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After switching to iWeb, I setup my iPhone to get my email on their IMAP server.

I have made a typo when entering my password for outgoing email. After trying to send an email, it kept on retrying, and I didn’t notice. The battery got drain in a matter of hours.

I noticed the mail application saying “1 message unsent”. I fixed my password, sent another message, which worked, but the “stuck” message stayed stuck.

I decided to delete the account completely. Fine, it’s gone!

NO!

Somehow, my Usage stats were EQUAL to my Standby time, and sometimes were not available at all. I could charge the phone, not use it for 2 hours, and it would say Usage = 2hours, Standby = 2 hours. It was obvious something was still trying to send in the background.

If you get a similar behavior ( Usage equal to standby ) , you might want to try doing a restore. That’s what fixed it for me, and it’s pretty straightfoward.

I hope the next firmware fixes that bug, because it could mean that anything else interrupting an outgoing message could drain your battery overnight. It should retry a few times, and prompt you..

After many problems with Dreamhost, my 2 year pre-paid period finally ended. I signed up with iWeb (www.iWeb.com) for TEN years, which costs under $2usd a month. Domain, mail and blog are already moved!

I’ve only got a few DNS settings to change here and there and some backups to take, then I can finally close my Dreamhost account.

I’ve helped my friend Laurent to fix a WSUS Server after a problematic restore, and he finally found a solution.

The error was..

Error CustomActions.Dll InstallPsfsip: Failed to load dll (Error 0×8007007E: The specified module could not be found.)

Error CustomActions.Dll RemovePsfsip: Failed to load dll (Error 0×8007007E: The specified module could not be found.)

Thought I’d post it because even though a lot of people seem to have that issue, there is not a whole lot of resolution data on the web..

http://laurent.ca/2009/01/14/wsus-3-installation-fails-at-iis-compression/

A lot of people have been asking me if my MSI Wind’s built in camera works in photobooth.. Well, it does, and no, I didn’t have to do anything special!

I have however read about multiple versions of the BisonCam camera being used in different revisions of the Wind, as well as different firmware versions.

In any case, I am posting my system profiler info about the camera in case it can help someone out there.

  Product ID:    0×0141
  Vendor ID:    0×5986
  Version:    3.06
  Speed:    Up to 480 Mb/sec
  Manufacturer:    BISON Corporation
  Location ID:    0xfd500000
  Current Available (mA):    500
  Current Required (mA):    500
Technorati Tags: Hackintosh, Webcam, Wind, Netbook

If you’re like me, you have multiple computers at home, multiple laptops in the family, and at least one video game console with Video/Music playback capability connected to your TV and sound system.

Synching music and picture databases is a pain, and having central storage that can be accessed by all of these would definitely make things easier, as all the devices would either

• Read directly from that device (if it’s a “Stay at home” computer or data considered “Stay at home”)
• Synchronize only with the central storage (i.e.: Laptop1 to NAS, NAS to Laptop2, never Laptop 1 to Laptop2).

Requirements

1. Storage: At least 500gigs usable storage
2. Redundancy: At least a mirror
3. Power: As low as possible (No full blown PC!)
4. Speed: No hard numbers, but “fast enough to be able to stream HD Xvid rips and bluray rips”, which should be using 6000 to 8000kbps. (Kilobits per second)
5. Protocols:
   1. It absolutely has to support CIFS for Windows and Mac OS X Access to shares.
   2. Obviously, FTP access, to enable any device to transfer to it and from it, especially over the VPN when you forgot to sync something and CIFS is too unstable at low bandwidth.
   3. DLNA ( Digital Living Network Alliance ) support would be great, simply because I intend to use my ps3 to play movies on the TV. My XBMC powered Xbox can mount SMB/CIFS shares but the ps3 can’t. Also, the Xbox supports many more codecs, hopefully, DLNA with transcoding will help the ps3 (though I am not expecting to end up with a machine able to transcode, since it won’t be powerful enough. Oh well, I’ll make sure to download supported media).
   4. Some kind of “Sync” protocol needs to be supported, such as rsync, Unison, etc.
6. Noise: Not too noisy please !
7. Encryption: Ability to encrypt the drives would be great, as this device will also store unencrypted backups of laptops. I use full drive encryption on my hard drives, and I want to be able to easily back them up and restore single files. But at the same time, I don’t want someone stealing my NAS and having my complete computers available.
8. Fun option: Torrent client. If I’m going to leave it on all the time, it might as well handle the torrents by itself too.

