micsaund.com

Cheap, almost perfect iPad case

micsaund — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 20:34:59 +0000

Showing the size of the iPad compared to the case

It seems that nearly anything with the word "iPad" on it commands a price premium, including carrying cases. Well, I found an alternative case that is nearly perfect for the iPad and it costs less than $15!

I was down my my local MicroCenter last night and figured I'd stop-in and see what they have. Those of you with Fry's stores nearby don't know how lucky you are. MicroCenter comes close, but still...

Anyway, I wanted a carrying case for my new iPad and I had read that you could use the netbook carrying cases and save quite a bit of money. So, once in MicroCenter, I went to their Apple section and grabbed an "iPad case" and proceeded to the massive shelf piled with dozens and dozens of netbook/laptop cases.

After a bit of digging and thinking about what I wanted, I avoided one of the fully featured "mini laptop" bags as that defeats the purpose of the iPad. Plus, there aren't any ports/etc. on the iPad to speak of, so I figured there'd be little reason to haul a bunch of crap around in the bag.

Thus, I opted for a more slimline type sleeve/case. There were several to choose from in the 7-10 inch "netbook" range which would work for the iPad. However on my way to the checkout, I noticed one last case that made me dump the neoprene sleeve - and it was $5 cheaper!

I found a black nylon Case Logic 7-10.2" netbook case with bonus hard drive case. The actual case the iPad goes into is made from a tasteful black nylon cloth (like a suitcase) with a couple "leather" accents which actually look decent. The case is lightly padded (probably 1/8" or so foam) and almost fits as though it were made for the iPad. It's a bit taller than the iPad (maybe 0.75 inches) but nothing really noticeable. And, even with the InCase rubber protector I've got on my iPad, you can easily slide it into the case because the zipper goes almost all the way around the top and one side.

The bonus hard drive case I figured would be handy to hold the iPad power adapter and USB cord.

Best of all this case was $14.99 retail at MicroCenter and it's even cheaper at Amazon ($12.99 as of writing this)! For comparison, the cheap neoprene iPad sleeve I was using for sizing in the store was $29.99!!!

I'm very happy with this case, it's fit, and just how it feels. With the solid, weighty iPad inside, it fits in your hand like a small text book. Oh, and it's about as thick as the iPad AC adapter when zipped shut with the iPad inside.

How to fix a dying QNAP iTunes server

micsaund — Sat, 29 May 2010 23:02:23 +0000

If you've got a QNAP NAS and some file in your music library is causing the QNAP's iTunes server to die, here's how you can track-down the problem and fix it.

A while back, I finally decided to drop the money on a Qnap TS-219P pre-built NAS (network attached storage). It's small, silent, draws almost no power, has a nice web based UI, and features many services such as Windows (SMB) sharing, Apple (AFP) sharing, web server, iTunes server, DLNA via Twonky, and much more. Sure, I could have built my own PC to do all this, but that takes time up-front, and time to maintain it, so I spent a little more to get an "already done for me" solution.

After months and months of owning the Qnap and having it silently and reliably serving up network storage for manual file copies, OS X's Time Machine, etc. I thought things were perfect. But, one day, I ran an automated tool on my iTunes library which corrects bad ID3 data, adds album art, etc.

So, once I had reworked my entire music library with this tool, I copied all of the files to the Qnap so that its built-in iTunes server could offer them up to any machine in my house.

That's when I had a problem. When I copied the music library to the Qnap, an iTunes running on another machine would lose the connection to the shared library. It seems that at least one of the thousands of files in the library was causing the iTunes service on the Qnap to choke and die. I could delete the library and restart the service via the GUI, and it would stay running. But, as soon as I put my library back on the Qnap, the service would again die.

I inquired on the Qnap forums and the official Qnap representative offered to have someone look at my NAS to find-out why the iTunes server was dying. I asked if they had any logs or some other way that I could do it myself, since, well, I prefer doing that myself and then I would not have to either be around when their support person was available, or give them unsupervised admin access. The answer was "no" - I would need to have them look at the problem. Now, don't get me wrong, I DO appreciate Qnap's willingness to investigate the problem, but I would just prefer to know how to do it myself, in case it ever happens again in the future.

Anyway, I figured-out how to troubleshoot the crashing Qnap iTunes server myself, and figured I'd share it in case anyone else out there prefers to self-resolve problems like this.

NOTE: This is not a hand-holding HOWTO, so if you're unfamiliar with commandline stuff, please let the Qnap support people do this for you. I offer no guarantees whatsoever.

First, you need to open an SSH session to your QNAP NAS as the admin user.

Once you have done that, the name of the iTunes server is ' mt-daapd '.

