I went on holiday for a few days last week and as is really quite typical, it was during this holiday that my server decided to fail.

What made this particularly annoying was I had intended to use my server as remote storage for my photographs. Considering the holiday was my first abroad since 1998, I felt some form of backup for photographs would be important. That plan had to be abandoned when I could no longer gain access on Tuesday 3 August.

As far as I can establish, a power failure of an unknown magnitude occurred at some point on Tuesday. When I came home, I discovered that the Sky box had reset which can happen with the smallest glitches. Normally after a failure, the computer restarts and all is well. However the server had no power when I returned home in the early hours of Thursday morning. I switched the machine on and ignored the numerous beeps emitted by the PC speaker being too tired to acknowledge them.

Realising the next day that I still could not access the server, I took the monitor from my normal machine, connected it to the server along with a spare keyboard and discovered that the CMOS had reset to its defaults. I checked over the BIOS settings and all seeming well, booted the server. What I didn't notice however was that there was no mention on bootup of the SATA to IDE controller to which my data drive was connected. When I noticed a few failure messages on start, I tried to access the data drive but was unsuccessful.

Panic started to set in at this point. Had I lost nearly 1TB of data? I took the drive out of the server and plugged it into my more modern general use machine. I could feel and hear the hum of the drive spinning and the BIOS detected it. Thank goodness, it seemed to be intact.

I then did a little experiment, powering the drive from my general machine, but connecting the drive to the server's SATA controller. Still the server did not recognise it. That led me to deduce that the onboard SATA controller on my server had failed.

So that left me with a dilemma. How do I get this drive reconnected to the server? Could I buy a new controller card? I did some research but the cheaper cards did not appear to be reliable with Linux. More expensive cards were out of my price range. So the alternative was to run the data drive as an external USB drive. I purchased an enclosure suitable for a 3.5" SATA drive and that arrived today.

I was very impressed to find that on connecting the drive to the server via USB, it was instantly detected and mounted at the correct point meaning everything instantly came back to life! Panic over!

Fortunately I had run a partial backup of this drive so if it had failed, I wouldn't have lost everything. Unfortunately though I don't have enough storage space to do a full backup of nearly 1TB. This scare has led me to realise I really need to get this sorted as soon as possible. I'll probably look at a solution to backup up to 2TB of data considering I am now recording HD home videos which consume a lot of space. I think 1TB of space will be consumed reasonably quickly.

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Tags: computers, this website

Last Wednesday I added to my collection of computers by purchasing a Samsung N210 netbook - a small, low-power, long-life laptop computer.

My primary reason for purchasing such a machine was for a forthcoming holiday, allowing me to backup photographs, video footage, write a journal and connect to the internet. A standard laptop wouldn't fit the bill - the one available to me was just to big and heavy. My smartphone didn't have the connectivity or storage to allow me to get pictures off from SD cards.

So the netbook option seemed to be the logical choice, and after a lot of searching (it's a crowded marketplace), I settled on the Samsung.

This particular model has a white case, a 10.1" 1024x600 matt screen, 250GB hard drive, 1GB DDR2 RAM (expandable to 2GB), Bluetooth, wifi 802.11b/g/n, built-in webcam, SD card reader and 3x USB sockets. The processor is one of the newer Atom N450 1.66GHz models which features an Intel GMA350 graphics chip as well. This processor, compared to the older Atom N270, features significant power reduction meaning battery life is significantly better than the earlier model.

I had to spend a lot of time seriously considering my requirements and trawling through reviews. Quite early on, I settled for a machine with the N450 processor which fortunately narrowed my search. From here though, machines are very similar with little to tell between them.

What settled it for me was that this model had strong reviews and featured the newest WiFi standard. Although I don't operate a 802.11n network just yet, I'm planning an upgrade in the not-to-distant future and it made sense to future proof the machine as far as possible.

