Pieter Viljoen's Blog

Don't Trust Your Agents

Sat, 26 Sep 2026 12:00:00 +0000

Written rules did not stop my coding agents from posting in a stranger’s GitHub repo or taking down my server, so I added hooks and resource limits that enforce what the rules could not.

Reverse Engineering the EasyStart Bluetooth Protocol

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 12:00:00 +0000

I decoded the Bluetooth protocol of my Micro-Air EasyStart soft starters from the vendor’s Android app, with help from Claude Code, and now read their compressor data into Home Assistant through ESPHome.

Moving This Blog From WordPress to Hugo

Sat, 01 Aug 2026 12:00:00 +0000

I moved this blog from WordPress to a Hugo static site, and the real work was not converting the posts but keeping every inbound link since 2008 working.

Yet Another Cloudflare Traefik Let's Encrypt Guide

Wed, 29 May 2024 18:45:00 +0000

There are many good guides on the internet on how to use and configure Cloudflare Tunnels, Traefik, and Let’s Encrypt, using wildcard certificates, and Cloudflare Access, for authenticated home lab network access.

This is yet another such guide, but using a single wildcard subdomain for remote homelab access. An advantage of using a wildcard subdomain is that the Cloudflare DNS and Tunnel and Access configuration only needs to be done once, and thereafter all access changes can be controlled through local homelab Traefik configuration. Another advantage is that services being exposed are not directly inferable by looking at DNS record names.

Mattos RGB Trim permanent roofline RGB pixel install

Mon, 20 Mar 2023 20:54:16 +0000

[Late post] I finally got around to installing permanent under eave roofline RGB lights, and I’ll share my experience and opinion of the Mattos RGB Trim I used. See my previous post and post on RGB holiday lights for background.

I pre-ordered Mattos Engineering RGB Trim in December 2021 and received the shipment end of January 2022. The boxes have been sitting in my garage for a year, and I just got around to installing them mid December 2022.

Moving from UniFi-USG and Circle to Firewalla

Sun, 19 Mar 2023 15:56:14 +0000

I replaced my aging UniFi Security Gateway Pro and slow Circle Home Plus with a Firewalla Gold Plus, giving me gigabit speed firewall and parental controls in a single easy to use and actively developed device.

Why Firewalla? We have 1Gbps internet, and I want a feature rich firewall that can operate at line speed. We do configure Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Netflix, Hulu, Disney, etc. (homogeneous control remains lacking) child account restrictions, but I also want content control and visibility for any network connected devices. Firewalla is at the intersection of high speed and visibility and parental controls.

Halloween pumpkins and lights

Mon, 31 Oct 2022 18:21:21 +0000

Last year was the first time I used RGB holiday lights for decorative outside lights, and this year for Halloween I started with some Halloween pumpkins.

I used a Boscoyo Pumpkin King and a Goofy Gourd because they are printed in color so they look good day and night. The Pumpkin King stands 95" / 2.4m tall, so it took a little extra effort to assemble and mount.

Last year I used wood planks as backing on my coro props, but that made hanging them a bit awkward. This year I used aluminum channel (cheap 1m sections of DIN mount rails) connected with short sections of thick wood dowels. I notched the channel so that I could hang it flush on the pillars using flat head screws, much easier. And as I did last year I spray painted the back of the coro black to make it blend in as the back is visible from the house entrance.

Installing FLAIR Smart Vents to keep room temperatures balanced

Sun, 30 Oct 2022 20:19:28 +0000

Every year on the hottest days and coldest nights, with the HVAC on, our bedrooms are either too hot or too cold, and I installed FLAIR Smart Vents to try and remedy the situation. In this post I am sharing my experience with the FLAIR installation and configuration, and my opinions and mini review of the Flair vents.

Background

First some history and background, skip to the installation or conclusion section for TL;DR.

eNom Datacenter Move Borks DNS

Mon, 17 Jan 2022 19:52:26 +0000

eNom really borked their datacenter move resulting in two days and counting of no DNS.

I first noticed the issue Saturday (15 Jan 2022) night when my inbox remained clean for several hours, yes, I am one of those people that like to keep email organized and the inbox clean. A bit of head scratching and googling led me to a reddit post laying blame on the Enom Data Center Migration gone wrong.

I registered my first domain in 2000 over a dialup modem. Over time I’ve registered several more domains with several registrars (based on regional or TLD requirements of the day). In 2006 I consolidated all my registrations with eNom, in 2011 eNom transferred my account to BulkRegister, and in 2020 BulkRegister transferred my account to Hover. So, today I am a Hover customer, and Hover is an eNom reseller, using eNom DNS services.

Getting carried away with RGB holiday lights

Wed, 22 Dec 2021 05:37:10 +0000

What started as a small project quickly snowballed; taking way more time than anticipated, going through multiple scrapped plans and hardware changes, my fingers still hurting from making cables and pushing pixels through corrugated plastic. But for all the overkill, it does look pretty.

It started when I ordered two strands of Govee RGB patio lights offered as a Black Friday special. Installed them, and they seemed to work fine, until the next night, when the lights did not return to the previous state, just white. Our holiday light outlets are powered sunset to 11pm, and although the Govee app does have an option to remember the last state, it did not work when completely powering down, only when using the soft power button, fail.

Trying to Keep my Garage Cool

Wed, 11 Aug 2021 14:11:19 +0000

We live in a moderate climate, and when we built our house my plans were for my home server rack to be installed in the garage and vented through the outside wall to the alley. Unfortunately plans changed, and the instant hot gas water heater had to be moved blocking rack access to outside ventilation. Without cool outside air the servers complain about overheating in the peak of summer, and I either need to power down or keep the garage door open during the day.

