Last night, the RAID simply shut down, and it wouldn’t come up again this morning. I unplugged the faulty drive, and tried starting the NAS with the single good drive, nothing.
Tag: computing
Then a little later, I taught myself php and perl (in that order, strangely), and went to work designing modifications for systems like phpBB and Wordpress, not to mention the now-long-defunct Filklore Music Store.
Tagadab, on the other hand, provided heaps of helpful information to my enquiry, plus a 7 day trial for £1 (later extended, for free, to 10 days). Which means – with their help – it was easier to migrate to a server run by a Tagadab than migrate within Webfusion’s offerings. Plus I am going to save a fiver a month.
Having proved it worked, I then forgot about it, as the only such channel I can currently get is Sky, which I am not interested in. I just wanted to ensure my kit could handle it should other channels come along in the future.
Most of the publicity shots and videos show this kind of thing plumped in the middle of the desk – that doesn’t make any sense to me. I have mine as far to one side as I can manage, which leaves a good half of the desk available for non-computer tasks. Since the pictures I first took for Facebook, I have moved the device to the left side of my desk, which I prefer; I have also angled it slightly, so it doesn’t feel like it is just sticking out.
The new router arrived in July, but initial attempt to get VPN working to my office with a suitable encryption failed. All I had to do was tinker with it, but I didn’t have time, and couldn’t afford for my work VPN to be down.
I recently spotted this youtube video, which is quite amusing.
It arrived today, and I immediately spotted something wrong. Checking the listing, I could see it was my mistake, and not the seller.
The software – DeVilbiss SmartLink – actually installed first time, without difficulties, and started correctly. It then told me I was on an old version (not surprising), and I did I want to upgrade? Of course I did – and that was my mistake.

Anyway, today’s call came through during my tea break, and this time there was a person on the other end, telling me that he was calling about the security of my Windows machine. “Oh, that one”, I thought; but didn’t hang up, as I was curious how these guys go about “proving” a machine is infected.
I already have a couple of cookery resources that can be usefully used on a tablet. The original recipe book for my pellet grill, for a start, and recently the 40 page recipe guide for my breadmaker got too sticky to be hygenic, and was replaced with a pdf kindle sent to me by Breville.
I have been having fun with my Bloggie 3D camera, but it highlighted something – that I lack a computer capable of doing any kind of useful video editing.
In the (distant) past, I used a desktop I had built for gaming and music, but that has long been superceded by modern requirements. It has actually been sitting under a variety of desks and shelf units for the last 3 years, and I know that it isn’t capable of anything by today’s standards.
Because I work from home, I now tend to use my work computer for most day-to-day stuff. This isn’t as naughty as it sounds, as for some years, my personal requirements have been mostly just for a browser and email (both of which I need for work, anyway). Any gaming I did was now on the Wii, and my Pokerstars account runs from either my smart phone or my Asus Eee.
Anyway, to cut a long story short, I thought I would look for a high-end laptop, with a decent built in video card. That way, I could use it downstairs, in front of the TV, as well as in my office. I was looking at a mixture of AV-spec machines, and gaming machines, both of which would do what I wanted.
Then I saw the Toshiba Qosmio F750-12P.