In my case, doing a ' ps | grep mt-daapd ' returned no running processes, so I knew that the service was truly not running. You should run this command also to check that the service is truly dead.

If you run ' mt-daapd --help ' you'll see the usage statement, like this:

So, the next step is to run the mt-daapd in the foreground so we can watch it spew log information to the screen. Use ' mt-daapd -d 9 -c /etc/mt-daapd.conf -f ' This will cause lots of log spew to scroll-by. If the problem you're having is the same as mine, the output will stop with a segfault like this:

In this particular case, I think the "o" with the dots above it are the problem. Nothing I did would allow me to cut/paste that character on the Qnap, so I'm guessing that when that character gets encountered, that's what is causing the segfault. I chose to simply delete the directory/files by that band as they're not one of my favorites anyway:

Running ' mt-daapd -d 9 -c /etc/mt-daapd.conf -f ' again, I saw that the entire library was parsed and the service was ready to accept connections:

Control-C that to stop the foreground debug copy, and then use the Qnap web-UI to restart the service by unchecking it, hitting OK, and then re-check and OK it. Now, when you do the the ' ps | grep mt-daapd ' you should see something like this:

And, your shared iTunes library should be showing-up normally.

I love my Qnap TS-219P, but I wish they'd offer more information on self-resolving stuff like this so I don't have to figure it all out. But, hopefully, that's the last problem I run into and if so, I'm still quite happy with the purchase.

Awesome spinning LED sphere project

micsaund — Thu, 13 May 2010 17:11:30 +0000

Check-out this awesome LED persistence of vision project some guy made from leftover junk in his parts box. The video (inside the post) is worth a million words.

This project features a total of 9 slip rings to provide power to the various spinning elements in the project. The effect once it gets going is pretty cool. A minute or two into the video there are some patterns which are very interesting.

Does that make you want to grab a microcontroller, a bunch of LEDs and get building?

Is the American public really this stupid???

micsaund — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 20:30:25 +0000

What? Are you stupid?

Is anyone surprised that "pecan pie" has pecans in it? Are people with allergies that brain-dead that they'd buy "pecan pie" thinking it's safe to eat simply because it doesn't list pecans on the ingredients list?

Sure, obviously the ingredients list is inaccurate and that's not good. But, would you buy a can of "Planter's Peanuts" if you were alergic to peanuts, just because the ingredients didn't list "peanuts"?

Our society has gotten totally over-dependant on being able to go through life with their brains turned-off. It's called "common sense" - use it, people...

Movin’ on up to the QNAP TS-219P NAS

micsaund — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 02:04:08 +0000

I finally decided to bite the bullet and bought a real NAS for use at home. I decided on the QNAP TS-219P for a number of reasons I'll discuss in the post. Also, I have plenty of screenshots showing the QNAP UI and a couple simple benchmarks comparing the performance to a USB disk attached to an Airport Extreme.

When it comes to a home server, I've usually gone the "cheap" route. That means building my own server from old PC parts, setting up my own OS, and maintaining it myself. I've had good luck with this and certainly learned a ton about FreeBSD, Linux, and other stuff doing this.

But, the problem is that those old PCs take up space, make noise, and eat electricity.

One day, I decided that I was tired of paying the electric bills and having that big mid-tower server sitting around in my way. After all, for a home "server" I just need network storage to dump files on for the most part. Sure, it's nice to have an SSH server or the occasional thing like that, but not critical compared to the storage component.

That's why I've been using a Guardian MAXimus hardware RAID 1 USB disk attached to my Apple Airport Extreme (AEX) router. The Guardian Max gave me the mirrored RAID I wanted for my network storage since the AEX doesn't do anything with RAID at all.

Since I had the router turned-on all the time, attaching a disk to it for network use seemed like a good solution. I could ditch that huge PC and just have the AEX "airdisk".

This worked fine for about a year, and then I got fed-up with the slow Time Machine backups and the fact that the AEX router spins the disks down after some ridiculously short period of time like five minutes. Every time I tried to access the disk, I had to wait for them to spin up and become available. Then, once they were up, the performance was, uhh, shall we say "lackluster" at about 3-5 MB/sec.

One day, I stumbled across the QNAP line of dedicated NAS (Network Attached Storage) appliances. These were exactly what I wanted. Small, very low power, handled RAID, and could even do stuff like run SSH servers, websites, and other stuff. And, the key thing: they were reasonably priced (note I said "reasonably" not "cheap").

So, after much research and basically finding only good reviews of the QNAP series, I opted for the $400 TS-219P. This toaster-sized box features two hot-swappable bays and an ARM processor. The OS is Linux under the hood, but the appealing thing after adminning my own boxes was NOT having to admin this one! It is basically a plug-and-chug storage appliance.