ESP32 Water and Gas Utility Meter

Tue, 10 Aug 2021 03:27:27 +0000

The recent release of Home Assistant’s energy dashboard inspired me to restore my gas and water utility meter monitors. I lost the measurements when I removed my Brultech GreenEye energy meters in favor of Sense energy monitors.

To recap, my local city and utilities do not allow any connections in any form to their utility meters, but I am allowed to install my own meters downstream, as long as the meter models are approved for local use, i.e. the exact same model as used by the local utilities. I installed the same model water and gas meters as used by the utilities but with dry-contact metering.

Cooling an Overheating NVMe SSD

Mon, 15 Mar 2021 15:10:50 +0000

The SSD in my Windows 10 system started reporting failures, and as luck would have it, died while I was cloning it to a new drive. I suspect death was caused by overheating, and I addressed that with my new setup.

This Windows 10 system is in an NCase M1 v5 SFF case with an ASUS ROG STRIX Z390-I GAMING mini-ITX motherboard and a Samsung 970 EVO NVMe M.2 SSD drive. The motherboard has two M.2 slots, one on the front of the motherboard and one on the back. The slot on the front has a heatsink, but I noticed the drive runs hot even under no load. Some googling showed this to be a common problem with the heatsink and M.2 slot being heated by the motherboard chipset, so I moved the SSD to the slot on the back of the motherboard. The SSD still reported +60°C temperatures under load, and I added a passive heatsink, and that kept temperatures in the low 50°C’s even under load.

Using ESP to Debug an ESP

Thu, 22 Oct 2020 18:04:53 +0000

This post is about troubleshooting the sporadic ESP8266 hardware watchdog resets in my water recirculation pump controller project.

The ESP8266 would randomly restart, which I can observe by monitoring the uptime reported by ESPHome to Home Assistant.

It is difficult to debug because the Sonoff TH10 is in a waterproof case in my garage, making it difficult to get a USB/UART connection for debug logging. The alternative is to monitor logs over the network, and to include the debug component that will log the restart reason. But, network logging does not capture crash information, that is only logged by UART.

Hot Water Recirculation Pump Controller

Mon, 12 Oct 2020 00:51:47 +0000

Our house uses a Noritz natural gas instant hot water heater, with a dedicated hot water recirculation line. Problem is the heater is installed in the garage, and in the summer the garage gets so hot that the aquastat that controls the recirculation pump never turns on. This leaves us with cold water in the recirculation line, and we have to wait several minutes for hot water, defeating the entire purpose of the instant hot recirculation line.

Tuya to Tasmota to ESPHome

Thu, 10 Sep 2020 18:16:57 +0000

This is a summary of my experience, and the exact steps I followed, to convert cheap Tuya based WiFi smart plugs to ESPHome for Home Assistant integration.

I am a novice when it comes to ESPHome, and I pieced information together from various great sources:

My goal was to use Tuya Convert, for it allows over the air firmware conversion, and no physical disassembly and firmware programmer wiring is required. Unfortunately I found that many currently shipping versions of plugs that apparently used to work no longer work, possibly contributed to by Tuya switching from ESP82xx to Realtek chips. The model numbers and physical appearance of the plugs did not change, making it difficult to predict what you will get if you buy now.

Abandoning GreenEye for Sense

Sat, 05 Sep 2020 23:30:28 +0000

I planned a whole house energy monitoring setup when we built our house. But in all these years I never completed the Brultech GreenEye installation, I officially called that plan abandoned, and instead installed Sense energy monitors.

First a bit of history, skip to the end if you’re not interested in my procrastination journey.

I installed my first energy monitor, circa 2009, The Energy Detective TED-5000 connected to Google PowerMeter.

Although our power utility (SCE) had installed smart meters, it took them several years, circa 2012, to enable Home Area Networks (HAN). I installed an EnergyHub Home Base, that turned out to be too unreliable due to the too long distance for ZigBee from the meter to our condo. I ordered the starter kit, that also included an energy monitoring power strip, but the power strip was unusable due to the excessively loud high frequency noise it generated.

Phyn Plus Smart Water Assistant - Early Impressions

Tue, 25 Aug 2020 04:03:13 +0000

Phyn Plus is a “smart water assistant”, a device that monitors water usage, and can automatically shut off the water supply when a leak is detected.

I am familiar with whole house water monitoring and leak detection devices, like the widely available and advertised Moen Flo Smart Water Shutoff, but until very recently I’d never even heard of Phyn. I was introduced to Phyn by a tech savvy friend that bought one at Costco, installed it at his house, and he had only good things to say about it.

Moving from Unraid to Proxmox VE

Sun, 21 Jun 2020 20:18:48 +0000

I finally took the plunge and moved from Unraid to Proxmox VE.

I used to love Unraid, but at some point the easy to use web management UI and app store ecosystem simply lacked capabilities I needed for deployment automation and configuration tasks. Then there is the problem with the poor IO performance, that I’ve written several posts on, and excessive SSD writes wearing out drives, that have remained unresolved, and no solution seems to be forthcoming.

Unraid User-Share vs. Disk-Share SMB Performance

Sat, 25 Apr 2020 16:44:42 +0000

This is yet another post on Unraid’s poor SMB performance, but I think I narrowed down the cause of the problem to the Unraid FUSE filesystem. I discovered this about 2 months ago, but with COVID-19 and no kids weekend sporting event duties, I have some time to post.

In this round of testing I compared the performance of “User” shares vs. “Disk” shares. An Unraid “User” share is a volume backed by Unraid’s FUSE filesystem, while a “Disk” share is a volume directly backed by the disk’s native filesystem.

