Drew Scott Daniels' Blog

Some Manitoba provincial parks like William Lake have free firewood (in piles outside), and some like Birds Hill have firewood for sale ($8 this summer for a bundle of dry, covered wood). Some parks like Stephenfield have firewood for sale just outside the park.

This last summer I stayed at Pickerel Point Campground which is on Madge Lake in the Saskatchewan provincial park called Duck Mountain. The firewood was free, but was very green and was piled in heaps exposed to mud on the bottom and rain.

So what makes good firewood?

• Clean of dirt and mud.
• No or very little bark.
• Old cuts so that the sap dries out. Preferably stored dry for a year.
• Dry rotten wood burns quickly.
• Small pieces.
• No leaves, grass, or twigs.

Using a hatchet, you can remove thick bark and make cuts in some dryer wood. Using an axe you can cut up wood that is more wet, or larger. Other options include mechanical splitting devices (hand, pneumatic, electric or gas powered), a wedge and mallet/hammer…

Remember more air gaps in upper surface area (e.g. small pieces) means more oxygen for combustion, and more upper surface area means less ash and more fuel available to burn. This also means arrangement of small pieces is important. It also means larger, pieces burn slower which can be an advantage for longer fires.

NASA recently studied fire in space aboard the International Space Station (ISS) and since there’s no upper side to fuel, ended up with interesting results. I suspect liquid fuel benefits from dispersion of burned fuel if the burned fuel is less dense. No upper side also makes it harder to extinguish flames as fuel needs to be covered from all sides in an even form so that it doesn’t cause propulsion (think rockets, and newton’s laws of motion). This is however getting a bit off topic.
More information on NASA’s fire studies at: http://www.space.com/13766-international-space-station-flex-fire-research.html and http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/experiments/FLEX-2.html and other places.

Drew Daniels

There is only one kind of tea plant, but many infusions. Black, green and white tea are just oxidized for different amounts of time. Other interesting related infusions include:
* “Red tea” (Rooibos) which is made from the roots of rooibos bushes.
* Yerba Mate
* Mint “tea” which is just mint or spearmint infused in water
* Lemon “tea” which is commonly made with lemon grass
…

Common brewing/steeping instructions for tea:
1 Clean the pot.
2 Use good dechlorinated, preferably filtered water
3 After the kettle has boiled, pour some water into the tea pot, swish it around, and let it sit for a short time. I sometimes time it by adding more water to the kettle, and boiling the kettle again.
4 Pour out the water out of the tea pot. You now have a “steeped” pot.
5 Use one bag/tea spoon for the pot and one per person. With most tea one bag/tea spoon is roughly two grams. Obviously there’s more factors.
6 Wait two to three minutes, and pour into tea cups.

Chinese preparation of tea includes “washing water” to wash the tea leaves, and doesn’t leave the tea sitting in the pot for long. The more common practice in that case is to use small one cup tea pots, and add more water before making a new cup. Common tea used for the style is large leaf (i.e. not cut up or ground) green teas, though white tea is highly regarded.

There is a British standard for brewing tea. It is “BS 6008:1980″, now ISO 3103. This standard is similar to instructions on many tea’s, but brew time six minutes.

Tea has less caffeine than coffee, but that’s measured for standard brew times. The long the brew/steep time, the more caffeine released. I suspect how ground the tea is effects how much flavour and maybe caffeine is released into the water.

Red Rose tea has 3 grams of tea per bag versus the more common 2 grams. Red Rose tea also seems to use tea leaves that have been ground up more

Ceylon tea comes from what was once the country of Ceylon and is now called Sri Lanka. Assam tea comes from the Assam province of India. Tea comes from Assam trees, and other varieties of the same species.

In India, tea is commonly known as Chai. Translating Chai tea into English makes it seem as funny as it is: Tea tea. Traditional recipes for tea in India, and other places are more accurately called spiced tea. Extending the Table has a good recipe for spiced tea. Several people I know say that Red Rose tea is the only tea to use for making good spiced tea, and that it’s best made on a stove with milk instead of water.

Real Earl Grey tea is more than black tea with bergamot flavour/oil. One commonly missed ingredients is lapsang souchong which is black tea that has been smoked with cedar.

A good London Fog is made with real Earl Grey, brewed in a pot of milk, with good quality vanilla extract. Real vanilla tastes noticeably different than artificial, but is twice the cost. Watch out for real vanilla extract that has a low quantity of vanilla in it. I suspect the extracting agent of vodka/alcohol and the additive of sugar can make a significant difference in vanilla extract.

