Category Archives: computers

More Dell goodness

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Finally got round to calling Dell back regarding the microphone not working after the laptop display was replaced. Got through to the right dept quickly, let him access remotely so he could check everything and uninstall/reinstall as needed. He was efficient, told me what was happening , what he was expecting. The upshot is that a new display is needed and someone will be round to the house tomorrow to fix this. Like last time I spoke with them over the phone I could not find fault. Perfect Support from Dell.

Dell – excellent service

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The hinge on my laptop just crunched as I opened it. It “breaks” as it is opened. Not good. Searched for the issue online and it’s known to Dell. Worldwide free replacement. After a couple of wrong turns in the phone tree I got through to tech support who put me through to hardware support.
It was one of the best tech support calls I have made. The guy got to the point, knew exactly what he was talking about. I hadn’t done a warranty transfer when I bought it from Amazon so he asked me to do that while he processed everything. Totally friendly – and it didn’t seem put on – he sounded like a really nice guy. All the stuff done and I can expect someone round to the house – yes they are coming to me – by the end of the week. I seriously could not have improved on the call and if – I think his name was Ran – was the model for their calls he’d be a great one. Very very impressed.

A backup

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Finally considered NAS again and it’s going to be the Synology DS211j. I’m wondering if I can remove the HDD from 2 of my WD MyBook’s and slot those in. Might get 2x1TB though. Jacq seems sold on the idea and it’s a new toy to play with. The proliferation of ext HD’s has to stop, the simplification of backups has to start, media sharing will be good and scooting around with usb drives gets boring and this is definitely the way.

D’s macbook screen died 2 days ago so with the age of the overall machine and her coming need for a laptop when she starts a new education/career course in September I said she could get a new one. Being a student does indeed have it’s benefits which saved me around £300, she impressed with her knowledge of the machine so is on the shortlist at that store for a position and she has the best computer in the house. And it’ll do Facebook, Minecraft and Runescape. Keeps her happy :) On the upside she does now believe that Portal and HL2 are worth playing despite my saying so for a long long time.

The 3rd

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1st: the external HD (which subsequently came back to life)
2nd: daughter’s macbook (which was repaired for free and Apple got another customer for life)
and
3rd: the CD/DVD drive on the mac mini died. Got two of them and now both won’t play discs. They just make a lot of noise. Pointless taking it to Apple as an external burner is going to be way cheaper. And can’t complain with the work they did and their age (5 and 4 yrs).
But at least the 3rd breakage has been and gone.

Typical

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I buy another drive and the dead one breathes again (gave it power to test a plug as another drive appeared dead). It is seen and repaired by the mac and ‘appears to be ok’. So I have 1TB of backup hanging off 1 machine and 1.5TB off the other. Nuts, absolutely nuts. Offline I am disorganised. The phrase “Yes I know it looks a mess but I know where everything is”** applies here. But on the machines it is tidy and organised. Spotlight can’t look anywhere because it’s all set to Private (if I really need something in a file I use Easyfind but that is rare indeed. So all that space is going to stay just space. You can’t backup backups esp when the important stuff is backed up online already. Play around with photo libraries maybe.

And I write this while praying at the Altar of Apple. Much pain through the night at my coccyx and I can’t do anything without it hurting. So I am kneeling at this desk, elbows raised and tapping away. So to the casual observer I am worshipping much white plastic. I don’t think so :)

**Everywhere J goes is clean and tidy. Not fair to live in a bombsite for her. Probably explains why this room is a Health & Safety problem. 19 plugs off 1 socket? What’s wrong with that?

I killed a HD

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Daughter’s macboook started making a huge clattering noise yesterday. Not some ticking, this was closer to a golf ball in a tin. It’s the first white macbook I bought in early 2006 so it’s had some use but nothing extreme. This morning went to back it up before her Genius appt on Tuesday. Attached the 500gb WD (which is 4 years old, formatted as journaled) and dragged over her home directory. That threw some sort of file error so I asked her to drag over several directories at once. In total around 50gb of files, 330gb free on the WD. That hung so a reboot and pulled the usb plug out. Costly was that.
The mac will not format from Disk Utility or Terminal. Disk Warrior says it is unformatted so will not recover.
Windows can see the disk but will not mount the disk
Ubuntu says the disk is failing and will not format the drive or the volume.
So I do believe I have killed this HD which is a lesson about unplugging. I’ve not given up hope but I’m not hopeful from what I have read. At Amazon I can now get a 1TB drive for less than I paid for this 500gb but then you need 2 really – to back each other up. Bigger drives are good until you lose bigger amounts of data. Not that in this case I lost anything – all backed up elsewhere. Oh – and during this I had to burn a CD and doing that in the mini was really noisy too, sounded like the disc was shattering. Comes in 3′s doesn’t it – which machine next ….