Unraid vs. Ubuntu Bare Metal SMB Performance

Mon, 03 Feb 2020 04:14:07 +0000

In my last test I compared Unraid SMB performance with an Ubuntu VM running on Unraid, and Ubuntu outperformed Unraid. I was wondering if the VM disk image synthetically improved performance, maybe IO caching, so this time I tested Ubuntu on the same hardware that runs Unraid.

I configured the system to boot from either the Unraid USB stick, or an Ubuntu Server USB stick. In both cases the hardware was exactly the same, and the SMB share was on the same 4 x 1TB Samsung 860 Pro SSD BTRFS volume. I mounted the BTRFS volume using the same mount options that Unraid uses. The Ubuntu Samba server used default options, the only change I made was to register the share.

Recovering the Firmware on a Supermicro BPN-SAS3-846EL1 Backplane

Sun, 02 Feb 2020 21:26:32 +0000

In a previous adventure I replaced an Adaptec HBA with an LSI SAS3 HBA, and the chassis drive bay LED’s stopped working. I suspect the LSI card does not play nice with the SGPIO sideband controller, and I decided to replace the chassis with one similar to my SC846 chassis, where the LSI card and drive bay LED’s do work fine.

What should have been a simple replacement turned into quite a recovery operation.

Unraid vs. Ubuntu SMB Performance

Sat, 18 Jan 2020 18:40:05 +0000

In my last round of testing I found that Unraid v6.8 SMB still underperforms compared to Windows Server 2019, but I was wondering if it is a Linux Samba problem, or an Unraid problem.

I installed an Ubuntu Server 18.04.3 LTS VM on Unraid, bridged network, 16GB RAM, 128GB raw disk located on the BTRFS cache volume, consisting of 4 x Samsung Pro 860 SSD drives. This is exactly the same configuration I use for the W2K19 test VM. I installed Samba on Ubuntu using default options.

Unraid SMB Performance: v6.7.2 vs. v6.8.1

Thu, 16 Jan 2020 19:07:49 +0000

I previously wrote about the poor SMB performance I experienced in Unraid v6.7.2. Unraid v6.8 supposedly addressed SMB performance issues for concurrent read and write operations, and after waiting for the first bugfix release of v6.8, I re-tested using v6.8.1.

In my last test I used a combination of batch files and copy and paste, this time I wrote a tool to make repeat testing easy. I am not going to describe the usage here, see the instructions at the GitHub repository. There are new reports in v6.8 of poor SMB performance when a folder contains large numbers of files, so I added a test to try and simulate that behavior, by creating a large number of files, then reading each file, then deleting each file.

Unraid repeat parity errors on reboot

Sat, 11 Jan 2020 01:52:30 +0000

This post started with a quick experiment, but after hardware incompatibilities forced me to swap SSD drives, and subsequently lose a data volume, it turned into a much bigger effort.

My two Unraid servers have been running nonstop without any issues for many months, last I looked the uptime on v6.7.2 was around 240 days. We recently experienced an extended power failure, and I noticed 5 parity errors, on both servers, after the servers were restarted.

Unraid in production, a bit rough around the edges, and terrible SMB performance

Tue, 11 Jun 2019 02:51:12 +0000

In my last two posts I described how I migrated from W2K16 and hardware RAID6 to Unraid. Now that I’ve had two Unraid servers in production for a while, I’ll describe some of the good and not so good I experienced.

Running Docker on Unraid is magnitudes easier compared to getting Docker to work on Windows. Docker allowed me to move all but one of my workloads from VM’s to containers, simplifying updates, reducing the memory footprint, and improving performance.

Unraid and Robocopy Problems

Mon, 13 May 2019 03:12:41 +0000

In my last post I described how I converted one of my W2K16 servers to Unraid, and how I am preparing for conversion of the second server.

As I’ve been copying all my data from W2K16 to Unraid, I discovered some interesting discrepancies between W2K16 SMB and Unraid SMB. I use robocopy to mirror files from one server to the other, and once the first run completes, any subsequent runs should complete without needing to copy any files again (unless they were modified).

Moving from W2K16 to Unraid

Mon, 06 May 2019 01:34:42 +0000

I have been happy with my server rack running my UniFi network equipment and two Windows Server 2016 (W2K16) instances. I use the servers for archiving my media collection and running Hyper-V for all sorts of home projects and work related experiments. But, time moves on, one can never have enough storage, and technology changes. So I set about a path that led to me replacing my W2K16 servers with Unraid.

I currently use Adaptec 7805Q and 81605ZQ RAID cards, with a mixture of SSD for caching, SSD RAID1 for boot and VM images, and HDD RAID6 for the large media storage array. The setup has been solid, and although I’ve had both SSD and HDD failures, the hot spares kicked in, and I replaced the failed drives with new hot spares, no data lost.

Monoprice MP Voxel 3D Printer Setup

Sat, 05 Jan 2019 19:07:03 +0000

[Update] After using the printer for about two weeks, I returned it to Monoprice for a refund. I would suggest you stay away and look elsewhere, or wait until Monoprice addresses the serious issues; Polar Cloud disconnects while printing, IO timeout error breaks camera function, and the deal breaker is the hangs during printing, with the touch screen unresponsive and the extruder and print bed heater still on.

I’ve been looking for a new 3D printer to use at home, and I just installed and configured my new Monoprice Voxel 3D Printer.

PurpleAir Sensor Installation

Mon, 19 Nov 2018 00:16:37 +0000

I’ve had an Ambient Weather WS-1400-IP weather station installed for some time, reporting to Weather Underground. During the fires of previous years, I considered getting an air quality monitor, but I could never find anything worth the installation effort. During this year’s fire season I saw several ads for PurpleAir, advertising that they collaborate with Weather Underground, so I decided to purchase and install a PA-II outdoor sensor.