Tea tastes best when it’s fresher. To keep the flavour of tea, keep it in sealed containers, away from heat and moisture.

I like pre-bagged tea the best at home and work as it’s easy to clean up. “Coffee” presses, various tea balls, tea strainers can be used, but removing finer ground leaves can involve more work than cleaning regular dishes.

Yerba Mate is a nice tea like infusion. It’s great by itself, but is also nice with honey. Make sure to use good honey though as some store bought brands of honey taste noticeably worse than good local clover honey.

Some of my favourite teas and infusions include:
* Earl Grey
* Yerba Mate
* London Fog
* Darjeeling
* Common black teas (Red Rose, Assam, Ceylon…)
* Prince of Wales
* Black Currant
* Lapsang Souchong
* Sweetened/unsweetened lemon iced tea.

Quality ingredients that can be added:
* Manitoba clover honey (it’s local to me)
* Good quality vanilla extract (I’m having trouble finding a good source)
* Whole spices to grind when making spiced tea
* Raw sugar
* White sugar (it’s the sweetest additive)
* Fresh milk (I like 2%)
* Lemon juice (don’t mix it with milk. I use lemon extract for convenience.)

Drew Daniels

Research into creating materials to allow plants to release and absorb water from stores only when needed is continuing. This research could be valuable to not only reducing water shortages, but also increasing productivity, making space exploration easier, increasing plant health (including potential yields) and helping out with long haul cargo trips. The addition of nutrients using the same method makes this even more useful.

According to a letter by Hymie Gesser of Winnipeg in an article in the Winnipeg Free Press on August 11th, 2011 work is continuing on a self-watering process for plants that uses a “special micro-porous plastic material that separated the plant’s roots from the supply of water and nutrients.”. The original process was for potted plants written about by Louis Errede, of 3M in St. Paul, Minnesota, and Gesser has extended the process to row plants and just patented it. Apparently there’s a more detailed article about Gesser’s work in the Winnipeg Free Press on May 17th, 2002. I found another article that seems to be written by the same researcher with the name variant Dr. Hyman D. Gesser. The detailed article by Gesser is available from Winnipeg Jewish Review at: http://www.winnipegjewishreview.com/article_detail.cfm?id=145&sec=2 and seems to have been written in or around 2009 as it refers to an article published in the Journal of Applied Irrigation Science, Volume 44, (2009) pp 31 -37.

Self-watering plants seems like a useful concept to reduce water usage, but it is worrying that the work was verified in Florida which I generally associate with being wet from rain and swamps. It’s also quite a hot climate. I’m also discouraged that drip irrigation seems to be preferred by several desert institutions.

Reduce water usage could be very useful to grow food and raw materials in deserts, other dry lands, or even on space expeditions. Long haul trips like cargo ships and distant space travel could benefit not only in reduce water consumption, but also potential longer life for some perishables, and less human intervention being required. One practical application for me might be for some office plants that I’m considering buying, but will not be able to water on long weekends, or some vacations. I can imagine some offices that have shutdowns for weeks, and some that have very few workers that could benefit. Also, reduce time spent watering plants means more time available for other tasks. People likely won’t deliver water as efficiently as the plants want, but hopefully a technology like this will which may mean better yields and healthier plants.

I haven’t found out what the source of the water is, but for potted plants it seems like manual refills will be required. For row plants hopefully there’s tubing that allows water to flow, though distances and rates of flow may mean that there are more opportunities for research. Fortunately Gesser lives in the same city as me so perhaps I’ll have the opportunity to find out more.

Further Research

Some topics that could be further researched include:

• What are the substances released by plant roots when water and nutrients are needed, or not needed?
• How can the costs of materials and production be reduced?
• What plants are best suited to these watering techniques? Guesser found it to be effective for many different fruit and vegetable plants.
• Do these techniques not work with certain plants?
• How does this technique effect yield? It may reduce yield in certain cases.
• Should nutrient or water be decreased during certain events such as certain growing phases, different weather, different ground conditions, and pesticide application?
• How can materials be protected during tilling?
• How do pesticides effect the materials?
• How do “weeds” behave in the presence of the materials? Last year’s crop can be considered a weed.
• How do insects and animals interact with the materials? This may make a good home for certain species, some may puncture materials making them less effective, and some might find the materials toxic (though this seems less likely).
• How do various harvesting techniques effect the materials? Using a mower cuts lower than a swather. Flooding fields to harvest cranberries could be significant to the materials…
• How can materials be repaired? Delivery of “healing” material may be possible via the same tubes.
• How do different shapes and orientations make a differences? Tubes with branches, capsules, spikes…
• Can roots be attached to more directly?