Hd d.d.d.d.d.d….d

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Decided that I really should find out what I had and what could be salvaged from various HD’s lying around the place. 3 were IDE so pulling the right bit from an enclosure mean I could fire them up. They had a combined 320gb. One disc shows me there is a lot there but cannot read it, another grinds away forever and the smallest 40gb gave me only 6gb of actual data. Total data loss of over 300gb. But these were old discs and had been backed up when new machines appeared so actual data loss is probably zero.
The PC I had up to recently – one Steve built for me some years ago had 2 SATA drives in. (I had debated either installing Ubuntu on there or running it from USB to rescue what I could but I thought £15 was a fair trade in time/money) To get at those I ordered a NEWlink USB 2.0 Docking Station for SATA HDD and that worked perfectly. 2 250gb drives. One was a single partition and everything I had on that was backed up on newer discs. The other was in two partitions – the Windows part had failed to boot took some time to get the data off – very very noisy – but other data came off well enough.
So in total I had storage space of around 820gb and I am confident I have lost nothing that matters. Easy for me to say because it’s not like I have anything super important but it’s in some way testament to the way I backup what actually does matter (and I’ll bet that a stack of what people think matters doesn’t, not really, not in the big picture) and also that for so much data accumulated I just don’t give a crap. Lose data forever or have a big argument with the wife? I’ll lose the data. Data is all 1′s and 0′s but life has the bits that matter :)

The Docking Station was a very neat purchase for £15 but what to do now…. I could leave it for a ‘just in case I need it again’ or I could use it as a backup drive for one of the girls. Be a useful thing for snapshot backups if you had a somewhere safe for them wouldn’t it? Buy 12 drives and use them on a rotating basis through the year.

The drive I cannot extract data from is an exercise awaiting but then I have 5 drives. None are reusable given the noise they made during the process. 1 I will take apart just to see what’s there, another I will take outside, throw high into the air so it smashes to the ground and then see if the drive is broken and the other 3 … not sure yet. I don’t think they have Great Big Magnets which was always my motivation to take things apart when I was a kid.

One click proxy

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Overall problem: Have netbook and want to be sure browser traffic is hidden from prying eyes. I don’t care about other programs, just the browser.
Sub-problem: I really cannot be bothered to do the ssh -D 8000 thing every time. Tedious.

So:
1. Get your ssh keys set up as listed here (Ubuntu) (Mac). They both talk about using scp to shift the file from machine to server. For some reason that did not work so I used ftp.
2. Open Terminal and check you can ssh straight in, no password prompt then exit. If you can’t go back up a step.
3. Install QuickProxy in Firefox. Go to http://whatismyip.com and note the numbers. Restart.
4. In Firefox > Edit > Preferences > Network

and apart from the 8000 which you can change you put exactly that.
5. Open Terminal and ssh -D 8000 name@domain.com You should not get a password prompt still.
6. In Firefox click the QuickProxy icon and then go to http://whatismyip.com. They should be completely different. The alternative is that you will get no connection in which case go back to 4 and check that the 8000 (or whatever) you used matches the number you used in terminal.
So, that should all work just great but that whole long winded hassle of opening Terminal, typing that long string and having to then press Return is just too tiring.

Open Gedit (textedit) and type the ssh line then save.
You need to make that file executable. In Ubuntu right-click, select Properties and check the box near the bottom. Save it somewhere easy to find like your main directory.
Now go to the main desktop, press alt-f2 and when the box appears you want to run ‘alacarte’
Go to Accessories (not that it matters, just seemed a good place) and on the right choose New Item.
Find your file (I saved mine as ‘ssh’) and when you add it make the Type “Application in Terminal”
Close the dialogue to save
Back to Desktop, go to Accessories and you should see ‘ssh’ ready for you.
Right-click and Add to favourites.
And there you go. Log in to your machine, give that a couple of clicks and you are good to safely go.