The installation instructions are sparse, and the device is not really what I would call rugged or weatherproof. I would not put money on it surviving outdoors for longer than a year, specifically because of the use of a vanilla Micro-USB power plug that offers no corrosion protection. The unit I received came with a Nest outdoor camera power cable, but unlike the Nest camera that uses a watertight plug, the sensor uses an open USB cable. The instructions do say to point the open USB port downwards, instead I opted to seal it in using clear silicone sealer.

eNom Dynamic DNS Update Problems

Sat, 30 Jun 2018 16:57:07 +0000

Update: On 27 July 2018 eNom support notified me by email that the issue is resolved. I tested it, and all is back to normal with DNS-O-Matic.

Sometime between 12 May 2018 and 24 May 2018 the eNom dynamic DNS update mechanism stopped working.

I use the very convenient DNS-O-Matic dynamic DNS update service to update my OpenDNS account, and several host records at eNom, pointing them to my home IP address.

CrashPlan throws in the towel ... for home users

Wed, 23 Aug 2017 01:19:55 +0000

Today CrashPlan, my current online backup provider, announced on Facebook of all places, that they threw in the towel, and will no longer provide service to home users. The backlash was heated, and I found the CEO’s video message on the blog post rather condescending.

I’ve been a long time user of online backup providers, and many have thrown in the towel, especially when free file sync from Google and Microsoft offers ever expanding capabilities and more and more free storage. Eventually even the cheapest backup storage implementation becomes expensive, when compared to a cloud provider, and not profitable as a primary business.

Razer BSOD When Driver Verifier is Enabled

Wed, 26 Apr 2017 05:13:57 +0000

Not too long ago I complained about Razer’s poor UX and Support, this time it is a BSOD in one of their drivers, and forever crashing Razer Stargazer camera software.

I’ve been looking for a Windows Hello capable webcam, and the Razer Stargazer, based on Intel RealSense technology, looked promising. The device is all metal and tactical looking, but the software experience is so buggy, install this, install that, then crash after crash after crash. I ended up returning it for a refund, and got a Logitech BRIO instead, the BRIO is cheaper, and works great.

Razer Shoddy Support and Bad Software UX

Tue, 28 Mar 2017 19:07:28 +0000

This post is just me venting my frustration at Razer’s poor software user experience, and their shoddy support practices. I’m writing this after I just had to go and find a working mouse, so I could click a button on a dialog that had no keyboard navigation support.

I’ve been using Razer keyboards and mice for some time, love them, their software not so much. I had to replace an aging ThinkPad, and the newly released Razer Blade Stealth looked like a great candidate, small and fast, reasonably priced, should be perfect, well, not so much.

Circumventing ThinkPad's WiFi Card Whitelisting

Fri, 23 Dec 2016 20:10:45 +0000

What started as a simple Mini PCI Express WiFi card swap on a ThinkPad T61 notebook, turned into deploying a custom BIOS in order to get the card to work.

I love ThinkPad notebooks, they are workhorses that keep on going and going. I always keep my older models around for testing, and one of my old T61’s had an Intel 4965AGN card, that worked fine with Windows 10, until the release of the Anniversary / Redstone 1 update. After the RS1 update, WiFi would either fail to connect, or randomly drop out. The 4965AGN card is not supported by Intel on Win10, and the internet is full of problem reports of Win10 and 4965AGN cards.

UPS Battery Replacement Turns Into Unrecoverable Firmware Update

Sat, 15 Oct 2016 02:09:32 +0000

As the saying goes, if it is not broken do not fix it, especially when it comes to firmware.

I have a couple APC Smart-UPS’s at my house, same as the models I like to use at the office. I use the SMT750 models with AP9631 Network Monitoring Cards. The problem started when we had a short power outage, and the UPS that powers the home network switch, cell repeater, alarm internet connection, and PoE IP cameras, unexpectedly died. A battery replacement led to the opportunity to do a UPS firmware update, which led to an unrecoverable firmware update.

Amazon Associates Account Closed

Wed, 31 Aug 2016 17:55:07 +0000

Amazon just notified me in email that my Associates account was closed due to not being in compliance with their operating agreement:

“You are not in compliance with Participation Requirement Number 29 because purchases resulting from Special Links on your site have been used for resale or commercial use.”

I have no idea how or why this happened.

A couple of years ago I moved my blog from the free Blogger platform to a paid WordPress.com hosted site. About the same time I signed up for an Amazon Associates account, profiting from any Amazon links resulting in sales, hoping that the proceeds would cover the costs of WordPress hosting and domain registration.

Ecobee3 WiFi Connection Troubles

Sat, 30 Jan 2016 17:39:45 +0000

In a previous post I wrote about my transition from Nest to Ecobee3 thermostats, and how the biggest benefit of the E3 was the use of remote sensors.

After several months of use, winter and summer, I find the remote sensors really do work very well, and our bedrooms remain at the desired temperature, while the areas around the thermostats can be warmer or colder.

But, the E3 is not perfect, there are two recurring problems; the remote sensors would report offline, and the units would lose network connectivity.

Ecobee3 Thermostat with Remote Sensors

Fri, 04 Sep 2015 18:17:45 +0000

We’ve had a particularly warm summer, for our very moderate area, and between my wife and my parents-in-law, they were constantly changing the thermostat temperature, leaving nobody particularly happy, and our electricity consumption sky-high. I needed a better solution, I found one, but it has some quirks.

I was an early adopter of the Nest Generation 1 thermostat, and when we moved to our new house, Nest was still the best available, and I installed two Nest Generation 2 thermostats, one upstairs, and one downstairs.

