If new phone shizzle is your thing then I’m cool as cats today…how many people in the UK have one of these in their greasy palms right now…Midday, Friday 26th April 2013?
The answer is not many.
But alas it’s not mine, it’s destined for Mrs Billy Goat to replace her Galaxy S2…..I haven’t told her yet she’ll need hands like shovels to hold this behemoth slab of tech 🙂
1.9GHz Quad Core CPU
5″ HD Super AMOLED screeb
13MP camera
LTE CAT3
Full 1080p Video
2600mAh Battery
NFC
Q. Is Google a boy or a girl?
A. Obviously a girl because it won’t let you finish your sentence without suggesting other ideas.
So you have your Synology NAS box setup with all your goodies on it, then you realise you could also backup all your junk from your Laptop, PC etc. to it as well (which is a good idea).
I’ve been doing this for years but using Synology Data Replicator 3 but running it in sync mode and triggering it manually. As good as it is it’s not as elegant as another Synology solution called Cloud Station.
This is what they sell as ‘Hit Save, and It’s Everywhere’:
If you own multiple devices, Cloud Station is perfect for you to have files synced automatically to all of them. Your work will always be up to date among Mac, PC, and mobile devices. Files are always accessible via web and Cloud Station folders on your local computers.
So, semi snowed in and bored this weekend I set about setting up..
Start by creating a backup account for each device you want to backup to the NAS
Then create Shared Folders for each of the locations you want backed up
Then go and enable Cloud Station.
Add the users you created earlier in Privileges
Go into Sharing in Cloud Station and share out the Shared Folders you created earlier (yes its dumb but you have to do it twice…)
Then install the Windows Cloud Station Client on each PC you want backing up, pick the account you created for the relevant folder sets and point them to the right place on your PC. The folders have to be empty to start with for some stupid reason so in my case I created a ‘FolderName2’ for each of the folders I wanted to sync, moved everything into them, pointed Cloud Station at the original folders that I wanted synching and then moved everything back into them afterwards.
Then site back and wait (several days in my case) for everything to sync across to the Synology NAS.
Oh and it eats a bunch of CPU while its doing it 🙂
Cloud Station Client will just sit in your system tray once everything has done an initial sync and anytime you change stuff on your PC it will get synced across to your NAS automatically.
Cool eh?
It would be perfect if it didn’t have a maximum file size of 10GB (so basically all my big BluRay files don’t get backed up automatically but I can live with that…..I think)
I think Robert F Kennedy once said ‘Don’t get mad, get even’ and sometimes it’s a nice feeling to do just that.
My computer has been annoying me for ages but I’ve been putting up with it as I’ve not had time to try and resolve the issues, actually because I’m employed to fix other people’s computer problems.
So when mine started acting up that little sucker’s card was marked and I vowed one day to kill it.
I waited until there was nobody around then beat the crap out of it, I must admit the whole experience was very therapeutic 🙂
I spend a lot of time in my car which I guess is why I’m so attached to it, one of the worst culprits for this is the 128km daily commute to work which I try and mix up by taking different routes from time to time and always having several hundred albums available to listen to.
Right now the UK is going through a Cold Snap and I was thinking “why do I live in this cold ass country?”, I should move to California or Mexico or Spain…..anywhere where they don’t get crap weather.
So as today’s journey went along I took to taking cellphone camera pix of the outside temperature gauge in the Astra….-7.5 when I left home, soon plummeting to -8.5 a few km down the road but the winner, 48km down the road was this badboy:
Brass Monkey’s as they say here….!!! (US readers check that link for translation LOL!)
There’s a mantra I like:
‘Data you don’t have at least two copies of is data you don’t care about’
Been there (many many years ago) and now believe in ‘redundancy’ on an industrial scale, nicely summed up in this neat ‘Motivational’ poster:
But of course not everybody follows this rationale and they keep their whole ‘lives’ on USB sticks which snap, go through the washing Machine, get ate by dogs, erased by alien forces etc. etc.
Slightly better (but only by a narrow margin) are those that keep their whole ‘lives’ on Portable Hard Drives. The technology is less prone to going FUBAR due to its design but sooner or later it WILL bite you in the ass, normally when you least expect it…..Shit Happens, it’s a fact of life but these days you can (should) plan for such disasters by having copies of all your important data in another place
(preferable two other places). This is especially important if said Portable Hard Disk is of the Low Rent variety…..what we would call in this country ‘Happy Shopper’ (i won’t be more specific just in case I invite a litigation case but you get the idea).
So todays customer who shall remain nameless wandered into my office with a forlorn look and asked if i could recover his Low Rent Portable Hard Disk as it contained all his financial records, his college work and his family photos.
I said “Sure, but you have a backup copy someplace, right?”
Him….blank look, blinking like a monkey…..then “That is my backup drive”
Me “Ah ok, but….oh never mind, leave it with me”
So it gets prised open and attached to the awesome DriveWire that’s saved my ass on many occasion and low and behold check the manufacturer:
Again….i won’t make a big deal about this as I don’t want my ass sued but take it from me….don’t buy one of these, buy a Hitachi…
So the end of the story is like this…..I manage to get about 40% of the data off Mr Low Rent Portable Hard Drive before it refuses to read and write data and thinks it’s dead, the rest of the data (and the IMPORTANT stuff too) is unrecoverable. Mr Customer goes into the corner to cry…
Lesson 1:
Buy a good quality device….THEN also back it up to one of the many new fangled Cloud Storage solutions on offer from the likes of Dropbox, GoogleDrive , SkyDrive, or SugarSync (other brands are available) then at least you stand a fighting chance if things go Tits Up with all your important shit.