As for my impressions now that I'm using the netbook, I'm very happy. The machine is slightly heavier than I anticipated but compared to an inexpensive laptop, it's certainly small and light. It fits in my backpack easily and I think it'll just fit in to my camera bag. The reduced resolution on the screen is noticeable - particularly in the vertical, but small tricks such as auto-hiding the taskbar and running a web browser full-screen offsets that limitation somewhat. Battery life is impressive and I estimate achieving anything between 5 - 7 hours of uptime depending of course on what it's used for. Admittedly this is short of the advertised 11 hours battery life, but still very good.

There's no doubt that the processor is limited, but day-to-day browsing feels sufficiently fast. Standard definition video files play okay from the hard-drive but I did struggle to use BBC iPlayer through Firefox on the supplied Windows 7 Starter. Video playback stuttered and full-screen use was out of the question.

I've configured my machine to dual-boot Windows 7 with Ubuntu Netbook Remix 10.04. I've divided the disk into multiple partitions to accommodate the two operating systems, the restore partition and a shared data partition. I find myself booting more and more into Ubuntu. It feels snappy and iPlayer here is much more successful although full-screen playback is still a struggle.

There are a few niggles with the open source system - after installation there is no wireless connectivity until an update is done via wired ethernet, and some additional software needs to be installed to make some special keys e.g., brightness work. I've also noticed the wireless does not always resume when waking the machine from a sleep state although this is intermittent and a reboot easily fixes it. I also needed to enable multiple desktops using gconf-editor which I think is essential on a limited resolution screen. Now it's configured though, I think it's a very usable and snappy system.

The Windows installation needed some work too. As seems to be the case with bought computer systems, a lot of extra - unnecessary - software was pre-installed. It took some time to install this as part of the initial setup and then more time again to remove it. I'm talking about Microsoft Office 2007 (trial), Microsoft Works, various non-standard games, McAfee virus scanner - all applications that hog disk space and have the potential to slow down the machine. Fortunately once I'd cleared all this I was able to take a snapshot of the system with one of the useful pieces of software - Samsung Recovery Solution 4.

So all-in-all, I think this was a sound choice and I'm looking forward to putting it through it's paces. As well as the uses I mentioned earlier, I will also see how it performs next to my radio equipment - I wonder if it emits a large amount of RF? As it has a large battery life I'm considering how useful it could be for operating a portable PSK amateur radio station. I suspect that it will be like other laptops I've used - on battery it'll be fine. It'll be the mains adaptor that pollutes the spectrum.

At the time of writing, the Samsung N210 was available at Amazon UK for £278 (white model) or £333 (black model).

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Tags: computers, reviews, gadgets, amateur radio

As is pretty well established, I've been a Linux user for a while now and I've come to expect certain things of which one is whilst most things work, somethings can be a right pain in the derriere. Wireless networking has often been cited as a prime example of such headache inducing problems.

So it was with that in mind (and the expectation that laptop computers will cause more problems than desktops) that I set to work over the weekend on installing Ubuntu Linux 8.04 onto a damaged IBM/Lenevo Thinkpad R50e.

This particular laptop has a damaged screen making it pretty much useless as something to use on the lap. The computer itself though was functioning fine. My mission then, was to employ this machine as a living room media computer. For the requirements of such a system it ticks all the boxes - it's small (fits into my TV centre), it's very quiet, it's high spec'd enough to playback HD (720p) video and it's onboard audio is of a suitable standard for my existing audio equipment.

I didn't want to use the supplied OS (Windows XP) not because of a hate of all things Microsoft, but because my Server runs Linux and I find sharing disc space between machines using NFS rather more straight forward and reliable than SAMBA (although I do have the latter available). A Linux OS would play FLAC audio files (the format my CDs are ripped to) out-of-the-box whereas Windows would need extra software; but above all I wanted to use the Amarok music player connected to an existing Amarok MySQL database so that my music stats would be updated.