MR16 12V Halogen to LED retrofit

Sun, 02 Aug 2015 21:25:14 +0000

[7 years later, see update at end of post]

This post is about my research into finding suitable MR16 LED’s for replacing the 50W recessed halogen lights in our house. In summary, I’ve found “ok” bulbs, not great bulbs, and you can read about the details below.

Our house is about 3 years old, new construction, and one of the many decisions we made during planning was recessed halogen vs. recessed LED lighting. At the time my calculations showed the additional cost for LED lights would only be recovered in electricity cost savings after about 12 years, not worth the cost at the time. Another problem was the optical quality of the products, the near halogen optical quality LED products were ridiculously expensive, and the mainstream LED’s were of poor optical quality, and had poor dimmability.

Nest Protect False Alarms

Wed, 21 Jan 2015 03:08:42 +0000

2AM, beep, smoke alarm low battery warning, and when one beeps, all the interconnected ones beep, now it is impossible to find which one has a low battery. As for how smoke alarms look, I’ve always wondered who made those terrible aesthetic design choices, maybe it is some kind of industry insider competition to see who can design the ugliest unit with the most obnoxious markings, and still get them sold.

Rack that server

Thu, 09 Oct 2014 00:24:34 +0000

It’s been a year and a half since we moved into the new house, and I finally have the servers racked in the garage. Looks pretty nice compared to my old setups.

My old setup was as follows: Two DELL OptiPlex 990 small form factor machines with Windows Server 2008 R2 as Hyper-V servers. One server ran the important 24/7 VM’s, the other was used for testing and test VM’s. The 24/7 VM’s included a W2K8R2 domain controller and a W2K12 file server. For storage I used a Synology DS2411+ NAS, with 12 x 3TB Hitachi Ultrastar drives, configured in RAID6, and served via iSCSI. The iSCSI drive was mounted in the Hyper-V host, and configured as a 30TB passthrough disk for the file server VM, that served files over SMB and NFS. These servers stood on a wooden storage rack in the garage, and at the new house they were temporarily housed under the desk in my office.

Self Signed BitFury Drivers

Thu, 17 Apr 2014 01:45:16 +0000

Almost two years ago I pre-ordered some bitcoin mining hardware from Butterfly Labs, what a waste. After countless delays, more than a year late, they finally shipped the hardware, and given the low probability of ever recovering the money through mining, I immediately sold the hardware on eBay, for a little profit.

In the meantime USB stick miners became available, outperforming GPU mining, and easy to set up and run. I’ve had a couple of ASICMiner Block Erupter’s running under my desk for some time, in the early days I saw some fractions of coins coming in, but in recent months they are so under-powered against the current hash-rates that they do little more than blink lights.

Electrical Power Quality

Wed, 13 Nov 2013 00:49:25 +0000

Earlier this year we moved a couple miles from Redondo Beach to Manhattan Beach, bigger house, better school district. As far as the house and area are concerned, it is definitely an upgrade, but not so for the utilities.

Monthly utilities are a lot more expensive, not so much the per unit fees, but the base service fees, not just a couple $, but three or four times what we paid in Redondo Beach. Now, if it came with better offerings, or better service, or higher quality, ok, but the opposite. Water quality is worse, specifically hardness, MB supplies its own water, RB gets water from LADWP, and that unsightly water tower that no longer serves any practical purpose, with efforts to demolish it always being thwarted. As a new resident trash collection makes me pay almost thirty $ extra per month for an extra trash can, while grandfathered-in residents keep extras for free. Now, I know it is unfair to judge a service by their employee’s actions, or is it, but the trash collection guy is a jerk, if a little dust and having to get out of the truck is going to get you agitated, you are in the wrong business, especially when compared with the pack of trash collection men in RB that were always friendly and willing to give a hand. But, I really digress, I want to discuss electrical power quality problems.

TiVo Roamio DVR vs. Verizon FiOS DVR

Mon, 30 Sep 2013 22:00:50 +0000

I just replaced the last of my four Verizon FiOS DVR boxes with a TiVo Roamio DVR box.

The last time I used a TiVo was about seven years ago, it was a DirecTV TiVo box, commonly referred to as a DirecTiVo. At that time DirecTV was my only option for television service, TiVo the only option for a DVR, and AT&T DSL the only option for internet and phone.

I then moved to an area where I could only get Time Warner Cable for internet and TV, and only Verizon for phone service. I used TWC for internet and TV, and Vonage VoIP for phone service. The TWC DVR sucked compared to the TiVo that I was used to, and so did their internet reliability, and so did their customer service.

Panasonic Lumix WiFi Disappoints

Thu, 22 Aug 2013 21:38:27 +0000

I’ve been a long time fan of Panasonic Lumix digital cameras, and I tend to update them every couple of years. My current cameras are the DMC-ZS20 for travel, and the DMC-ZS7 for pocket use.

My workflow typically entails taking lots of pictures, and then using a Transcend USB3 card reader and ImageIngester Pro to copy and rename them to my PC, and finally import them into Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. This is a tedious process, but with the release of the Lumix WiFi capable handheld cameras, came an opportunity to make my life simpler by uploading directly using WiFi.

XBMC on NUC's and Pi's

Wed, 26 Dec 2012 22:44:44 +0000

I’m still looking for the perfect XBMC hardware; must be small, silent, low power, low heat, 1080p, HD audio, and play anything I throw at it without a hiccup. The number of options is increasing, but no clear winner.

I previously tested an XIOS DS running XBMC on Android, and XBMC on Linux. At that time the builds were pretty unstable. I retested the latest Linux builds, that also include XBMC 12 Frodo RC2.

LSI turns their back on Green

Wed, 21 Nov 2012 23:02:00 +0000

I previously blogged here and here on my research into finding power saving RAID controllers.