Further reading

Louis A. Errede and Patricia D. Martinuccl, Flow Rate of Water through Porous Membranes as Affected by Surface Modification on the Low-Pressure Side of the Membrane, 1980, 19 (4), pp 573–580 found at: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/i360076a018

João G. Crespo, Karl W. Böddeker, North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Scientific Affairs Division, Membrane processes in separation and purification, Springer, 1994, ISBN 0792329295, 9780792329299

C. A. Heath and G. Belfort, Synthetic membranes in biotechnology: Realities and possibilities, Springer Berlin / Heidelberg, 1992, ISBN 978-3-540-55551-3. Abstract found at: http://www.springerlink.com/content/245u31675230m064/

Shampoo/Soap

Toiletries like shampoo can be a pain to take when travelling or camping because it can pop open, or leak needing a plastic bag and leaving half open containers. Shampoo’s number one ingredient is usually water (sometimes they call it aqua). Some bar soap from Rocky Mountain Soap is also shampoo, and I’ve heard of other soaps that can be used for shaving, bubble baths, and more. The “shampoo bar” is listed as only for men and for dry scalp, but for camping I imagine the applications might be wider, and if you visit, they might also know of other useful products. Their soap is “natural” so that may appeal to a camping crowd too. With limits on liquids for air travel having bar soap allows another toiletry to be carried on reducing what you might need to check-in if you want to make sure you have it. Of course with air travel, another popular option is getting free small bottles from the hotel or buying it along with other supplies from a store at the destination.

Food

There used to be a product that I believe was called Pasta Magic which was widely available. Pasta Magic was great for hiking or long duration camping because the pasta needed minimal preparation. Now I look to Mountain Equipment Co-Op (also known as MEC) for their camping food. There’s even some good substitutes for some of the frozen food people bring to the office. Camping food can be a great alternative where no microwaves are available. Some foods are ready to serve, and many simply require hot water. Some foods cheaper than a cheap meal out while also taking less time to get, possibly being more healthy, and many “camping” foods just aren’t available elsewhere. Unfortunately cooking directions seem to be missing from at least some of the online entries so you can’t be sure if they expect a pot and fire/stove to cook.

Note

I’m looking at helping out more with Beaver Scouts (“Beavers”) next year so there may be more camping related posts coming up.

I plan to start adding in my old hand written notes into this blog. I have notes going back more than 13 years. Most of my notes were written during my time at the University of Manitoba.

I have notes on Data Compression, games, short-wave radio logs, computer errors, my own literary writing, course related reference notes, notes about various organizations I was in, travel observations, business process observations and more.

I’ve got a small folder of things mostly from 2004 that I may be starting with. I’m still debating what’s worthy for entry. Some notes I may have lost the context for. I must admit that one of the reasons for this effort is reducing the pile of paper I’ve accumulated.

At one point I was taking notes on my Palm device, but after several minor data loss incidents, and the nuisance of changing batteries I stopped using it. I have some notes there that I may look at putting in this blog too, but since I’ve got a digital copy there’s less urgency.

Another challenge I have is what to do with the various diagrams and pictures I’ve drawn. Most of it isn’t relevant, and when it is I may put it into a proper web page and re-draw it digitally. I think when I was younger I had a notion that my hand written notes would be treasured like those of the scientists of history, but that was long before the topic of “horders” hit the main stream media. Now my rules for what to keep and what to dispose of is leaning towards getting rid of more.

I have a small file folder filled with small notes on books I’ve looked up that I’d like to revisit and maybe post reviews about. Without looking I know that I want to re-read some books that quote “How To Solve It”. I particularly liked the following problem:
If a bear walks south 1km, east 1km, and then north 1km and ends up where it starts, what colour is it?

