Category: Gadgetology

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Give us this day our daily power outage

At around 5:30 this morning I awoke to an ominous thunderous sound. It wasn’t actually thunder, but Xena thunderously knocking on the front door wanting to be let in before the actual thunder got here. I let her in and then shut down the Avid, which I had left on all night to render some stuff, and then we got yet another monsoon, and more flooding (hey, maybe we’ll get more Gamera!) and what’s becoming an almost daily tradition: the storm-induced power outage. I’m sure with storms rolling through just about every other day that there isn’t a chance to do a really comprehensive repair job on substations and whatnot, but it’s getting kind of silly.

Please Squeeze. I’d have something insanely cool to show you video-wise right now, except that all of a sudden, I can’t get Sorenson Squeeze to run on a single machine in my house. I’ll admit that I haven’t tried my wife’s laptop yet (though it has other issues that make me hesitant to even try, such as rolling over, powering down and playing dead with no warning), but it’s incredibly frustrating – this also means no new site video for stuff like Phosphor Dot Fossils (this has also held up a promo video that I’ve put together for the PDF DVD, which I’m sure is probably helping sales to drop off significantly, which they have). So maybe “incredibly frustrating” is being a bit on the charitable side. I’ve submitted a trouble ticket, though I have the feeling the fix will be “Upgrade to our new version for $XX!” I really don’t seem to be having much luck on the computer end these days, which is a surprise, because normally it’s purely mechanical problems that give me massive headaches. Which makes this next bit all the more surprising…

Holy #$%&, I fixed the air conditioner! Okay, maybe fix is too strong a work, because it wasn’t really broken, just frozen over, and this “fix” involved pointing a hair dryer on full heat at the ice until it melted away, and then taking a bucket full of warm soapy water and cleaning the intake vent, and then changing the filter that I should’ve changed probably a month or two back, which, if I’d done it then, this probably would never have happened. So on the balance of it, purely mechanical things still caused a massive headache. But I actually fixed it – if you want to call it that – without calling anyone out to do it, which I couldn’t afford anyway, which surprises me as much as it does anyone else. Still, I doubt the high-priced HVAC techs of the world have anything to fear from me. There are still plenty of people who are willing to pay them big bucks to aim a hair dryer on full heat at their iced-over intake.

More fun with Globat. Welcome back to Globat.com, fine web hosting and the home of Internal Server Errors galore! Today’s issue: “Server shutdown in progress.” Repeatedly. Sometimes you can actually get what you want from theLogBook’s databases…and just as often you can’t. The really fun part of this is on Scribblings, where each server shutdown forces me to go in and reconfigure my anti-spam plugin from scratch. If Globat sucked any more, they’d be off the Suck Scale on my suckometer. I can’t get the site moved away from these bozos fast enough.

Here’s hoping I can get some good Sorenson Squeeze lovin’ soon, because I’m eager to show off this…thing…that I want to show off. He said vaguely.… Read more

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...And Little E Makes 3 Cooking With Code Gadgetology

Thanks for the memories

The memory card snafu has been solved! Pantech pointed me in the direction of an incredibly useful piece of software called Easy Photo Recovery which recovered – get this – all but two of the photos that had vanished from the offending memory stick. (The two casualties were from this week’s ToyBox piece, and since that’s already posted the originals aren’t needed anymore.) This program is just amazing, and I had no idea anything like it existed – and I’ll probably be calling on its services in the future, since this isn’t the first oddball disappearance of memory stick photos I’ve ever experienced, and because I take a lot of pictures. (I don’t know anyone with kids who doesn’t, actually.) … Read more

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Feedback Gadgetology

Stop shirkin’ and start workin’: the fall of Queeg.

Not too long ago – not even a month ago, in fact – I was raving about the new LaCie “Big Disk” Ethernet network drive I’d gotten, which added a desperately-needed terabyte of storage to my network. After copying most of my media (including my whole directory of Evan photos) to the new drive and making sure it was performing as promised, I started to gradually delete the stuff off the local hard drives on Zen and Orac.

At about the ten day mark, it started getting weird. In short, Queeg started living up to its namesake, trying to elbow out other machines for the *.*.1.1 slot on my router – very weird behavior. LaCie tech support thought that was odd, but couldn’t really offer any solutions, and any attempt to force Queeg to settle down at a specific address rather than a dynamically-assigned one brought about even weirder weirdness.

Then I couldn’t get files from it anymore. BIG problem – kinda defeats the whole point of having a freakin’ outboard mass storage device, no? LaCie tech support sent me two patches, neither of which fixed the problem, and in fact made the thing start acting weirder – I couldn’t modify any settings because the system firmware insisted that the drive was completely out of space and couldn’t handle any more. Then last night, it lost its “shares” – its directories full of stuff that I had moved there from the other two machines. I thought it had lost the data. LaCie’s answer to this was to send a return authorization number to ship the drive back to them, but they said that there was no way they’d get their fingers into the pie on recovering the 600 gigs of data I’d offloaded to the drive.

I know that every hard drive in the world, in every computer in the world, will someday fail. It’s moving parts and motors, which wear out. I accept that. That’s why you’re probably never going to go out of business making hard drives (at least until they’re phased out in favor of stable mass-storage-grade flash drives). But you know, three weeks? That’s a new land speed record. I’ve pretty much made the decision that I’m not going to take LaCie up on their offer – I’m going to return the drive to Amazon and get my money back instead, and get a 1TB internal drive for Zen..by a different manufacturer. Zen’s overdue for getting the dust blown out of it anyway – it needs to be opened up as it is, might as well stick a drive in there while I’m at it.

So, the grade for LaCie’s 1TB “Big Disk” Ethernet Drive is an epic fail – it might be a great product when it works, but when it doesn’t you’re going to be saddled with some of the most inept tech support you’ve ever seen. I’m used to outsourced-to-India call center flunkies not being able to cope when your tech support call diverges from their script. I’m not sure what the excuse is for these jokers.

Also, in the future, I think I need to stop naming my network nodes after cranky-ass sci-fi supercomputers. Apparently the deck’s stacked against me on the hardware manufacturer end anyway, so I need to do myself a favor and stop tempting fate.… Read more