I have been using LSI MegaRAID SAS 9280-4i4e controllers in my Windows 7 workstations and LSI MegaRAID SAS 9280-8e controllers in my Windows Server 2008 R2 servers. These controllers work great, my workstations go to sleep and wake up, and in workstations and servers drives spin down when not in use.

I am testing a new set of workstation and server systems running Windows 8 and Server 2012, and using the “2nd generation” PCIe 3.0 based LSI RAID controllers. I’m using LSI MegaRAID SAS 9271-8i with CacheVault and LSI MegaRAID SAS 9286CV-8eCC controllers.

RIP Boxee Box

Tue, 23 Oct 2012 02:02:11 +0000

After nearly six months of no software updates for the Boxee Box, Boxee announced the Boxee TV, and, as far as I’m concerned, the death of the Boxee Box.

Boxee is releasing an updated hardware platform, but they are abandoning all local media playback and cataloging capabilities, and instead focusing on a, US only, cloud storage DVR device.

I have no need for such a device, and based on the Boxee community forum posts, the blog comments, and even comments from their XBMC roots, I am not alone in expressing my disappointment.

Storage Spaces Leaves Me Empty

Sat, 22 Sep 2012 22:54:46 +0000

I was very intrigued when I found out about Storage Spaces and ReFS being introduced in Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8. But now that I’ve spent some time with it, I’m left disappointed, and I will not be trusting my precious data with either of these features, just yet.

Microsoft publicly announced Storage Spaces and ReFS in early Windows 8 blog posts. Storage Spaces was of special interest to the Windows Home Server community in light of Microsoft first dropping support for Drive Extender in Windows Home Server 2011, and then completely dropping Windows Home Server, and replacing it with Windows Server 2012 Essentials. My personal interest was more geared towards expanding my home storage capacity in a cost effective and energy efficient way, without tying myself to proprietary hardware solutions.

XBMC for Linux on Pivos XIOS DS

Sun, 09 Sep 2012 02:41:59 +0000

Pivos released an XBMC build for Linux, and I tried it out.

The Pivos XIOS DS is a very small (less than 5" x 5" x 1") HTPC supporting hardware accelerated 1080p video and HD audio playback. The XIOS DS supports XBMC for Android, and XBMC for Linux, with native hardware acceleration. I reviewed the Android port of XBMC in a previous post.

The XIOS DS is available for $115 at Amazon, placing it, price wise, between the $98 Roku 2 XS and the $178 Boxee Box.

Koubachi Wi-Fi Plant Sensor

Sat, 08 Sep 2012 00:54:48 +0000

Last week several tech and gadget news outlets reported that the Koubachi Wi-Fi Plant Sensor has been released and is available for order (Amazon or SmartHome). I remembered reading about this device some time ago, and I decided to try it out.

Our houseplants are under my care, and they are generally happy and healthy. A simple water moisture indicator would not get my attention, and certainly would not be worthy of a place in my collection of semi-useful/useless Wi-Fi enabled devices (of which the Nest Learning Thermostat is the most useful), but the Koubachi promises more than just moisture monitoring:

Dyslexic Intel RSTe Driver

Mon, 03 Sep 2012 16:45:04 +0000

I encounter one problem after another running Windows 8 and Server 2012 on the dual Xeon E5 Intel C600 chipset based SuperMicro 7047A-T and 7047A-73 SuperWorkstation machines. I will say that this is really not representative of my Windows 8 experience in general, as all other machines I installed on worked fine with the in-box drivers.

The C602 includes the Intel Storage Controller Unit (SCU) SATA / SAS controller. Windows 8 and Server 2012 do not include in-box drivers for the SCU. The SCU drivers are part of the Intel Rapid Storage Technology Enterprise (RSTe) driver set. Note that the RSTe and RST drivers are different and not compatible with one another. When you install the full RSTe package, it includes SCU drivers for the SCU RAID controller, AHCI drivers for the SATA controller, and the Windows RST management application.

Windows 8 VIDEO_TDR_FAILURE Madness

Thu, 23 Aug 2012 22:09:49 +0000

I finally figured out why I kept on getting VIDEO_TDR_FAILURE BSOD’s when installing Windows 8 on my SuperMicro workstations. It turns out that the problem goes away when I use a PCIe slot associated with CPU #1, instead of a slot associated with CPU #2.

Some history on my adventures with Windows 8 and SuperMicro SuperWorkstations:
I got ACPI_BIOS_ERROR BSOD’s while installing Windows 8, SuperMicro provided a Beta BIOS that resolved the problem.
The Windows 8 install hangs if installing to an SSD drive on an LSI 2308 SAS controller, that issue is still unresolved, but can be worked around by connecting the SSD to the Intel SATA controller.
I got VIDEO_TDR_FAILURE BSOD’s while installing Windows 8 with an NVidia Quadro 5000 graphics card, same with an ATI FirePro V7900 or an NVidia GeForce GTX 680 or an ATI HD 7970. And this post is about resolving that problem.

WordPress.com 404 With Blogger Permalinks

Tue, 07 Aug 2012 00:02:52 +0000

Part of the research I did before migrating from Blogger to WordPress.com, was to make sure that current Blogger permalinks would resolve correctly once the old posts were imported into WordPress.com. At the time all seemed fine, but soon after migrating, I received alerts from Google Webmaster Tools that there is an increase in site errors, specifically 404 errors.

Some background: Permalinks are the URL’s that point directly to specific posts on the blog. These URL’s are known by search engines, are shared on forums, and are basically the static address of posts. Blogger and WordPress.com use different styles of permalinks. WordPress.com allows some customization of permalinks, but unlike WordPress.org, there is no support for custom plugins to handle rewrites for permalinks, 302’s or 404’s.