Drew Daniels

dict "$(head -n $(($(od -N 2 /dev/urandom|cut -d' ' -f2 -s)%98326)) /usr/share/dict/british-english| tail -n1)" |less

More people may prefer:

dict "$(head -n $(($(od -N 2 /dev/urandom|cut -d' ' -f2 -s)%$(wc -l /usr/share/dict/words|cut -d' ' -f1))) /usr/share/dict/words| tail -n1)"|more

• I still want to check for bashisms
• 98326 is the output of wc -l /usr/share/dict/british-english. I put it inline for speed, and didn’t bother with a variable since I wanted a one line script.
• If the dictionary is too big then a larger random number would be needed.
• /usr/share/dict/british-english isn’t installed on many systems, but words is.
• “more” is lighter weight than “less”, and is installed on more systems. It lacks the ability to go backwards.

To get a random number I used:

$(od -N 2 /dev/urandom|cut -d' ' -f2 -s)

• od converts to decimal.
• -N 2 gets two bytes
• /dev/urandom is pseudorandom bytes from the kernel. There might be a more cross platform alternative like maybe $RANDOM for bash.
• cut -d' ' -f2 -s gets only the second column. Often awk '{print $2}' is used instead. Awk can be very big. gawk is said to be big, and mawk is said to be minimal. cut seems more portable and smaller yet to me. -d sets the delimiter, -f2 is field two, -s is only print lines with the delimiter.

Try “set -x” before the command to see the different levels of shell script in the one line, do “set +x” after to get things back to normal.

Drew Daniels’ resume: http://www.boxheap.net/ddaniels/resume.html

I have a ever rising need for data storage. Even if I stop accumulating data, or even cutting back what I store, I have to deal with failing media. I’ve had numerous hard drives die over the years, CDR’s have gone bad…

In my searches for cheap ways to store data, I came across some recommendations to use online storage. With Dreamhost offering 50GB for backups for free, this is something I’m going to start using. At $0.10 US/GB for overages, I hear it beats out quite a bit of competition. I’d prefer to stick with Dreamhost if possible as I know and use them.

Hard drive costs

So how much does hard drive storage cost, and how reliable is it? Well for the raw drive, I’ve recently been seeing about $1/GB CDN for SATA drives. My backup server is currently PATA with slow USB (likely version 1) so I’d likely need to spend some money upgrading the backup server. A cheap modern PC seems to go for about $300 CDN. I’d guess controller cards aren’t cheaper than $20.

Related costs

But the media cost isn’t the only cost. There’s also install time, maintenance time, and operation costs. One of the biggest operation costs at a house is electricity. Manitoba Hydro charges somewhere around $0.063/kwh CDN. That’s about 365.242199 * 24 * 0.063 = $552.246205 per kw-year.

Western Digital seems to say hard drives consume between 0.40 Watts to 5.4+5=10.4 Watts. I’ve seen elsewhere claiming 25 Watts for hard drives. So at the given kw-year, the cost of operation could be as low as about 0.40 * 552.246205 = $220 CDN. The more likely case of lets say 2 hours of operation, 1 hour idle to off, based on Western Digital’s “competing” write case of 5.4+4.5 watts in operation, 2.8 watts for idle, and 0.40 watts for standby is about
((((5.4 + 4.5) / 24) * 2) + (((2.8) / 24) * 1) + ((0.40 / 24) * 21)) * 552.246205 = $715.

Wow. I need to turn my computer off more often.

Simple comparisions

So lets take the best case for hard drives then and make it as big as seems reasonable right now. 1.5 TB is about 1,396.98386 GB. At Dream host, 3 years (typical hard drive warrenty) times 12 months times $0.10 times 1396 GB times 1.13 for padding for exchange rate, and possible volitility is about
3 * 12 * 0.10 * 1 396 * 1.13 = $5,679. Local storage would be $750 for electricty * 3 years, plus $150 for the hard drive, plus maintanence of lets say $250 is about (750 * 3) + 150 + 250 = $2,650.

So local storage is about half the cost in its best case. I’d say it’s more likely to be far less used, but at home I’d have to budget for expansion immediatly. Being at Dreamhost is good for a site disaster (like a house fire), but bad for access time.

Conclusion

More research is needed. If I had to make the decision tomorrow, I’d probably go with spending more on Dreamhost storage. I like the offsite feature, the low maintenance, and not having to spend as much time figuring out how much storage I might need.

Drew Scott Daniels’ resume

Saturday, January 3rd, 2009 (2009/01/03)
Drew Scott Daniels

Adventures with testdisk

Testdisk seems like a great utility as does its companion PhotoRec. I recently had a single NTFS partion hard drive stop displaying its contents in Windows. When I tried to mount it in Linux, “mount” complained that the $MFT file which holds the meta data about where files are was missing or corrupt. My initial experiments with testdisk showed the same results. The mirrored copy of the MFT seemed to be missing or corrupt too.