So it was with keen determination that I downloaded and ran the latest LiveCD on said laptop and straight away things worked. The LiveCD booted without so much as a whimper and at that point everything seemed fine. The wireless adaptor was detecting nearby networks including my own, I had widescreen resolution on my television and I could hear audio. Result!

Not wanting to get my hopes up though, I told myself to stay skeptical until the final install was complete. The 6 installation steps went by uneventfully although I did get concerned when the partitioner appeared to hang but it was just taking it's time. 30 minutes later, the system restarted without the LiveCD and Ubuntu loaded up. Again happy as a happy thing.

So now came the real testing. Wireless network - connected first time. Internet access - connected first time. NFS shares - mounted first time. Amarok - installed, accessing the database and playing tunes first time. Playing HD video - codecs installed and the video playing full screen first time.

I even tested a few of the laptops special keys: the volume keys (up/down/mute) all functioned, and brightness worked fine. I didn't notice any effect of the external screen button (Fn+F7) though and I haven't yet tested the zoom (Fn+Space), wireless (Fn+F5) or other special keys but only because I have no need for them. I should probably also note that I haven't tested battery life since I'm running without it (no need for a battery if it's staying plugged in).

I really could not be happier. With the exception of mounting drives using fstab, no terminal access was needed. Although I used it for software installation, Synaptic would have worked just as well.

I now have a tidy media computer controlled by VNC (on a fully working Windows laptop) running on my TV allowing me to listen to music all day long (as evidenced in my last.fm profile from yesterday), watch stored videos, stream radio stations across the net, use the BBC's catchup service; the iPlayer, and view photographs on a large screen.

Yes, I fully realise that there are hundreds of different laptop and desktop computers out there, and that there are problems on many when installing Linux. This example however shows how good and simple it can be given the right hardware. This is what Ubuntu, Linux in general and the computer industry should strive for.

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Tags: ubuntu, linux, computers

The Linux command line makes the task of making a DVD-Video compliant disc fairly straight forward when one knows how, but finding straight forward instructions on the internet isn't always so simple. So after searching through various sites I've come up with my own guide.

1. Create a folder on a hard disc with ample storage space (15GB should be plenty for one 4.7GB DVD). Make sure this is easily accessible from the command prompt (keep the name short for ease of typing). For this example, I'm going to place a folder on the desktop called "dvd".

2. Copy the video files that you wish to place on the DVD into this new folder.

3. If you haven't already, call up the Terminal (Applications - Accessories - Terminal in Ubuntu).

4. Ensure tovid, mencoder and dvdauthor are both installed

   sudo apt-get install tovid mencoder dvdauthor

5. Navigate to the new folder containing your videos

   cd ~/Desktop/dvd

6. Use tovid to convert videos to DVD compliant MPG files

   tovid -noask -dvd -in myvideo.avi -out myvideo.mpg

   
   Repeat this for each video file

7. Use dvdauthor to convert the newly created MPG files to DVD format files

   dvdauthor -o DVD/ -t myvideo.mpg

   
   Repeat this for each video file. Each file will become a title on the DVD.

8. Run the following command to create the titles:

   dvdauthor -o DVD/ -T

9. Create an ISO of the DVD, ready to be burnt to disc:

   mkisofs -dvd-video -v -o DVD.iso DVD

10. A file called DVD.iso will now be found in the folder created earlier. Use a CD/DVD burning package such as K3B or Brasero to burn this image to a disc.

11. The DVD should now be playable on a standalone player

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Tags: ubuntu, linux, computers, dvd


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If anyone reading this doesn't regularly backup their important data, then you may wish to start doing so. It is often said there are two types of people - those who backup, and those who wish they had.

The reason I have put out that little warning is that my server's system drive died today. One minute it was working fine, the next it had gone Ka-put. Luckily for me, it wasn't my main data drive but it did contain the databases that this website relies on - databases that contain all my blog entries, meta data on files, map locations and music library statistics.