Windows 8 Install Crash With NVidia Quadro 5000

Mon, 06 Aug 2012 08:45:13 +0000

I got Windows 8 RTM installed on my two SuperMicro SuperWorkstation machines, with a bit of trouble along the way, but nothing I could not work around. But, I ran into a problem with NVidia Quadro 5000 cards causing a VIDEO_TDR_FAILURE BSOD during the Windows 8 install process.

I was running my two workstations with ATI FirePro V7900 graphics cards, but I decided I wanted a bit more rendering horsepower. I wanted a card that had a good balance between modern architecture, great 2D performance, good 3D performance, OpenCL or CUDA support, and reasonable power consumption. I found the Tom’s Hardware Workstation Graphics 2012 benchmark site to be very informative, and I decided that the NVidia Quadro 5000 was a very good choice.

Windows 8 Install Hangs Booting From LSI 2308 SAS Controller

Mon, 06 Aug 2012 04:29:48 +0000

I’ve previously posted about problems installing Windows 8 on SuperMicro machines, and that SuperMicro released a Beta BIOS that solved the install problems. I’ve since run into two more problems; the install hanging when booting off the LSI 2308 SAS controller, and a BSOD when using a Quadro 5000 video card (more on that in a later post).

I have two SuperWorkstation machines, a 7047A-T using an X9DAi motherboard, and a 7047A-73 using an X9DA7 motherboard.

SuperMicro Beta BIOS supports Windows 8 and Server 2012

Mon, 30 Jul 2012 20:15:32 +0000

In a previous post I reported that my SuperMicro SuperWorkstation 7047A-T failed to install Windows 8 or Windows Server 2012 due to an ACPI_BIOS_ERROR. I contacted SuperMicro support, and I was informed that new BIOS releases are on their way that will support Windows 8 and Server 2012.

This morning I received an email from SuperMicro, with a new Beta BIOS for the X9DAi motherboard used in the 7047A-T. The new BIOS allowed me to install Windows 8 and Server 2012.

XBMC for Android on Pivos XIOS DS

Sun, 22 Jul 2012 20:36:07 +0000

In my ongoing quest to find the perfect Home Theater PC platform, I was excited to read that XBMC had been ported to Android. This opens possibilities for XBMC on low cost, low power, low noise, small form factor hardware, with hardware accelerated media playback.

The XBMC Android development was done on a Pivos XIOS DS device, and I ordered one from Amazon. At $115 it is not exactly low cost, especially compared to mature platforms like the Roku 2 XS for $98 or Boxee Box for $180.

Debugging Windows 8 Install BSOD

Fri, 20 Jul 2012 22:04:27 +0000

In my last post I described how to prevent Windows from automatically restarting when encountering a BSOD during the OS install process. This allowed me to see the ACPI_BIOS_ERROR fault code while installing Windows 8 on my new SuperMicro workstation. The new Windows 8 BSOD page looks friendly, but no longer displays any error parameters other than the main fault code.

In order to get additional details of the crash, I had to hook up a kernel debugger to the machine. Windows 8 adds USB3 and TCPIP kernel debug support, and I will describe how I used the TCPIP network option to capture details of the crash.

Windows 8 and Server 2012 on SuperMicro results in ACPI_BIOS_ERROR BSOD

Fri, 20 Jul 2012 00:59:01 +0000

I ran out of disk space on my development workstation, all those VM images add up. The machine has four drive bays, and all four have 3TB drives. I can replace the 3TB drives with 4TB drives, but migrating the RAID5 array will be time consuming and risky. I can add an external SAS storage enclosure, but they do not power down when the machine goes to sleep. So I looked at buying a new machine with more drive bays.

CrashPlan Memory Utilization

Sun, 15 Jul 2012 22:39:14 +0000

I’ve been using CrashPlan as an online backup solution for quite some time, and it works really well.

I like the fact that I can subscribe to the consumer plan, with almost 3.5TB of data backed up, and that the backup client installs on a server OS. Many of the other “unlimited” backup providers I tested have restrictions in place that make such a setup impossible.

CrashPlan sends email notifications about backup status, and I noticed that something was wrong with the backup:

From Blogger to WordPress

Sun, 15 Jul 2012 19:48:58 +0000

I outlined my concerns with Blogger in my last post, and after much deliberation, I decided to move my blog from Blogger to WordPress.

There are two main choices; use WordPress.com for full service blog hosting, or use WordPress.org and host the WordPress application at a hosting provider. Here is a summary describing the differences.

I decided to try both options; I created a blog at WordPress.com, and I created a self-hosted blog using WordPress.org.

Creating the blog at WordPress.com was very quick and easy.

About

Sun, 15 Jul 2012 03:07:10 +0000

Hi, my name is Pieter Viljoen, this is my personal blog I use to document my discoveries, frustrations, and delights.

The content reflects my personal opinions and are not reflective or representative of my employer or their customers.

My open source projects are published on GitHub and my professional profile is on LinkedIn.

Looks can be deceiving

Wed, 20 Jun 2012 05:28:00 +0000

It has been almost two weeks since I switched to using Blogger’s new dynamic template.

Browsing the site with the new template works really well; it uses most of the available browser real estate, it looks good on an iPad, it feels nice and fluid, but it also has problems.

For some reason my AdSense integration stopped working, and the AdSense site said my account needs to be verified. AdSense was working fine in the old template, so something in the new template, or switching to the new template, must have triggered this. I’ve had AdSense for almost a year, and in that time I’ve not even made enough for Google to trigger a payment. In order to verify my account, I had to enter a PIN they mailed me on a postcard, enter the amount of a test transfer in my bank account, and enter a PIN read to me on my phone. Two days after the verification steps were completed ads started showing up again.