To try to restore the MFT file, I wanted to use the beta TestDisk 6.11. I tried the Microsoft Windows version which seems to be CygWin compiled. I’ve seen many problems with cygwin in the past so I have a bit of a distaste for it. I much prefer when applications are compiled with mingw. I gave it a try anyway, but couldn’t find the MFT recovery section, I later learned it was under Advanced, then Boot.

Since I had trouble with the Windows version, I pulled out an old copy of Knoppix (a Linux LiveCD) and booted to Linux with the startup options:

knoppix 2 noswap

The “2″ boots to the command prompt which takes less memory. The noswap option prevents Knoppix from automatically trying to write files to any of the disks for “swap” space (AKA a page file). I later added the option “nodma” to try to make sure that the DMA controler/driver weren’t causing problems with trying to mount or run TestDisk.

Knoppix comes with the testdisk package installed, so I gave it a quick try. I didn’t find the MFT recovery section so I moved on to compiling TestDisk 6.11. I already had the source code so I coppied that to /tmp and tried configuring it. Of course, I was missing build dependencies. After a while of playing I remembered I could do an “apt-get build-deps testdisk”, but I needed to update the /etc/apt/sources.list file first so that I didn’t try to pull in a new libc6 (my Knoppix CD was from 2006) or anything else like that. On reflection, I should have added the deb-src line for Debian unstable (sid) after, and done a “apt-get source testdisk”, then coppied over the new TestDisk code, then did another round of getting build-deps.

I managed to get it compiled with a simple “./configure;make”, and ran the executable without needing to install the package. I still didn’t find the MFT option.

I rebooted back into Windows as my nagios monitor was of course reporting the host as being down, and my nightly bacula backup was about to start. I decided to treat the MFT issue as an accidentally reformated partition. I then went to Windows’ TestDisk’s Advanced, Boot options and found the MFT recovery option. The MFT mirror wasn’t available either. So I stared the boot recovery option which seems to scan for the MFT. The “Rebuild BS” didn’t seem to help. The MFT file or files seem to have bad magic. I beleive bad magic means the “magic numbers”. The magic numbers are a fixed string of bytes which are usually at the beginning of a file. See the “file” utility for more information on “magic”.

So I had no luck finding the MFT. I’m now starting to look at PhotoRec which supports scanning for an interesting variety of files. Unfortunatly, I’ll have to find a disk large enough to put all the found data on. I’ll have to sift through the data by hand and look to see if there was anything useful on the drive. I mostly think it was just where I did optical media backups so I’m not too worried, but I think I may have had some more interesting backups there.

Drew Scott Daniels’ resume: http://www.boxheap.net/ddaniels/resume.html

Originally from: http://www.boxheap.net/ddaniels/notes/20090103.html

Thursday, January 1st, 2009 (2009/01/01)

Drew Scott Daniels

• Updated 2009/01/02, added links to build EVA8000 firmware.

Open Source on my TV

I recently got a new LG TV. It has an “Open Source Software Notice” with the caviet “This feature is not available for all models.” It notes that it may be running Linux kernel 2.6.12, busybox, uclibc, and Nanox. To get a CD (for a charge of distribution and media), within 3 years of distribution, I have to write to Opensource@lge.com which I think I’ll give a try. There’s a USB port and RS-232C in port on the back of the TV for “service only” which have the note “Used for software updates.”. I can’t find any other details so I guess it’s time to make some inquiries, and make sure I’ve got a nice null modem cable which I can use for lots of other projects.

I’d like to find a way to make use of the MPEG decoder that’s on my TV. A cheap encoder that I got the link for went for several hundered
dollars. I don’t know of any easily accessible digital television (DTV)
signals in my area. I’m wondering if Shaw offers free to air (FTA) DTV
that my TV will accept as CADTV (cable DTV?). I know PBS in Minnesota, and FOX in Pembina, ND may theoretically be accessible, but I don’t have time for that until it’s warm enough outside.

Since the TV has a nice “SVGA” input plug (that they call “RGB(PC)”) in
the form of a “D-sub 15 pin cable (VGA cable)”, I may try and hook up a computer to it. I’m conserned about the noise of the fans which seem to fail fast. I also would like to run another circut so I don’t have to stretch to the next circut’s plug. I’m thinking this could replace my Netgear EVA8000 – Digital Entertainer HD.

