Leaving the offices of customer.com today, I pressed the button half a dozen times. (For some reason, customer.com's planners thought it best to litter the offices with giant TVs, most turned on, all muted. There's a corporate espresso bar with seventeen corporate television sets. Really makes one wonder.) Walking to the hotel, I pressed the button a few more times.

Just as I was entering, I saw one last TV, reached for my tv-b-gone and... nothing. An employee had turned the TV off as part of closing for the day.

I'm not sure how I feel. Puzzled to have seen someone turn a television set off. Happy to have seen it happen. And somehow cheated.

Update: What a pity the TV-b-gone is too slow for drive-by actionism.

After a few years of service, my ReadyNAS NV+ broke one day. The hardware was fine, but the software had painted itself into a corner and didn't want to boot at all.

Googling showed that lots of other people have been bitten by the same bug. I phoned support. The support person told me that my box was out of warranty, and would I please post to a web forum and I'm sure someone will help you. I could tell from his voice that he didn't really believe that.

I eventually moved the drives to a linux box. LVM (on ubuntu 10.04) recognised the drives automagically and ext3 let me mount the file system, so I bought a new Synology NAS and copied the data to it.

When I did a factory reinstallation (the hard way) the ReadyNAS booted without problems. From now on I'll use it to back up other devices, nothing more.

A neighbour is noisily tearing down one of its office blocks. I'm sure a new unpretty office block will then be noisily built in its stead, so I bought a Bose QC15 to work in peace meanwhile.

Summary review: It handles the construction-related noise well, but it does really badly with respect to human noises such as a telephone conversation or a crying baby.

Both of the employees I spoke to in the Bose shop here in Munich were sloppy, arrogant and ignorant. Not a good combination. I walked out, and bought the headphones elsewhere.

Tidying my office, chapter 17, in which beloved hardware is less beloved than a usable shelf.

I'm throwing away the keyboard Cherry made for me sometime around the middle nineties.

It has an AT keyboard plug, so I haven't been able to use it in a while, and it's worn out (more…)

It's debian. apt-get install works. But they removed some files without telling dpkg, and edited some, too.

For example, they removed the man pages. Why? It's a NAS: Disk is the one resource it has in abundance, and the man pages aren't even big.

Foo.

When my previous printer ran low on toner, I bought a new printer. Billing is critical. A Brother MFC-8880DN, which I already know from setting it up for someone else.

It's a decent network printer. Notable positive aspects: It can scan in colour (even though it's nominally a monochrome printer). (more…)

My previous laptop (a Lifebook P7210) grew bad-tempered. Investigate or replace? Stupid question considering how much netbooks cost.

My new laptop is a Nokia Booklet 3G, a moderately expensive netbook with good battery lifetime, a 3G modem, a high-resolution screen and no fan. Ubuntu 10.10 runs well (more…)

I've had the 4828 for half a year, and have had several bad experiences.

I have crashed the printer twice. Once by printing the guice guide using chromium and once by printing a book-length ΤΕΧ (dvips) document, mostly text with some tables and figures.

The copier is really, really bad at copying grey-on-white or green-on-white text. (more…)

Nice. Very nice.

It's solid, doesn't move around on the desk, the keys feel clear without any jarring click, (more…)

The Telly Terminate is a small keyring gadget to turn TVs off. It appears to have sold well during the recent sports event.

Pro: It turns TVs off. (more…)

Oxca makes a range of KVM products, including one to provide remote KVM access via TCP/IP. The latter uses a java applet and runs in the browser, and isn't very fine at all. (more…)

I have a Samsung SCX-4828FN printer/fax/­copier/scanner, and use it with linux and BSD. (Update: I've a follow-up posting about the printer.)

The printer is fine for black and white text, such as I usually print: Fast, crisp text with fine edges, nicely readable. Duplex printing just works. The printer can print quite close to the paper's edge, too. (more…)

I need to reconfigure a device via its serial console; the device emits many ANSI/VT escape sequences and other control codes. These are perhaps helpful if one is typing, but not so helpful when a script is to reset and reconfigure the device.

The following perl s/// magic gets rid of most (but not all) escape codes. (more…)

WD Caviar Green disks (WD15EADS-00S2B0 in my case) like to unload the drive heads to save power. The ReadyNAS likes to load them again. This causes two problems: Frequent eight-second delays as the drive heads move away from the platters and then back towards them, and in my case, the drives would reach their stated lifetime (300,000 load cycles) in less than a year.

Several solutions exist. (more…)

Sad to say, but I recently installed ubuntu 9.10 (karmic koala) on a Fujitsu Siemens Lifebook S4572. I installed the minimal system followed by xubuntu-desktop and gcompris: xfce is supposed to be better for small boxes and gcompris is the whole point. (more…)

The Popcorn Hour A-110 is a small silent box that can play ISOs and other movies scaled up to 1920×1080 resolution. We have one, diskless, connected to our NAS via gigabit ethernet, (more…)

If my Benq M108 mouse is plugged into the USB hub of my Eizo S2100 monitor while linux 2.6.31 (and several others) boots on my Zotac ION-ITX-B motherboard, then the kernel freezes after this line:

[ 0.828204] io scheduler cfq registered (default)

Numlock does nothing, I need to press the any key.

If I unplug the mouse from the hub, or the hub from the PC, then the boot succeeds. (more…)

I bought a ReadyNAS NV+ years ago, and don't like it. It serves files, but does so many things badly that next time I want to add more disk space, I intend to purchase something else. (more…)

Zotac ION ITX B motherboard, Silverstone SG05 case, Scythe Slip Stream 120mm fan, Be Quiet SFX power supply, SSD. (more…)

The Quickmill 3035 Pegaso, also called Quickmill 03035 or Quick Mill 3035 (or other combinations of the same units) is an espresso machine with built-in coffee grinder and an unusual heating mechanism. (more…)