My Drobo turned on me #drobo #fail #twit
After I have been recommending Drobo to almost everyone I have talked to for roughly a month (bought it on recommendation from TWiT), it suddenly turned on me this weekend. It all started Saturday morning. I have been using the Drobo as a media backend for my Plex/Mac Mini HTPC setup. RipIt has helped me backup my DVD collection and I have carefully named each movie so that the IMDB scraper in Plex can find information about it. Before going to bed Friday night I started a copy job of the latest movies from my Ubuntu box to the Drobo (via DroboShare/Samba). Saturday morning I discovered that all the 7 copy jobs was stopped due to "Connection time out" with the Drobo. I tried copy files to it again, and once more I got a time out message. The Drobo Dashboard told me that everything was fine and that my data was secure, but I could not write anything to the disk. I connected the Drobo via USB directly to my MB Pro to analyze the problem thoroughly and it turned out OS X could only mount the Drobo in read-only mode. Disk Utility couldn't verify or repair the disk so I researched the web and it seems like a common problem. None of the suggested solutions worked (not even DiskWarrior) to get the disk fixed, so I had to buy extra disk space for my Ubuntu box and copy everything back (roughly 1TB of music, movies and photos), reformat the Drobo and copy everything back again. So far I'm 12 hours into the first copy job so I guess I will be back on track sometime in the next two days.
The Snow Leopard have arrived
I have now been using Snow Leopard since lunch and most of the programs I run on a daily basis works just fine. Besides the fact that I got several GB more available disk space, the most usable new feature is the improved grid-mode of “stacks”. Now I can display all my applications, downloads and documents without having to press the annoying “Show in Finder” shortcut.
Another feature in the category nice-to-have-feature-that-I-didn’t-know-I-needed is the “Force Eject” button that appears if you try to eject a disc image that for some reason is busy or locked.
SlipStream – The Bamboo Pin 2009
Garmin Edge 705 and Open Street Map
I recently bought a Garmin Edge 705 bike computer to help with my training for next years Vätternrundan (a Swedish 300K bike race around the second largest lake). It was quite expensive in itself which led to a small chock when I saw the price of the maps – almost 50% of the price of the GPS unit.
I googled for free maps and after a while I stumbled upon openmtbmap.org. They package Open Street Maps for mountain biking, hiking or bicycling. So far I have only used the maps a couple of times and they have worked just fine. In the end it all comes down to how detailed the Open Street Map is for the required area.
http://openmtbmap.org/tutorials/convert-maps-for-mac-os-x-roadtrip/
http://www.openstreetmap.org/
The new Sony reader could be interesting…
… if it handles PDFs and text files in a better way than the previous models (preferably natively) and if the Sony eBook shop will be available outside the US.
(via Gizmodo)
Apple hardware saved my day
Today I got a tips from @joltcan (thank you!) via Twitter to try AirPort Extreme instead of my PowerLine ethernet setup. I went out and bought one, configured it, added AirPort Express as a wireless extender and … great success!
Some HD stuff with really high bit rate still makes the Plex choke sometimes, but it is only very small flickerings once in a while.
The mailbox that could electrocute you!
Just the other day I had to send a snail mail quite urgently and had to visit the “last call” mailbox at Borrgatan in Malmö. To my surprise there was a warning label on the cover of the mailbox with the text “During humid conditions the handle of the mailbox could carry an electric current” (but in Swedish, see picture). Crazy!
PowerLan not fast enough for HD streaming
I recently bought a pair of D-Link DHP-303’s instead of using WiFi between our work area (where the router lives) and our TV area (where Mac Mini and PS3 lives). At first it worked as a charm, then I started streaming HD content (low compression ratio) and Plex started to choke every 10 seconds or so. First I thought it was lack of RAM in the Mac Mini (1GB), but after I tried moving my Drobo from the work area to the TV area everything fell into place. It now plays everything I throw at it very smoothly … what a bliss.
On the flip side I now have another fan in the otherwise oh so quiet TV-room and the data transfer rate between my workstation and the Drobo dropped from 10 MB/s to 1 MB/s which is quite noticeable (transfer times went from minutes to hours). I guess that is the price you have to pay for smooth low compressed HD playback these days.
New keyboard
Today I got the aluminum keyboard without numpad (a colleague wanted a keyboard with numpad so we switched). It feels better somehow. Can’t write at full speed just yet, but you adapt to it pretty quickly.
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