas.mooo.com) followed with a comma and then whatever you have copied. The update interval can be left as it is. You can reduce the number to make it more responsive and update more frequently. The number of updates you can get varies from service to service. Apply the settings and check if it is good to go by pinging the domain name.

It should show your current WAN IP address.

You have successfully gained access to your local service from the outside.

Hello world!

I had an iPod Touch. It was my precious. It kept me entertained in the cage which I’m only set “freed” every weekend; only to have a string tied on my feet to pull me back, locking me back again for the rest of the weekdays. So yeah, I store all my music and videos on the iPod and I listen and watch them whenever possible. Now it’s gone and I have no idea where it went.

It is as if the iPod grew legs and ran away. I always place my iPod together with the rest of my essential items upon coming home. I never touch my iTouch during the weekends mainly because I have my other precious devices such as my smartphone and computer. It should always be there, either on my bed or the table in my room. Flipping my room inside out and it was nowhere to be found. As always when you misplace something, your first reaction would be to “retrace” whatever you’ve done in the day. Unfortunately, I had to retrace days’ worth of history as I only found out that it was missing about 3 days after I came home from camp.

It has to be misplaced; but where exactly? Expanding my search radius, I went prowling the house. I scrutinized any possible location where I might leave my iPod. It must have ran away. Perhaps I’ve watched too much videos on it that it got fed up and decided to escape the torture; the torture of playing the countless minutes and hours of videos through the night to keep me sane.

The main thing that hurts most is the money that’s gone flying away with it. It costs quite a bit and losing money out of the blue isn’t fun. Oh well, I guess this gives me a reason to get a better device; preferably one that allows me to use the internet. A smartphone would work. A smartphone that is blind to be more exact. You see, inside the cage there are “sensitive” stuff that only my eyes can lay upon. As for phones, their eyes must be gauged out else they’ll be detained.

Oh well, I guess I’ll have to spend another few hundreds getting one. What a total waste of money. Naughty iTouch, wait till I find you. Once I do, if I do, I’ll make sure that you get sold to some random dude in the street that you’ll never want to have your body tampered with.

[photo by Gonzalo Baeza H via flickr]

There are many things that can be used as headphone stands. For people who do not want to spend the time to DIY a headphone stand or the money for those overly priced retail stands, repurposing common objects as stands works perfectly fine. Examples of objects used are Banana Stands, hooks and all kinds of surfaces that allow you to rest your headphones on. Sometimes these solutions are aesthetically unpleasant, sometimes they simply do not work as well. I have come up with an idea (at least I haven’t seen anyone doing it or talk about it) of repurposing a guitar capo as a clamp on kind of stand. Read on for some pictures and a video that explains more about it.

The capo has surfaces that are very compatible with placing headphones. In addition, the clamping functionality enables the capo to be used in various places. As long as there is a stand and edge to clamp on, headphones can be hanged at that very location with the use of the capo. The capo is easily obtainable and costs little. The variety of designs and colours make it versatile in different colour schemes and themes. The way I place it (on the edge of my desk) not only looks fantastic, it also makes my headphone easily accessible; the capo headphone stand is simply an elegant and practical solution.

Need an elegant headphone stand but do not want to spend the big bucks? The capo is a pleasant surprise.

There are many ways to access a hard drive. The most common way is through the internal SATA connectors. The other common way is through USB/eSATA. The former requires you to install the bare drive into your computer and the latter requires you to have an enclosure that supports such a transfer. Another method, that partially combines both mentioned connections, is through a hard drive dock. A hard drive dock allows you to use bare drives and simply connect them through whatever means available. Today we will be reviewing the Mukii TransImp TIP-D180U3, a USB 3.0 HDD Dock. Read on for the video and written review.

The Mukii TransImp TIP-D180U3 dock comes in two different colours, black and white. Both colours look simple and sleek, fitting for any kind of desk that you may have. It supports both 2.5 and 3.5 inch HDDs. Transmission is via USB 3.0 so do make sure that you have a USB 3.0 port on your computer should you want to maximize its performance. On the dock itself, there is a physical power button and a small empty slot for you to put notes or whatever (no real clue what it is there for).  The dock requires dc power input (adapter included) so there will be that additional cable for you to manage.

