Great Apple Support

Last week my iMac Late 2013 started to have frequent beach ball syndrome. I noticed that starting apps were slower in general and Safari behaved sluggishly. I checked for console messages and found the dreaded:

disk0s2: I/O error

After much Disk Utility repair or first aid, the above error still come back at infrequent times. I went on Google and was already mentally positioning myself for a hard drive replacement. I then found the iMac (27-inch) 3TB Hard Drive Replacement Program. Lone and behold, my iMac was eligible! Talk about timing.

Brought the iMac to the genius bar yesterday morning and got it back the same day in early evening.

Restored my iMac with my latest Time Machine backup, and my iMac was back to its old self.

The experience was wonderful and all Apple related technology and customer support process worked like a charm.

We often compare Apple products with other products by comparing their features and benefits of the hardware, but I think their retail presence and their support is often an understated feature in itself and should not be underestimated.

Blog Consolidation

Over the years, I’ve dabbled with Tumblr, Blogger, and WordPress.com.  I think I have decided to move all of my posts into WordPress.com.

The import functionality at WordPress.com is impressive. I’ve already imported my content from Tumblr. Now I have to import some posts from Blogger.

Wish me luck.

Home IT Improvements

Ubuntu AirVideo Server with NAS

Some people use their weekend for home renovation projects, I however used this particular weekend to perform some home information technology (IT) upgrades. My replacement iMac 27" Late 2012 model arrived this week, so after setting up this monstrosity of a machine, I am left with an extra box. An old Windows PC running Windows 7 with a very old AMD Athlon™ II X2 245 Processor along with 3GB of memory. Unfortunately the PC’s motherboard, a Gigabyte M61PME-S2P, is a three and half years old motherboard. It doesn’t even have gigabit ethernet on the board. Instead of having it sit around, I figured that it would be a good idea to try my hands on building a Linux file and media server.

I could do FreeNAS, but I wanted flexibility to run some additional software on the box in addition to just perform as a file server. We have many iOS mobile devices in the house, so I also decided to install Air Video Server on the machine. If you are not familiar with AirVideo, you are missing out. Check them out at http://www.inmethod.com. I ended up running Ubuntu Desktop 12.10 release as an experiment.

Here is a quick to do list that I set for myself:

  • Installed Ubuntu;
  • Consolidate old hard drives into a single volume for media storage;
  • Install samba to share the volume, so I can copy media to it from other computers in the house;
  • Install AirVideo server and configure it to serve media from the above volume;
  • Ensure all of the above works when we reboot the box

Installing the operating system from a USB key was a piece of cake. This weekend project also gave me the opportunity to hunt for old hard drives that have been sitting around dormant in my home office. I wanted to place all my old hard drives into this box, reborn as my new Air Video Server (I named it AVS for short). To my disappointment the old motherboard only allowed for two SATA drives, and one was already taken. Therefore, I could only repurpose one of three old drives that I have found.

Adding drives to the AVS box, forced me to dust off the webs from my Linux knowledge base. I had to re-familiarize with myself on the topic of how to use lshw to find out the hardware that is being installed on the system, and using fdisk to partition the drives properly. I had two old drives. The first a 300GB SATA drive, and the other a 320GB drive. I created a single primary partition on each drive.

Once I’m happy with the partitioning, I’m ready to create a software RAID array or volume using the mdadm utility ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mdadm ). I used mdadm to combined the two drives into a single volume of RAID-0 of 600GB. I didn’t care about redundancy or backup, so I chose RAID-0 instead of RAID-1. I am thoroughly impressed by mdadm in its ability to handle drives of different models to accomplish this.

Now that I have an array device created, I have to create a file system using mkfs.ext4. The last time I created a Linux file system, we only had ext2. I then have to brush up on my mounting procedures and configure the mount points with /etc/fstab. The mounting configuration was an optional step, but I wanted to rename the default mount point that mdadm gave me. After some more permission related configurations, and the installation and configuration of samba on Ubuntu to share the mount point, I have a Network Attached Storage (NAS) that I can copy videos to.

The installation of AirVideo Server was super easy. Kudos to Sergio Rubio. I literally downloaded the Debian install package from https://launchpad.net/~rubiojr/+archive/airvideo and I was done. After quickly configuring the server by editing the AirVideoServerLinux.properties in /opt/airvideo-server, I manually run the AirVideo Server on the command line to see if it works with my iPad. This was a good moment, but I am not finished.

I needed to ensure that all the services related to this new AirVideo Server comes up when the machine is rebooted. This launched another journey down memory lane in terms of /etc/init.d. Again to my amazement, I simply searched init.d and airvideo on Google, which lead me to a post ( http://www.inmethod.com/forum/posts/list/3485.page ) with a ready made /etc/init.d shell script. After some minor adjustments, I was off to the races with a completed AirVideo Server using my old computer and hard drives.