Netgear EVA8000 runs Linux

Netgear’s EVA8000 has a support page here, but the main forum and a restricted beta forum seem to have quite a bit of information not in their support site.

My Netgear EVA8000 runs Linux, and has several open ports on it. It
seems like the firmware is encrypted though. I can’t find anyone posting information like even a port scan so I may do that later. I’m worried that the Netgear EVA9000 will/has caused the developers to stop working on the EVA8000 which I hear ran out of memory.

Although for what they call GPL compliance, they offer to let you
download source code for the EVA8000, it seemed to be the original
version only (I later found the Feb 2008 release). It also seemed to be stripped of quite a bit of functionality. I also can’t easily figure out a way to upload the code which I think is intentional. I guessed it was a simple block device upload, but it didn’t mount in loopback. I should run testdisk on the file just in case. I think I remember reading somewhere about an encryption password being used to do updates, but it seems others have figured out how to dissect the image like this:

dd if=$FW of=crc bs=1 count=32
dd if=$FW of=bootkernel bs=1 skip=32 count=$((0x210000))
dd if=$FW of=jffsroot bs=1 skip=$((0x210020))

I just found a forum thread about how to edit the firmware images, and I’ve seen they’ve updated the source code to the latest non-beta release. Versions in between don’t seem to be available nor do beta versions. Unfortunately it seems you have to register to see this.

Another use for a null modem cable is connecting to the EVA8000 during boot and after interrupting the boot (by sending a few escape’s?), typing:

config cmd root=/dev/nfs ip=bootp
boot net

All at the boot prompts.

I see that it runs a 2.4 kernel which bothers me (2.4.22-uc0-sigma-20051018-nm). When I worked with embedded systems, I saw a few that updated 2.4 kernels to run with their reference boards as opposed to 2.6 kernels.

The EVA8000′s PC software called Digital Entertainer for Windows (DEW) seems to have at least one Windows audio driver which would be nice to learn how to use. I’m pretty sure that is what it is using to play iTunes music.

The DEW software comes with receiver.exe which seems to be what’s used to play things like YouTube videos. This makes me wonder if there are other videos that the DEW software manipulates (re-encodes, or redirects?) prior to going to the EVA8000.

Wireless network drivers

It’s a bit frustrating to see the software upgrade path for wireless
network devices stop. On old versions of Windows it’s easy to see that
the cost of maintaining the wireless network stacks for various
families of cards complicates things. On Linux, it’s easy to see the
problem is time and motivation. Now that there’s a standard wireless
stack on Windows Vista, and Linux, I hope that I can do things like
setup a Wireless Access Point, mesh network, etc. all with just a
software update and some configuration. I’ll have to be careful about
making sure my next devices work with the new standard wireless network stacks.

Mass storage

Now that I’m doing more with video, and I’m actively backing up many of the computers that I have, I’d like to get more storage. I evaluated
getting more drives, getting a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device
like the D-Link DNS-321, but for the cost, I think I should look at
online storage. I’ll likely still need a few extra drives, but not the
high capacity I was looking at.

I’ve decided that for home applications, I don’t need a RAID array. The
costs of maintaining the drives, the controller etc. is extremely high. I
seem to currently get all the relevant benefits with Bacula backups
plus the bonus of a long retention period.

Optical media (e.g. DVD’s) and other “removable” media seem to have a
very high time cost. They also require manual intervention on a regular
basis. Reloading any data requires finding the media and inserting it
which often doesn’t feel worth while for just verification.
Additionally, one should periodically do full backups and manage the
removal of old backups (AKA retention). Thus the removable media method of backup does not seem suitable for backups. Optical media seems less useful for movies too except that it’s so cheap.

I’ve been trying to think of the common modes of failure to help come up of ways of recovering from future failures. Most of my past failures
have been due to hardware problems, though a few seem like they may have been software triggered. Software for managing files like NTFS and ext3 seem to be a lot more reliable as are the OS’s that run the software. Hard drives are also more reliable with various SMART and related features. CD-R’s however have become less reliable from what I’ve read.

Power supply related failures causing hard drive failure has happened to me a few times. Drives failing to work after long periods of
inactivity… Most failures have resulted in the loss of an entire data
set.

Some of the online data storage have a 1GB file size limit. This is
probably to prevent the storage of large amounts of data. The easy work around for me is to set bacula to 1GB volumes.