Today, after upgrading to the QNAP, my Time Machine syncs are super snappy, I can set the disk spin-down time, and my direct SMB transfers are in the neighborhood of 25-32 MB/sec. Much better! The QNAP works with my Mac, Windows and Linux machines for storage, plus it provides an SSH tunnel server for private surfing on the road. I can also use it to share files with family members using a web interface rather than FTP or something like that. I generally don't even log into the admin interface for weeks at a time -- because the QNAP just sits there, day in and day out, doing its thing exactly as I want it to. It gives me no hassles - I get enough of those from my day job!

Anyway, I wanted to provide some screenshots showing the UI as well as a couple simple benchmarks using Xbench.

First, here is the old benchmark using the Airport Extreme router with the disk attached. Note that the hardware RAID1 enclosure was not the limiting factor in any way:

Now, here is the new and improved benchmark using the QNAP on the same network/etc.:

Much better, huh?

Here's a random screenshot I took to show how the QNAP appears in Winbloze since the rest of my screenshots are taken from OS X:

QNAP includes a program called the QFinder which locates the NAS when first run and allows you to configure it even if you don't know the IP address/etc.

Next up, we see the pics of the actual QNAP administration UI. I went through every menu so that you can see what the various options are. I forgot the System Administration menu, so that's last. I was too excited setting-up my new toy and taking all the screenshots was getting tiresome. Note the nerd goodliness of iSCSI, remote syslog, etc.

Well, I hope that all this work answers a question someone has or helps them decide whether a QNAP NAS is the right choice or not. If you buy one (or not), I'd appreciate your using the link to Amazon below as a means to say "thanks for all the screenshots"!

"TS 219P- NAS (Network Attached Storage) Superior Performance All-in-One Server with iSCSI for SOHO and Home Users" (Qnap Systems)

"TS 439 Pro- Turbo NAS (Network Attached Storage) - Superior performance server with iSCSI for Business" (QNAP Systems)

"TS 239 Pro -Turbo NAS (Network Attached Storage) Superior Performance All-in-One Server with iSCSI for Business" (QNAP Systems)

P.S. this is my first post written with Ecto. I had to do some stuff manually in WP that I couldn't figure-out in Ecto. Let me know if you have any trouble.

Stop Safari from opening PDFs inside the browser

micsaund — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 19:08:08 +0000

The Apple Safari logo

It's been a while since I posted, but today, I had to figure-out how to make the OS X version of Safari stop opening PDF files inside the browser since that's one of my pet peeves.

For some reason, I am one of the few people who do not like to do everything inside a browser. One of the things that most computers do, Windows and Mac, is open PDF files inside the browser.

Mac OS X has a built-in tool called Preview that is lightning fast. Compared to Acrobat, Preview is a Ferrari while Acrobat is a Yugo. Thus, I prefer to open my PDF files in Preview and not inside a bloated web browser. I also like to save them, as I often will save a PDF and look at it later.

Until recently, I have been using FireFox on my Mac. But, due to some crashing, slowness in the Gmail RSS reader, etc. I have been trying to use Safari 99% of the time. So, while I had an add-on in FireFox to force downloads of PDF files, I couldn't seen an obvious way to do this in Safari.

After a bit of digging around, I found this little gem. As of this writing, I'm using Safari 4.0.4 on Snow Leopard 10.6.2, but the tip has worked for years, so it should work with most other combinations.

Here's how you stop Safari from opening PDF files inside the browser and instead save them to the disk:

Quit Safari
Open a Terminal (in Applications -> Utilities)
Paste this into the Terminal defaults write com.apple.Safari WebKitOmitPDFSupport -bool YES
Restart Safari

It's that easy! Now, when you click a pdf link, the file will be downloaded to your normal download location on the disk and you can open it with whatever tool you want.

NOTE: This will NOT work with the Windows version. There probably is some similar tweak you can do, but the above tip uses OS X specific commands!

Revisit the moon landing from 40 year ago

micsaund — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 00:53:21 +0000

Interactive website with full audio of the original lunar landing mission

This awesome site has the complete audio of the original moon landing along with lots of interactive goodies.

With the 40th anniversary of the original moon landing this weekend, this post recognizes the amazing achievements of the men and women who made the incredible feat of putting a man on the moon possible. When you consider that they did this in the 60s without the aid of modern computers and the ability to simulate everything to the nth degree, it makes one wonder why it's going to take NASA so long to *get back* to the moon.

Alas, I'm not hear to NASA bash as I feel they are one of the few useful recipients of a of my tax dollars.