Although Ubuntu has made great strides in making Linux easier to use, I had to do most of the above on the command line as I find the user interface of Ubuntu is still thwarted with many bugs. Creating something like this is still not for the faint of heart.

Ontario Teachers Strike – Fighting For Their Rights

Consider this when fighting for your rights.

When I was a little kid, I thought living in a free country is to do whatever you want. It was later that I learned that in a society with limited resources, ones rights and freedom needs to be limited such that the freedom of others are not encroached. The peaceful coexistence is only made possible when a balance of freedom and rights exists amongst all. Trouble arises when one or more individuals believe that their entitlements to certain rights are more than the generosity of the others. The level of generosity is often determined by the availability of related resources in question.The concept of basic or absolute rights and privileges are only made possible by the consensus of the populace. This consensus is more easily reached when resources are in abundance and are not contested. It is easier to give when you have everything. Human rights would be difficult to adopt by many if others have to sacrifice their own sense of freedom to do so. I’ve always used this concept to gauge and assess the morality of ones actions to pursue a goal.

I am in full support of the teachers to lobby and fight for their perception of rights as long as their actions do not encroached on the rights of others. I fear that in this particular situation the rights of others are indeed compromised.It is ironic but not surprising, that the method that the teachers choose to protect and fight for their own rights is to erode the students’ rights of education. Of course education is their main asset to give, and they must leverage it to make their point.

In this situation, it is easy to reference ones rights and lay blame on the group who encroaches them. The only way to reach peace is to have all parties to readjust their sense of rights relative to the limited resources in question. Until this new balance is realized, there will continue to be ill feelings amongst the parties. As a parent, I am willing to reassess and come to terms the new quality of education that my children is receiving based on the limited provincial funding the government can provide. Can the other parties, the government and the teachers not do the same? Reassess their distribution of resources and their sense of rights respectively?

An Elder Has Passed

For me, when I learned of someone that I know has passed away, I immediately reflect upon the shared experiences that I had with him, wanting to hold dear to those moments, and finding the sad realization that one always want to remember more than one can retrieve.

Today I learned that my brother-in-law’s father has passed away. My mind immediately recalls a gentle and wise man from a previous generation, who I had several opportunities to chat with in different occassions.

Our first meeting was at a brunch gathering during Dim Sum. This is the first time that we met my brother-in-law’s family, and they were kind enough to entertain us with a bit of our culinary culture. Since then we have had other BBQ’s and dinner gatherings when we gossip about current events, economics, politics, etc.  

I would not say that I got to know him really well, but I would say that through these conversations, I learned that he was a kind and sensitive man.  What impressed me the most is his way of calmly conveying his past experience and perspective by delivering carefully chosen statements in a calm and measured fashion, while retaining a dose of good humour. If I am in search of a teacher, he certainly possessed the sensei qualities that I wanted in a master of life.

My brother-in-law and I spend a lot of time together during the weekends, riding our bikes. We of course talk a lot, and on many occassions he has praised his dad. Judging from his values, I know that the man who raises such a son must have high values of his own.

I selfishly write this piece so as to help me to recall more of these memories, with the hope that they will be retained, and in doing so, help me rationalize the good bye that I must say to the elder that I respect. 

iPad’s Camera Kit

Posted from: ON L4S 2G6, CanadaWe purchased the iPad camera kit today with the hope of storing videos that can be viewed on the iPad, since the iPad only has limited storage. It would be nice to store some videos on an USB stick for viewing during vacation, or a long business trip.

For this to work we discovered that we had to over come a couple of barriers, both are needed to mimic the USB stick as if it was a camera when connected to the iPad via the camera kit.

The first thing to ensure is that the USB stick must be formatted in FAT32, and has a DCIM sub-directory in it’s root directory. All images and videos must be stored in this directory.

The second thing is that the filenames cannot be exceedingly long. I followed the IMG_0001.JPG or MOV_0002.m4v formats, the former for pictures and the later for movies. Of course, the movie must be iPad compatible, which usually means H.264 video with AAC audio. The iTunes software can convert your video to this format.

I hope this helps any one who is trying to do the same.

Vacation Photos

Posted from: ON L4S 2E4, CanadaAnother hopefully constructive rant.

I just spent more than 6 hours aggregating photos from our Far East cruise and vacation from this past fall. And I think I only processed about 20% of them so far. I think the photos were taken with over 5 different cameras of various form and quality. The trip had over 25 individuals, and as you can imagine there were many cameras amongst us.

Many photos were blurry and others had weird colors due to improper white balance settings.

With today’s photo processing and sharing technologies, my advice is that when going on vacation with a large group, just have two designated cameras and photographers who know what they are doing. They don’t have to be pros but at the very least should understand the notion of shutter speed and focus.

Okay my rant is over and now back to processing the pics. Arghh!