Computer and technology related topics
We switched to Ting from Virgin Mobile… here’s my quick review: What is Ting? Ting was started by Tucows in 2012, like Virgin Mobile it’s an MVNO (Mobile Virtual Network Operator) backed by Sprint wireless. Ting’s marketing point is that most people don’t actually use all the data, texting, and voice that they pay for. … Read more
*** DEPRECATED StartCom no longer exists. Please see my newer SSL Certificate Guide Using Let’s Encrypt *** Here’s a quick tutorial on how to obtain and setup a certificate from StartCom. StartCom offers free personal certificates, these aren’t the fake certs where you have to setup your own CA and it only works when people … Read more
I messed up my zpool with a stuck log device, and rather than try to fix it I decided to wipe out the zpool and restore the zfs datasets using CrashPlan. It took CrashPlan roughly a week to restore all my data (~1TB) which is making me consider local backups. All permissions intact. Dirty VM … Read more
I’m in the progress of switching my ZFS Server from OpenIndiana to OmniOS, mainly because OmniOS is designed only to be a server system so it’s a little cleaner, and they have a stable production release that’s commercially supported, and it has become Gea’s OS of choice for Napp-It. One of the last things I … Read more
Just saw on STH that the HP Microserver Gen8 specs have been released… Intel Pentium G2020T (2 core, 2.5Ghz, 3MB, 35W) OR Intel Celeron G1610T 2GB ECC memory (up to 16GB, 2 slots) One PCIe expansion slot. Dual gigabit ethernet ports (332i adapter) Dynamic Smart Array B120i/ZM 150w power supply HP iLO4 remote management port … Read more
Model UV-3R+ UV-5RA VX-7R VX-6R Brand BaoFeng BaoFeng Yaesu Yaesu TX 6 M no no 30-59MHz no TX 2 M 136-174MHz 136-174MHz 137-174MHz 137-174MHz TX 1.25 M no no 222-225MHz 222-225MHz TX 70 CM 400-470MHz 400-480MHz 430-470MHz 430-470MHz Wideband Receive No No 0.5-999MHz 0.5-999MHz Channels 99 127 900 900 TX Power 2 Watts … Read more
Good news for the cheap photographers, Yahoo! wants back in the photography sharing game. Flickr has redesigned its website and is now offering 1TB of Free photo storage to anyone. You can see on my grandfathered Pro account I have only used 0.035TB up in 2 years! To give you an idea of how many … Read more
Over the last few days some of you noticed a 403 forbidden error from time to time. So I’d login, check the Apache error logs and see this entry “(13)Permission denied: /home/benjamin/.htaccess pcfg_openfile: unable to check htaccess file, ensure it is readable.” Well the permissions were set, I had the executable +x bit for www-data … Read more
Ben’s List of Free Programs 7-Zip http://www.7-zip.org/ Open Source compression / decompression program that handles almost any format (rar, zip, bz2, tar, etc.). Better than WinZip. CamStudio http://camstudio.org Screen recording application (use Handbrake to encode output file to a usable format) CHIRP http://chirp.danplanet.com Open source program for programming amateur radios (great for BaoFeng and … Read more
Got my $44 UV-5RA Chinese built ham radio. For the price I couldn’t pass it up just to see how good a ham radio this cheap could be. Update 2014-05-11 It has been a little over a year since I first wrote this and BaoFeng has released several versions of this radio, UV-5RE, UV-82, FB-F8+, UV-B5, GT3, … Read more