That brings us to the website called We Choose The Moon. This interactive site has the full audio from the original moon landing mission so you can hear exactly how complex and cutting-edge this was for everyone involved back in the day. The site shows you the various stages of progress during the mission and lots more. Be sure to check out We Choose The Moon if you enjoy spaceflight or anything like that.

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2009-06-29

micsaund — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 15:00:00 +0000

Weekly Twitter Update

Weed eaters are one of my top ten annoying sounds possible on the planet... #
Anyone else get tired of people who follow you, (for obvious marketing purposes) but obviously don't read anything you type? Gonna unfollow! #
Wow Florida style rain here in Colorado! http://twitpic.com/8boqf #
Imaging my new used Series 2 TiVo drive to a new 320GB. Finally gonna retire the trusty Series 1 after 7 years. http://twitpic.com/8ezte #
Argh... I've got about 10 books here on Amazon that I'm interested in and would buy for the Kindle if the price of the reader was reasonable #
Crazy thought but will Michael Jackson be another Elvis where people think it's a hoax and see him at gas stations and other places? #
New TiVo drive is installed and I'm bringing it up now. Felt odd to remove my Series 1 after 8 years. http://twitpic.com/8klxm #
Awesome weather in CO today and no signs of the daily storms... yet. http://twitpic.com/8levo #
RT @ freeiphoneapps RIP Billy Mays. He was the only human that was allowed to speak entirely in CAPS LOCK. #
hahaha Sneak 80oz of beer into concerts and sporting events in the Beer Belly http://bit.ly/seEoA #
RT @OrlandoUpdates: PHOTO UPDATE: Gaylord Palms (this place is incredible; you have to see it if you haven't already!) http://ow.ly/g0QY #
MAKE Controller & I/O board via @YoTwits http://bit.ly/kjPcc #
I hate waiting to get a haircut. 25 minutes down the drain. #
Beer holster is perfect for 4th of July, BBQ, or whatever. Funny idea. http://bit.ly/YwuCh #
Just put 6GB in my Penryn Macbook Pro. Did hardcore geek-fu and hacked the SPD EEPROM on one of the sticks cuz Apple doesn't handle diff. #
Awwww yeah. Plenty of room for running a VM, FireFox, and other goodies now on the MBP! http://twitpic.com/93nx5 #
Lol for being "illegal" I can count at least 10 diff spots shooting aerial fireworks just looking out bedroom window. #

Slow(er) posting for a while – I’m going to Disney World

micsaund — Sun, 24 May 2009 01:11:42 +0000

Going to Disney World tomorrow

Time for a couple weeks of real living, away from the other part of life known as work...

I know, I know... I haven't been posting a lot lately. It's a number of factors mainly stemming from a job that siphons every bit of life and excitement out of me every day, leaving nothing left for hobbies and other fun stuff.

But anyway, I'm leaving for a week in Walt Disney World and also week in Bonita Springs, FL tomorrow. I jumped on the WDW "buy 4 get 3 free" special and am staying at a "deluxe resort" because the nearly half-price special is the only way I'm gonna be able to stay in a $300+/night resort! Naturally, my first choices were the Contemporary and then the Polynesian, since both are on the monorail, but both were full. So, I did the best I could and grabbed the Yacht Club since it's walking distance to Epcot.

Follow me on Twitter (micsaund naturally) if you want to see periodic updates and photos.

FPGA board emulates classic platforms

micsaund — Mon, 04 May 2009 22:28:36 +0000

FPGA Replay board uses an FPGA to play classic arcade games

This cool projects aims to take the various FPGA-based arcade platforms and run them on a common piece of hardware, thus letting you play many games and platforms without having tons of equipment sitting around.

I've written here about various FPGA arcade and emulator projects, such as the Minimig Amiga 500 project. All of these projects are using a hardware programming language like VHDL or Verilog to implement the circuitry of classic arcade and computer platforms on a regular, (relatively) cheap field programmable gate array (FPGA).

There is one project, though, which is attempting to create a single hardware platform that you can buy which will run many of these independent projects. Currently, the board is still in the design and debug phase, with only a few developers having them, but eventually, the FPGA Replay board will be offered as a pre-assembled unit which you can download the various games onto, or work on your own pet projects.

Currently, the games supported by the FPGA Replay include:

Scramble
Frogger
Asteroids Deluxe
Pac Man
LadyBug
Space Invaders
Galaxian

I'll be keeping an eye on the progress of the FPGA Replay as I think this would be really fun to play around with, if only for the games. But, it could also be a challenging project to take one of my favorite games (like Robotron or Joust) and try to create the VHDL code to actually run it. I suppose that's something to add to my ever-growing list of "long term to-do" projects