Fortunately I have an automatic daily backup program running which takes copies of these databases plus essential server configuration files, archives them, and copies the archive to the data drive. The latest backup took place at 1AM this morning, about 8 hours before the system died. If my backups weren't daily, I would have lost the last blog entry and my most recent music statistics.

Rather obviously, normal service has now been restored. A spare 15GB hard drive has come to the rescue until I can get a newer drive installed, and thanks to having those configuration files handy, the server was restored with only about 3-4 hours of downtime.

I'm going to look at getting a couple of 500GB (or maybe 750GB) drives and setting up a mirrored RAID array to protect my storage drive. Although most of that is backed up, my music takes more space than I have room for on secondary storage. I'm also going to look at improving my daily backup system so that it copies to a flash drive and also sends a copy to a remote server by FTP.

But it just goes to show that even the most basic forms of backup can save the day, so once again I urge everyone to BACKUP YOUR DATA!

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Tags: computers

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has agreed to allow a vast increase in the number of Top Level Domain (TLD) names that could be used alongside the current common names such as .com, .org, .net etc.

The idea is that anyone who has a sound business plan (and the financial backing to do so) will be able to setup a TLD, meaning there is the potential for hundreds of new TLDs.

This is a bad idea, and will leave internet addressing in a right mess. I can't imagine that corporations are very happy with the idea, considering that they will have to buy up a vast number of domain names in order to protect their intellectual property and trade marks. It also appears that the idea of a logical structure will break down.

This screams of a money making scheme, which is fine in it's own way but some structure could have been setup. Consider my idea:

1. Have a small number of international addresses, strictly restricted to, and only registerable by the following:






• .com - International companies




• .net - International networks




• .org - International organisations/charities




• .ind - Personal websites for those who want an international web presence




Define two or three letter TLDs for all connected countries (as we have now).







• .uk - United Kingdom




• .us - United States




• .es - Spain




• etc




Each country is responsible for it's own TLD. The international TLDs are replicated as second level domains. Individual nations decide whether they want a strictly organised naming system, or whether they will allow anyone within that nation to apply to run any other second level domain.







• .com.uk - UK Companies




• .net.uk - UK Networks




• .org.uk - UK Organisations/charities




• .ind.uk - UK Individuals





• .smith.uk - UK Alternative second level domain




• .jones.uk - UK Alternative second level domain




• .whatever.uk - UK Alternative second level domain




A multi-national not-for-profit organisation maintains the international TLDs and country TLDs.

Within each country, a not-for-profit organisation accountable to government maintains the second level domains. This organisation makes final decisions on whether an alternative second level domain is applicable, and enforces restrictions on who can apply for a website under it. Applications should be transparant so a company can easily monitor what second level domains are being registered and object if necessary.

Although naming will get a lot more complicated than it is now, at least it will be clear which nation a site applies to, and individual nations can decide on how limited their second level domains are.

Strict enforcement of who can apply for a domain should be mandatory. For example, I have the websites www.bengamblin.com and www.bengamblin.co.uk but I'm not a company. Under my proposal, I would loose the right to these addresses but would have the right to www.bengamblin.ind and www.bengamblin.ind.uk.

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Tags: internet, computers, domains

Just under two weeks ago, Kate and I bought a Nintendo Wii. In order to use it too it's fullest, I also re-instated WiFi on my home network.

When we moved home back in August, for some unknown reason my Wireless Access Point decided to stop working. It hadn't been that reliable anyway so it wasn't a big surprise. Fortunately the use of wireless hasn't been such a big issue since there is a phone point in the office meaning my computers could be wired into the router. For that reason I didn't bother replacing it.

The only real issue was Kate's laptop, but we got used to either using a very long network cable or just using the laptop in the office.

However, it's obviously impractical to have long cables running from the office, across the hall and into the living room in order to network the games machine so I decided to get myself back on the airwaves with an Linksys WRT54GL Wireless Router.