The Heron Tower at 100 Bishopsgate is 230 metres (755 ft) tall and has a massive 70,000-litre aquarium containing over 1,200 fish in the Reception area on the ground floor.
I was there for work purposes and didn’t have a camera so shot these pix on my Android phone. It has 46 floors and I was only on Floor 17 when I shot these pix
Sadly one of London’s most noticeable landmarks ‘The Gherkin’ (30 St Mary Axe) was on the other side of the tower to me so couldn’t get any shots of that. I intend to go back to visit the Sky Bar on the 40th Floor and shoot some proper long exposure night stills across London with my 40D…
Reception
‘That fish tank’ (end on)
Room with a view (17th Floor)
The ‘L’ shaped building with the relatively low roof at the 9 O’Clock position is Liverpool Street Station, one of the busiest stations in the United Kingdom
‘That fish tank’ (shot taken by someone else and ganked from the internets)
Amongst (many) other vehicles I have owned seven Land Rovers over the years but have also had a Vauxhall Astra obsession for a very long time and have owned several: Mk1 estate, 2 x Mk4 LS estates, a 1.7 CDTi ECO4 Mk4 and my current baby a Mk4 1.6 SXi Dual Fuel.
Duel Fuel is working out kinda neat with this whole Global Recesssion thing as I can fill the LPG tank for £30 and get around 360 miles out of it (not to be sniffed at!!). Of course I would really like a 200BHP GSi Turbo but I have a long commute for work and the petrol bill would suck so I have the SXi Dual Fuel to be ‘sensible’.
I’m very attached to this one and have done over 150,000 miles in it, we’ve been through all sorts together and now and again I show it some love, this time with switching the cloth interior for a set of Full Leather from a Bertone Turbo Coupe, complete with heated front seats 🙂
Switching Astra interiors is relatively easy if you have the right tools – a good quality Torx set (T40 and T50), flat blade screwdrivers, phillips screwdrivers and a wrench for the battery terminal.
First and foremost disconnect the negative terminal on the battery, this is required as the front seats have electronic Pre-Tensioners linked to the Airbag system (that need taking apart) and this will freak out the ECU, lighting up your dashboard and requiring a visit to your local GM/Vauxhall garage to have them reset stuff with their OpCom…
Now you can start ripping stuff out.
Rear seats ‘before’ shot 🙂
Detach ‘hidden’ brackets for seat back on both sides…leave the spring tensioned bracket attached.
Seat belt mountings, left and center (T50 Torx)
Check out all the detritus under the seats from years of having Mountain Bikes in the back…
Rear mounts for seat back (T40 Torx)…stuck under the chassis for the LPG tank!
So that’s the rear seat back and bench out, plus the seat belt mounts
Time for the new leather seat backs to be fitted to the old brackets….then the new bench
Front seats. Remove the two rear T40 Torx, lift the seat from the back and tip. Disconnect the Pre-tensioner (pull out the orange lock pin and squeeze the black tongue) under the seat and slide it out from it’s housing.
Remove the lower front seat belt mount (T40 Torx) and out come the front seats
Reverse the sequence and re-connect the pre-tensioner into the new seats, in go the new fronts…nice eh?
Just need a good clean and some leather restorer to detail them now 🙂
Duty calls and it was time to ‘do the right thing’ and take Mrs Billy Goat away for our anniversary…..three weeks of Pin The Tail On The Donkey later and we settle on this idyllic resort tucked up in a pine forest in downtown Yalanci Bogaz, Türkiye.
All the boxes were ticked:
Child Free Resort – Tick
All Inclusive – Tick
Peace and Quiet – Tick
F-16’s running bombing missions into Syria…..Huh?
Yep, you guessed it…..no vacation all year and we pick the ONE WEEK when Syria starts throwing its toys over the fence and the Turkish Military’s patience finally wears thin……cue Syrian Radar Positions being targeted while we were (ironically) lounging around at an area in this place called The Relax Pool 🙂
This is NOT what you should see while chilling at the pool on vacation:
The rest are actual shots of the place, plus a bona fide Turkish Bath (yep we had one like the proper pale tourists that we were posing as….) and some cheesy seafront shots from the nearest town.
Hosçakalin 🙂
There is a God….and he likes a bassline 🙂
Many of us shed more than a tear when the Hartnoll brothers hung up their Oberheim Xpanders and Alesis sequencers in 2004 and told the world they were splitting up, we sat huddled round our stereos listening forlornly to Snivilisation and Orbital 2 like we had just lost something great.
In 2008 a ray of hope brought smiles to our faces when 20 Years After Chime happened at The Big Chill. Promising murmuring then carried on for several years until Loopz posted news of another album…
Fast forward to 2nd April 2012 and Wonky hit the streets to the joy of eager fans. It could have gone either way but although there is some clever adoption of contemporary genres such as Dubstep (an unexpected move to these ears), but don’t forgot the current generation of clubbers were probably not even born when Chime took dancefloors by storm in 1989. The innovative ‘Orbital Sound’ is very much still there and after a couple of spins this is a very strong album indeed, Stringy Acid had me smiling ear to ear and nodding my head like Flat Eric in my car as the windows rattled to the bassline.
At first I was dubious about the Electro and Dusbtep twists, never before have the Hartnoll brothers done anything other than lead by example but I think it actually works very well and stops it sounding too retro and derivative, they were right and I was wrong…
The expectation was huge but Wonky delivers on all fronts