The dock also comes with its own software that apparently helps to boost performance. Unfortunately, the software seems reluctant to work on my system most of the time and therefore will not be considered in this review. Other than that, it is a simple plug and play dock and once you have it connected to your computer, the recognition process works the same way as an external HDD. Let us jump straight in to the performance benchmark:

Test HDD: Kingston HyperX 120gb

Test System USB 3.0 chipset: EtronTech EJ168A

Test Results:

As you can see the performance is nowhere near that of USB 3.0 theoretical speed. The SSD isn’t the bottleneck so what that means is that the results you see above are the maximum performance of the HDD dock. With all that said, it isn’t too shabby at all. When using such a dock, the main thing you will want to consider is the sequential read and write speeds (since you will be transferring files to and from the HDD). At 183.3 MB/s read and 174.2 MB/s write, you will max out the performance of all kinds of 3.5” HDDs. Unless you are using a SSD (like in the test), you will never reach this kind of performance.

There are many reasons why you want to have a HDD dock. The most useful feature is that you can plug in different HDDs for backup or file transfer to and from your system with ease. If you do not already know, 3.5” external HDDs all require you to have an additional power source and thus if you’re backing up to several different external HDDs, you will find yourself with loads and loads of power adapters to manage. Also, buying internal HDDs has its benefits in that you can often choose a higher performance HDD as compared to those that are built in within the external cases. You may also save the money on the additional cases and simply use it solely on your HDDs. Another useful feature of a dock (or any SATA to USB converters really) is that should you need to test out a HDD (for example a laptop that doesn’t load etc), you can simply take the HDD and plug it into the dock.

The Mukii TransImp USB 3.0 dock sure does perform well while maintaining excellent aesthetics. It also doesn’t cost much especially with the bundles that are sold (at least in my country). The bundle basically consists of both the dock and their very own PCI-E to 2 x USB 3.0 port card (that’s the one I’m using in the test). This is extremely useful especially when you’re using an older computer like mine which do not have native USB 3.0 ports. Other than that, the dock costs roughly $20 USD, one of the cheaper options if you’re looking for a USB 3.0 HDD Dock. In terms of price, performance and design, the Mukii TransImp sure shines brightly.

Life is never fair.

[photo by: I See Modern Britain via flickr]

A few days back I wrote a guide about backing up your files locally. This time around, I will be teaching you how to backup your files in a remote location say another NAS in another house. For a clearer understanding, do read up on the previous guide. For this guide, I will jump straight into the steps to backup your files remotely and cut short the explanations that are already done previously.

There are two prerequisites that you must meet. Firstly, the remote location should have a SSH server setup at its end. Secondly, the SSH server should be using a key authentication instead of password. A key authentication based login is more secure and will also allow for the commands to work.

If you have all those ready, let us begin by preparing the servers to receive the connections. I will recommend that you create a new user at your remote server for the connection. To do so, simply enter the following command:

sudo useradd –d /home/tutorial –m tutorial

“/home/tutorial” is the home directory of your new user. Change the variables accordingly. Set your user password by typing:

sudo passwd tutorial

You will also want to create a ssh directory for the user:

sudo mkdir /home/tutorial/.ssh

Now is to establish the public key of your server into the allowed list in your remote server. We want to establish the public key of your server’s root and not the user that you are logged in as. To do so, run the following command to generate your root public key (if you haven’t already done so):

sudo ssh-keygen

Save the file in the default location. Leave the password fields blank. If it asks you if you want to overwrite, type “no” and continue (unless you want to generate a new key). With that done, type the following:

sudo cat /root/.ssh/id_rsa.pub

Now the command interface will produce the authentication key (try brute forcing that). Simply select the whole content (starting with ssh-rsa and ending with root@whatever) and copy it (if you’re using Putty simply highlighting everything will bring it into your clipboard).