Option #1: DNS-323

After researching SOHO hardware, the only one that was cheap enough and looked “hackable” enough, with a decent reputation to go, was the

2-Bay Network Storage Enclosure – DNS-323 by D-Link  . It costs 150 to 200$ depending on your retailer, without drives.

Let’s see how it scores against my requirements..

1. Storage: It has two available SATA slots, and according to this page , it has been tested with drives up to 1TB .
2. Redundancy:  It supports RAID 1 .
3. Power:  According to TechDigs.net , the device uses 24 to 26 watts when in use, and 14 to 16 watts when drives are parked. Other anecdotal data suggests that it uses around to 25 watts when in use, too. We will average this to 20 watts.
4. Speed: The same TechDigs review has tested the DNS-323 with speeds of 14.5 to 16 MB/s.
5. Protocols
   1. It does support SMB/CIFS.
   2. It does support FTP.
   3. It does not seem to support DLNA out of the box. However, a software called TwonkyMedia could be purchased and added to it.
   4. It could be synched relatively easily with rsync on client computers by mounting it as a smb or nfs share. NFS not included, but can be added.
6. Noise: According to the same article, the machine generates approximately 40decibles at 2 feet, and 50decibels at 2 feet under maximum usage. Maximum usage is less of a concern as it won’t be in the room where I watch movies, but the minimum noise is important as I will often work near the machine. Sounds like it’s pretty quiet. We will average this to 45decibels.
7. Encryption: The DNS-323 doesn’t seem to support full drive encryption. I could probably manage to recompile the Linux kernel for it, or I could use something such as duplicity to encrypt the actual backups. Meh.
8. Fun option: Torrent client. Multiple torrent clients seem available for the DNS-323, plus command line ones could probably easily be compiled and used along with ssh and screen.

Option #2: FreeNas on a MSI Wind Desktop

After finding that FreeNas looked like a really promising distribution, the MSI Wind PC was the machine I decided was the best hardware fit for my project.

It is available on NewEgg for approximately 170$, so there is not much price difference with the DNS-323. This could be a bit more expensive since a bit of RAM will need to be added to it. (It looks like it comes with no RAM).

Let’s see how it scores against my requirements..

1. Storage: It has two available SATA slots. I did not find much about the biggest type of drive supported but it shouldn’t have any type of hard limit (especially not under 1TB!)
2. Redundancy:  The board has no RAID support, however, FreeNas supports multiple types of raid, including 1 and 5.
3. Power:  The unit comes with a 65watt power supply, and anecdotal evidence seems to point at a 20watt “idle” power usage, and 30 to 35 watt peak usage. I do not know if this includes two hard drives, so let’s go with 35 to be safe. 35 and 20 average to 27.5 (even though it will be idle more often,I use this very simple average for the chart below. It’s not scientific at all.)
4. Speed: I have no idea. Quite simply, I haven’t seen benchmarks of people running FreeNas on that machine, as it is pretty new. It does have a Gigabit Ethernet port, so the bottleneck will definitely not be the network adapter, and I do own a MSI Wind netbook which performs rather well overall. 
5. Protocols: According to the FreeNas manual ..
   1. It does support SMB/CIFS.
   2. It does support FTP.
   3. DLNA support is not fully documented yet, but is available. It uses uShare 
   4. It includes Rsync, Unison, NFS, AFP… synching to it as an rsync server or a mapped share should be easy.
6. Noise: Anecdotal data suggests a 30decibel volume rating, so with two drives, it should be similar to the DNS-323. We will average this to 40decibels.
7. Encryption: The manual explains encryption support for plain and RAID volumes. It supports multiple algorithms, including AES.
8. Fun option: Torrent client. There is a built-in t
   orrent client, and since it runs on FreeBSD, installing any command line client should be straightforward.