Now, for the first time ever, I am experiencing how truely liberating using a wireless connection can be. Not only can I now surf the internet easily from the sofa again (through the Wii or Kate's laptop), but on a nice evening like this evening, I can sit out on our balcony (as I am right now) and take in the fresh evening air whilst writing in my blog!

I love technology!

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Tags: computers, networking

The Gadget Show returned to British television screens today, for it's 6th series; promising an hour of 'soft' tech reviews and gadget fun.

Why soft reviews? Well there's hardly a lot of in depth discussion about the pro's and con's of a particular product especially when compared to other products that it might be tested against. This is not necessarily a bad thing. In depth reviews would turn off a lot of viewers who just want to see what the latest gadget on the street is, and what some people think of it.

However, I don't think today's comparative review of lightweight, small laptops was particularly fair.

The review focused on three laptop computers:

• The MacBook Air

• The Asus Eee PC

• Sony Vaio TZ31

The problem I had with this review, is simply the choice of machines. I'm OK with the MacBook Air, and Sony Vaio - but including the Asus Eee PC in that? It only costs something along the lines of £220 compared to over £1100 for the other two. Was this a 'David vs Goliath' type test or something?

In my mind, it's a different class of computer for a different user. The Asus is designed to corner the 'cheap laptop' market and because of this does not have the processor, RAM or screen size that the other laptops have. It's a laptop that's able to take a bit of abuse due to the extremely small size meaning it can be carried nearly everywhere. I'd be terrified of causing damage to the other two and because of that, wouldn't consider them as portable since I would insist on a proper laptop bag to carry them with. The Eee PC would probably be thrown into a bag carrying everything else.

In all fairness the Gadget Show reviewers did give it the same rating as the MacBook (3 G's) but there are many other companies producing laptops to a similar specification to the Asus that I think it would have been fairer to do a comparison between them perhaps as well as a comparison between computers of the MacBook and Vaio class.

And my personal opinion on the three? The MacBook is the best looking notebook I have ever seen but I don't think I'd be happy with just one USB port. I know a hub could be used but then there's more cables, destroying that sleek look. The Vaio looks like any other laptop to me, and I'm not aware of it's specs. They said it took 3:30 to boot into Vista though, so something is seriously wrong with it's default settings and software. I've seen the Asus in a store, and it's size amazes me. It would be great for surfing from the sofa, taking on holiday, uploading stuff to this website. Granted it's not got the highest specs, but that's not what it's about.

That Asus is going on my shopping list!

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Tags: television, gadgets, computers

I've been pondering about building another new PC over the last couple of days, but can't decide whether it's really worth it or not.

I've currently got two machines running - a server machine (running as a web, email and file server) and a general use machine (doing day to day stuff).

The server is running nicely at the moment since it's not that old, but my general machine is getting on in years.

It's an old AMD Athlon 1700+ with a measly 256MB of RAM. It used to run using onboard sound and video (with shared RAM), but I added in a spare soundcard and bought a PCI video card (no AGP or PCI-E here) which helped it's performance a bit, and eliminated annoying squeeky noises from the speakers when scrolling. I've also added a new PSU which runs quieter and cooler than the original

It still is quite sluggish though. Running any OS (Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Windows), startup time is not great and applications take a while to load. And running 3 or 4 programs at once really starts to tax the system. Every now and again it will just restart of it's own accord.

Now I have a couple of options.