Now in your remote server, edit the following file:

sudo nano /home/tutorial/.ssh/authorized_keys

Paste in the key. Now to verify that it is working, ssh into your remote server using your local server:

sudo ssh tutorial@remotesever

It should successfully log you in without asking for any password whatsoever. Once that is done, you can test backing up by typing in the following command:

sudo rsync -azvv -e ssh /local_data tutorial@remote:/remote/backup

rsync should run and you will see that /local_data will be present in /remote/backup. Just a tip, you can reverse that command around to “pull” data from a remote location into your server. This will allow you to backup data from that remote location into your local server.

Once you see everything all working, you can enter it into your crontab schedule! (read the previous guide to learn how to do that. Simply change the execution command portion into the one above).

Now that you have started storing your precious files and data into the NAS, it is time to back it all up. It isn’t fun when you lose all your data. Things such as photos and videos contain precious memories that can never be replaced should they be gone. The most common way to lose your files (unintentionally) is through HDD failure. Sometimes you can spot a dying HDD but in other cases, they just come and go without any warnings. It is thus vital to store the files in at least two locations. Today, I will be teaching you to do just that. Time to learn how to setup a scheduled backup of your files!

Firstly, you should have another HDD or storage space to store your backup files. For this time around, I will be showing you how to setup a scheduled backup to a local destination (an external HDD, another HDD inside the NAS etc). For now, I will assume that your backup destination is always on and mounted in the system. In future, I might do a guide on how to run a script that helps to mount and unmount a HDD (especially useful when using an external HDD).

Start by running this command:

sudo crontab –e


This is where you will type in the commands and actions for execution. Cron is a system daemon used to execute desired tasks (in the background) at designated times. For a detailed understanding, you can visit the Ubuntu documentation page. Otherwise you can type in the following:

0 1 * * 7 rsync -azvv /what-to-backup /backup-destination

This will backup your files once a week. The above command will run every Sunday at 0100HRS. Let us break up the command and understand a bit more of how the thing works. The first 5 variables set the schedule.

minute (0-59), hour (0-23, 0 = midnight), day (1-31), month (1-12), weekday (0-7, 0/7 = Sunday),

Placing an asterisk signifies that it should be done at every single time period. The first two variables are vital in terms of the exact timing as to when to execute the command. The latter 3 variables  determine the frequency and rate as of which the command is run. Whether is it weekly, monthly or every other day. Customize it as you see fit. You may also use commas to run the command again in that time period or dashes to run the command continuously within that time period. So for example:

0 1 * * 7,3 rsync -azvv /what-to-backup /backup-destination

The above command will run every Sunday and Wednesday. With all that knowledge, we now jump to the next portion of the command. “rsync” is a tool used to copy and synchronize data from one location to another. There are many options that you can choose (read more here) from but the above “-azvv” should be sufficient to backup every single file while maintaining the original properties.

-a archive mode; performs an exact copy of the source and preserves the properties of the file (date and time, file owner, permissions etc)
-z compresses the data
-vv increases the verbosity of the reporting process

Another option that you might want to consider is “--delete”. This means that the backup will be synchronized with your source. A deleted file from your source will also be deleted in the backup.

The first location points to the files you want to backup. The second location points to the destination as to where the backup will be stored. Edit according to your needs. Once you are done editing the command, press CTRL+X and save the file. If you want to have the backup up immediately (I encourage you to do this. You will also check to see if your rsync command is working) simply type in the command portion:

rsync -azvv /what-to-backup /backup-destination

rsync will start doing its job and soon you will see that the contents in /backup-destination will be the same as the contents in /what-to-backup. The initial backup will take some time (depending on how much data you’re backing up) but in future rsync will only copy the files that are new or modified. It works somewhat incrementally.

There you have it. A working backup schedule is in place! If you need more advanced methods (excluding certain files, directories, file types etc), give Google a go to search for what you need. This guide is meant to provide the basic knowledge and all these are sufficient enough for you to get a working backup solution going.