Chart and conclusion of Part1

I scored the criteria for each devices. “Better when lower” criteria such as Watts were scored in a “100 minus Power usage” way, so higher scores are better.

Scoring for non-numeric points is 100% for fully functional and supported.90% for minor inconvenience (included but not supported, not fully implemented but usable), 75% for “some hacking required”, and 50% for “Could work, but would be a bit annoying to setup.”

Totally unscientific chart, I may sound biased, you might not agree… but it looks like while they are both good machines. However, easy full-disk encryption, free DLNA support and better rsync support make the FreeNas combo a winner to me. It might use a tiny bit more power, and performance is unknown.

I will write Part 2 as soon as I have bought and received my Wind PC. Part 2 will cover HD selection and installation. I will also write about my experience with DLNA and the ps3, as well as about how I will backup a Windows machine and a Mac machine to the NAS.

Thanks for reading, and if you have any comments or questions, be sure to post them, I’m usually close enough to my iPhone to approve them right away !

As an ex-Palm fan and user, it was with great (desperate?) optimism that I had been waiting for the January 8th announcement at CES.

Palm hyped it up by saying we’d finally get all the Palm new-ness we had been waiting for, but that had been said before. Rumors were circulating..Upgraded Treo pro running Nova… completely new device running Nova, which was rumored to be INCREDIBLE. Devices with touch screen and a full keyboard behind it… this could make sense as Palm said they wanted to “Bridge the gap between the iPhone and the Blackberry”.

I was willing to forget about the unreliability of the latest Palm devices I used. The T2’s digitizer… the removal of Graffiti, the Lifedrive’s complete failure..

Why?

Because I am currently stuck using an iPhone. I say stuck because in reality I would rather be using an Android device, but the G1/Dev1’s 3g frequencies are not compatible with 3g providers in Canada. (We’ll, there is only one Provider actually – Rogers). Also, using Palm devices had always been a great experience, until they became totally outdated, and mostly, until their high end devices were Windows mobile only. Why would someone get a Palm to run that sorry excuse for a mobile OS?

While I do enjoy the multimedia features of the iPhone, and the browser, the major problem with it, to me, is the control Apple has over the app store. I appreciate the app store, but I wish there was an official way of releasing apps without going through the store. Of course, my phone is jailbroken, however, I don’t think companies such as Iambic, who make incredible apps for the PalmOS platform, would spend hundreds of hours to make Agendus for iPhone without knowing in advance if it will be turned down or not, and releasing it as a jailbroken-only app is clearly not a good business plan. Also, the fact that the iPhone third party apps can’t sync with the desktop is a big letdown. “Cloud” computing is great and everything, but I’m not letting a different company host some of my data for every app I need to sync. It’s ok for To-do lists maybe, but what about Password sync? If at least all my data was in an Apple “Sync” account and not on every program maker’s servers, it would be so much nicer.

So the solution seemed relatively simple, but hard to obtain for a company that is cash-strapped as Palm is now, and seemed pretty unrealistic considering the streak of failures that Palm has called innovation. Palm needs to release a wicked device with an awesome touch screen, as precise as the iPhone, and a slide out keyboard. It needs to have better multimedia than Android, and great enterprise features, which the iPhone is lacking. A great Mail client, centralized management, built-in tethering.

And what do we get?

SOMETHING THAT LOOKS INCREDIBLE !

This is the first time in many years that I, and presumably thousands of other Palm fans are excited. The only downside is that it is not GSM/3g, but I am sure a GSM version will come eventually. Palm is back, and by the time my phone contract is over, I’ll buy one!