Drew Scott Daniels’ resume: http://www.boxheap.net/ddaniels/resume.html
Originally from: http://www.boxheap.net/ddaniels/notes/20090101.html

Sunday, July 23rd, 2006

Drew Scott Daniels

I am maintaining a variety of old machines including many running
Windows 95. I have many licenses for Windows 95, but not as many for other versions of windows (although my MSDN subscription allows me to install certain versions of Windows on certain computers).

Applications I use on Windows 95 include:

• Abiword
• VideoLan Client (VLC)
• Opera Web Browser

Problems

I’ve had significant trouble with, Mozilla Firefox mostly due to its
installer. I believe Firefox would run fine, but it was taking too long
to install so I switched to Opera instead.

Abiword had a well documented required that I download some
“redistributable” Microsoft files. I was considering OpenOffice.org, but
it is quite bloated and has many features that I and other users do not
use. I use OpenOffice.org on several Windows XP machines quite happily.

One feature that I miss in OpenOffice.org’s Writer is a grammar checker. When I was in grade 10 I had my grammar level tested. The test indicated that I had a grade 14 level of understanding. Despite that, I enjoy grammar checkers such as the one in Abiword. A number of years ago I tried many word processors including Correl WordPerfect, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Works and Lotus WordPro. I found Lotus WordPro’s grammar checker to be so useful that I still like to run it over documents that I proof read. I hope to have more time to see if Abiword’s grammar checker is up to that level, and maybe help improve it.

VLC worked on one Windows 95 machine, but not another due to missing dlls. The missing dlls could probably all be downloaded, but I ran out of time. I installed two Microsoft packages after searching to find the source of the error messages that I was getting. A third error message left me without time. It had some kind of winsock dll requirement that could probably be removed if the dlls were delay loaded. I would imagine that it would be the same case for several other dlls that VLC required.

I find VLC to be one of the best video and audio players available.
It supports almost every format I want, is OpenSource, has support for
professional broadcast standards, and is very portable. I run VLC on
quite a few different operating systems including Windows 95, Windows
2000, Windows XP, Debian Linux and others. Unfortunately I currently
can’t say I run it on Apple’s MacOS X version 10.2 as it seems to crash. I believe the version 0.85 was the one that was crashing on startup. One other problem I have with VLC is that its playlist seems to cause the application to crash under certain circumstances. Rather than look into it, I’ve simply avoided the playlist feature.

I’m hoping to use VLC or ffmpeg to transcode some movies I have into
a format that I can watch and listen to on my 200MHz laptop. In the past I used to play 128Kbps mp3′s at lower quality on a 486 DX2 50Mhz. To do that I think I used WinAmp’s decode at quarter quality option. I think I can decrease the decoder requirements by lowering the frame rate. I was also considering lowering the bitrates of the video, audio and stream, but I’m uncertain as to whether that might mean more processing. Some compression/decompression algorithms take more system resources when trying to lower the bits per byte ratio (“better compression”).

Time has been a valuable resource lately. I finally got around to
upgrading my laptop to Windows 98. I spent quite a few hours trying a
few weeks ago, but the installer refused to work as I was trying to
upgrade with Toshiba’s Windows 95 winutils installed. I tried figuring
it out what was going on by reading all the documentation I could find
on the computer, and on the Win98 CD, but there was very few hints. One day, when I had some time on another computer, I searched and found that Toshiba has a nice upgrade web page. The trick to the upgrade was a separate uninstaller that was not linked to from the list of downloadable files.

My upgrade to Win 98 required a Linux boot CD, and a USB storage
device. The files I wanted/needed would not fit on a floppy
easily/conveniently. Win 95 does support USB, but it does not support
mass storage devices. That means that it would not support my USB key, any external USB drive, my digital camera… It also doesn’t support the Palm Pilot USB driver, and I couldn’t get a dlink USB wireless network key to work.

One of my motivations for updating, was that despite my many hours
working on getting my WPC11v4 working, I found that I required special out of tree Linux drivers, or Windows 98. I did find some indications that it might work on Windows 95, but it seems that was the WPC11v3 using a different chipset, the European version… The RealTek RTL8180 (or RTL8180L?) reference driver would install, and I believe attach, but not work.

More on these topics later.

Drew Scott Daniels’ resume: http://www.boxheap.net/ddaniels/resume.html

Originally from: http://www.boxheap.net/ddaniels/notes/20060723.html