VPNs (Virtual Private Networks) can be used for several things. The most common use of them is to bypass geographical restrictions. There are many sites and services on the net that only serve certain regions; Netflix, for example, is only available in the US, Canada and some Latin American countries. Using a VPN server that is located within the allowed regions will give you access to that particular service. There are also other uses such as providing anonymity, higher privacy and a more secure connection. There are several “free” services out there but they always come with some kind of special condition. VPN Gate, however, is a truly free service.

VPN servers provided by VPN Gate are run by volunteers. People like you can start a VPN server and provide your own house connection as a VPN relay route. For more of such info and the reason behind the creation of VPN Gate, do give their site a visit at http://www.vpngate.net. For guides on getting started and connecting to a VPN server, do head on to their site as well. It is pretty simple stuff, basically downloading a client and then clicking your way to a connection. You can also watch my video above for a guided tour (for windows OS).

Do not expect much from VPN Gate as compared to a paid VPN service. The connection speeds are that of the volunteer’s connection. While there are several relatively quick connections based of Japan and Korea, US/UK servers as of now are not of the best quality. Sure you can view and browse the net fine but for HD video streaming and bandwidth intensive activities, I suggest you fork out a little money for a better experience. I am able to view some SD quality videos on YouTube but the quality has to be reduced for the streaming to be smooth.

Another thing to take note is that using VPN Gate will not render you truly anonymous. They do have a logging policy (mostly 2 weeks) and should the authorities want access to it, they will provide the logs. Other than that, VPN Gate will be great for people who just want a taste of VPNs or simple web browsing. Do give a premium service a try should you want to go to the extent of say watching HD videos and so on.

If you’re into cinematography, video capturing, cameras and anything that deals with capturing/recording light through devices, this upcoming product will be sure to please you. Stabilizing a camera while moving isn’t a simple task. There are several types of stabilizers and even for handheld stabilizers, there are different form, sizes and of course performance. The MōVI produces some of the most outstanding results that I’ve seen. Behind the scenes action of the stabilizer after the break.

Amazing eh? Here is a quick clip demonstrating the power of the system:

Here are more moving shots with the MōVI:

Its going to cost you but if you’re in the trade, it sure seem like an amazing investment.

This guide’s main purpose is to introduce a device that will aid in recording HDMI output from whichever sources you have. This is particularly helpful for recording 1080p footage from say the Playstation 3 (PS3). The “only” way to record PS3 footage is through component cables and while that provides pretty good 1080i quality, it is not exactly the full 1080p that we want. There are also many other reasons why HDMI is preferred over component (from the recorder’s point of view); in my case, my PC monitors do not support component input and thus requiring converters to get the output displayed. There are several different types of devices that will help you but here is one of the most readily available one out there.

The above is a DVI + SPDIF to HDMI converter. DVI only carries video signals and for people using DVI to HDMI cables, they will need to run a separate sound cable to enable sound. The converter helps to encode both the digital sound and video signals together and transmit it through HDMI output. So how does this device exactly help in our recording?

The reason why you are unable to record HDMI output from sources such as the PS3 is because the HDMI signals are encrypted. This encryption is called the High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection or HDCP in short. This encryption prevents you from recording any footage directly from the source’s HDMI output. What this converter does is that it “mess” up with the re-encryption. Why “mess”? That’s because the product specifications state that there is HDCP carrying over in the output. However from experience, this does not seem to be the case. They must have messed up their encryption process somehow.

This is a rather touchy subject and this post is in no way encouraging anyone to do anything illegal. The converter introduced just happens to do some magic with the HDMI output to allow it to be recordable. It is after all just a DVI + SPDIF to HDMI converter. The connection part should be self-explanatory and in doubt do watch the video as it touches a little more about the additional things you might need.

For those wondering if there will be a drop in quality of the footage my answer is, yes. Small noticeable changes.

P.S I have written guides that give detailed instructions as to recording footage (PS3/XBOX 360 and PC) with the Hauppauge Colossus.

P.P.S Monoprice and eBay holds the mentioned converter.