I upgraded to OS X El Capitan so I could be down with the kool kats and join the revolution. Not really – I installed it ‘cos it’s new and shiny. Although the upgrade went smooth enough (and only took an hour) I discovered several applications were now broken š
I’ll save everyone from nonsensical rambling and get down to the facts. First up, prank calls…
With the ever greater need for the adoption of IPv6 in the Internet world it’s high time people started dual stacking services on both IP versions. Sadly, sometimes this is not possible when particular software hasn’t caught up with 1995.
This is especially frustrating when, for one reason or another, you want to use a single hostname for both services which support v6 and those which don’t.
The reason this is complicated is because a single hostname Read More
After posting how great Tarsnap isĀ I thought it only fair to write a ‘how to install Tarnsap on Linux’ article, so here goes.
Sign up for an account
This is the easiest part, simply create an account at Tarsnap.comĀ andĀ verify your e-mail address. You will need to ‘top up’ your account with at least 5 AmericanĀ Pasos to actually get started so may as well do that right away. I used Paypal as it makes me feel safe and when I feel safe I sleep better at night.
Once you have an account balance there’s actually not much else to do via the website; the rest is all command line goodness.
Download and Compile the Source Code
I’m going to do the rest as the ‘root’ user. If you’re not feeling as brave you may wish to prefix every command with ‘sudo’ as your normal user – for some reason Ubuntu et al seem to love doing this.
At the time of writing versionĀ 1.0.36.1 was the latest.
First up lets get root and change to /tmp and then download the tarball:
sudo -i cd /tmp/ wgetĀ https://www.tarsnap.com/download/tarsnap-autoconf-1.0.36.1.tgz
Tarsnap is a no nonsense backup service for Unix (Linux, Mac etc) and is very nice indeed from a sysadmin’s point of view. It is inherently uber secure by design. It somewhat lacks being end-user friendly though – for example it doesn’t handle expiry of archives out-the-box. Therefore if you wanted GFS style rotation you need to wrap it in something which handles deleting old archives according to whatever deltas.
Their payment model is a bit strange in that it is prepay so you get a warning email when running low on credit or risk having your backups deleted for good. The cost of a particular backup run can Read More
When I first read about this I thought it can’t be real but it is. The Raspberry Pi can be used as a stereo FM transmitter. It’s a pretty nifty discovery which uses a GPIO pin on the Pi to generate spread-spectrum clock signals and outputs FM Radio energy.
There’s no point in me rewording what has already been written so here is the explanation from the guys who discovered it over atĀ icrobotics.co.uk… Read More
We all know when you buy a domain name the registrar often provides a complimentary DNS service for you to use. Gee thanks you might think. Turns out they’re almost all half-arsed and generally a bit shit.
Lets take 123-reg.co.uk and easily.co.uk as examples. Read More
TP-Link are pretty much synonymous for producing feature rich, solid and cheap networking products. TheirĀ SG108E Gigabit Switch should be decent.. surely.
Ermm… well lets just say it’s cheap and cheerful. Whilst they have gone to the effort of writing the managed firmware code in the device itself, the management interface is shocking.
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There it is – a cute 8 port ‘managed’ switch. I expect some thingsĀ at minimum from a managed switch. Read More
I’ll be writing a post about how great Mopify is shortly but essentially it’s a web plugin for Mopidy which providesĀ a web front end to Spotify running on just about any machine. It means you can control Spotify running on a machine plugged into your HiFi without the needs for the Spotify App on your device. This is handy where you have other people in the house with their own accounts but still want them to be able to control the music on the main HiFi.
Of course, an ideal host machine might well be a Raspberry Pi with a decent USB Soundcard.
Mopidy runs its own little web server which means Read More
As promised, Google have delivered a shiny new Chromecast Audio today. First thought isĀ it’s tiny, second thought is I hope it sounds decent.
This neat little toy lets you Read More
Using an off the shelf energy monitor you can graph your energy using Cacti. The monitor unit I’ve used here is a Current Cost ENVI. E-On were giving these away for free but they’ve probably stopped that now.
It comprises of a sender unit, with a single phase clamp sensor and an Read More