The first option is the cheapest. Buying a stick of 512MB SDRAM should stabilise the system somewhat. Based on eBuyer prices, that'll cost around £35. Even better would be 2 sticks to make it 1GB although I'll need to check the motherboard to ensure it will take that. Assuming it does though, it'll set me back £70 (2 x 512MB modules). I'd also like to add a USB2 card, but that would mean loosing the dedicated sound card since there's only 2 PCI slots. And whether or not I add that card, I'd like a front panel USB hub to take up a 3.5" drive bay. So let's say I upgrade with 512MB RAM, 1 USB2 PCI card and a USB2 internal hub, option 1 will cost around £50.00

The second option is a new machine. I intend to recycle the original case, power supply, sound card, hard drive and DVD burner so all that would be needed is a new motherboard, CPU, cooler, RAM, graphics card, and internal USB hub. As a temporary measure, I can use the PCI graphics card so I'll take that off the list.

Now I need to consider what sort of processor. Ideally I'd like to future proof myself somewhat, so I was thinking of an Intel Core 2 Duo E4400 2x2GHz CPU. Ideally I'd like 1GB of DDR RAM but will settle for 512MB for the time being. I'll also settle for the cooler supplied with the CPU, and no USB hub as temporary cost saving measures. So the cost of the new machine at this spec will be around £135.00

So for an extra £85.00 I can have a new machine. If I save the money and go for the upgrade, I could decide in a year that the aging AMD Athlon CPU simply doesn't cut it any more and get a new machine then. However I'd be stuck with outdated SDRAM with no use for it.

The third option is to go for a new machine but settle for a 1.8GHz Core 2 Duo E2160 chip. This will save around £25 from the cost of machine, but I'll also loose some L2 Cache as well as that slight speed drop.

I haven't decided yet, but whilst typing this out, to me simply upgrading this ageing computer doesn't seem very effective. The option of a slightly slower CPU could be a winner, and in a few years time I should be able to upgrade the processor without dramatically changing hardware, if I decide it's necessary.

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Tags: computers

No it's not some sort of medicinal drug. It's much more geeky than that. It's an alternative keyboard layout that is supposed to be much more efficient than QWERTY.

I was inspired to try the new layout after reading a thread about it in the Ubuntu Community Cafe forum, where various people are giving it a go and posting their experiences of it. Well, I say new, but it actually dates back to the early 1900's.

Yesterday I installed the new layout onto my Ubuntu machine, onto my logon on Kate's laptop, and onto my iPaq, and have slowly been learning where the keys are ever since. I've even altered the physical layout of my keyboard so I can see where the correct keys are if I need to double check, although people say not changing the keyboard layout is a good excuse to learn how to touch-type if you don't already know.

So I'm trying to learn this new layout correctly, using the right fingers for the right keys rather than how I type with QWERTY which is simply a knowledge of where each key is and only using two or three fingers to press them, although I can type reasonably fast like this.

But other than the slightly geeky obsession I have with trying something out of the ordinary, I do have a valid reason for attempting to use this new layout.

I occasionally find after doing a lot of typing at the office, that I have a dull ache in my left wrist. Since it's reckoned that the Dvorak keyboard minimises the risk of damage occuring through RSI, I thought that it may alleviate this pain.

The only problem is I cannot currently use Dvorak at work for two reasons. First of all, I am way to slow at typing at the moment. The first paragraph of this entry took about 5 minutes to write before I changed to QWERTY. I did notice a marked improvement today though over yesterday so hopefully my typing speed will increase quite quickly (it's reckoned around 4 weeks to return to normal typing speed). The second reason is that I can't install alternative keyboard layouts on my laptop. I'll have to ask our IT contractors to install it for me.

The good thing as far as work is concerned, is that assuming I can master touch typing, I won't need a special keyboard since I won't need to look at the keys anyway. Take the typing of this post as a reversed example, I am typing using the QWERTY layout, but looking at my keyboard I see Dvorak. Because I know where the QWERTY keys are, I don't need to look at the keyboard itself. Hopefully I'll be able to achieve the same with Dvorak.

Of course there is the possibility that by this time next week, I will have given up on the whole idea and just reverted back to the mainstream. I do like to be a bit different though even if it is just to baffle people at work who might need to type something on my computer.

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Tags: computers