Blogger Dynamic Templates

Fri, 08 Jun 2012 06:17:00 +0000

I just switched to the Blogger Dynamic Template.
You can read about what it offers readers here, and what Blogger wrote about it here.

I am still on the fence about keeping it, or switching back to my old custom template, or adopting one of the standard templates.

It is much easier using standard Blogger templates vs. using custom templates; the template designer keeps up with new Blogger features, or Blogger changes. With custom templates there is always manual CSS and HTML editing involved.

Iomega TV With Boxee vs. D-Link Boxee Box

Sat, 31 Dec 2011 20:38:00 +0000

I have yet to find the perfect media player for playing my archived music and movie collection.

I’ve tried building my own using small form factor computers like the Zotac ZBOX HD-ID11 (Amazon), Nano AD10 (Amazon) and Nano VD01 (Amazon). I’ve tried software like Windows Media Center, XBMC, MediaPortal, and Boxee. I’ve tried commercial products like the WD TV Live Plus (Amazon), Popcorn Hour C-200 (Amazon), A-210, PopBox 3D (Amazon), Apple TV, D-Link Boxee Box (Amazon), and Iomega TV With Boxee. But, they all have problems and shortcomings.

Rotation confuses face recognition

Wed, 14 Dec 2011 00:44:00 +0000

I have around fifty thousand digital photos in my library, and it has become impractical to browse through them looking for some event, or some place, or some person. So other than archiving, there really is no value in collecting photos if you can’t go back and find the ones you are looking for.

A few years ago I switched to using Image Ingester Pro and Adobe Photoshop Lightroom to import and catalog my photos. Now one of the first things I do after importing photos, is to add keywords describing the event, the place, and the people. But, I still have tens of thousands of photos that have no keywords, and there is no easy or automated way to add keywords to these photos. One thing that can be automated is adding people keywords to photos based on automated face recognition.

Synology DS2411+ Performance Review

Thu, 21 Jul 2011 19:43:00 +0000

In my last post I compared the performance of Synology DS1511+ against the QNAP TS-859 Pro. As I finished writing that post, Synology announced the new Synology DS2411+.
Instead of using a DS1511+ and DX510 extender for 10 disks, the DS2411+ offers 12 disks in a single device. The price difference is also marginal, DS1511+ is $836, the DX510 is $500, and the DS2411+ is $1700. That is a difference of only $364, and well worth it for the extra storage space, and the reliability and stability of all drives in one enclosure. I ended up returning my DX510 and DS1511+, and got a DS2411+ instead.

Synology DS1511+ vs. QNAP TS-859 Pro, iSCSI MPIO Performance

Wed, 06 Jul 2011 22:50:00 +0000

I have been very happy with my QNAP TS-859 Pro (Amazon), but I’ve run out of space while archiving my media collection, and I needed to expand the storage capacity. You can read about my experience with the TS-859 Pro here, and my experience archiving my media collection here.
My primary objective with this project is storage capacity expansion, and my secondary objective is improved performance.

My choices for storage capacity expansion included:

Archiving my CD, DVD and BD collection

Sat, 23 Apr 2011 00:03:00 +0000

I am about two thirds done archiving my entire CD, DVD, and BD collection to network storage. I have been ripping on a part time basis for about 5 months, and so far I’ve ripped over 700 discs.

I have considered archiving my media collection for some time, but just never got around to it. Recently our toddler discovered how to open discs and use them as toys, so storing the discs safely quickly became a priority. I’d like to give you some insight into what I’ve learned and what process I follow.

Unlimited online backup providers becoming extinct

Wed, 13 Apr 2011 04:53:00 +0000

I just received an email from ElephantDrive informing me that my legacy unlimited storage account will be terminated in 30 days, and that I must select a new plan.

In July 2009 ElephantDrive announced that they are no longer offering their $100 per year unlimited storage plan. ElephantDrive is now offering a $200 per year for 500GB plan.
In February 2011 Mozy announced that they are no longer offering their $55 per year unlimited storage plan. Mozy is now offering a $120 per year for 125GB plan.
In February 2011 Trend Micro SafeSync announced that they are bandwidth throttling large accounts. In March 2011 they announced that they are no longer offering their $35 per year unlimited storage plan. SafeSync is now offering a $150 per year for 150GB plan.
Carbonite offers a $55 per year for unlimited storage plan, but they are bandwidth throttling accounts over 35GB to 512Kbps and accounts over 200GB to 100Kbps access speeds.
AVG LiveKive offers an $80 per year for unlimited storage plan, but the terms of service defines unlimited as 500GB.
BackBlaze offers a $60 per year for unlimited storage plan.
CrashPlan offers a $50 per year for unlimited storage plan.
Neither BackBlazenor CrashPlan supports their unlimited plan on server class machines.

Delete, Are You Sure, Yes, Oh Oh

Tue, 04 Jan 2011 04:44:00 +0000

I just had one of those moments where the blood drains from your head as you contemplate what you did.

I was in Disk Management Console, messing around with new drives I was testing, and I wanted to delete the volumes. Right Click, Delete, Are you sure, your data will be lost, and without thinking twice, I clicked yes.
Then the blood drained from my head as I realized what I just did; instead of deleting the test volume, I just deleted my main 5TB data volume!

Trend Micro SafeSync, neat, but unreliable

Fri, 31 Dec 2010 22:17:00 +0000

I wanted to write about Trend Micro SafeSync, but it reminded me of my Streamload experience, and I ended up writing this instead. This time I am really going to write about SafeSync.

SafeSync is another online backup and sync and share application. Actually, they offer both online storage through a mapped drive, and syncing folders online, this makes it unique compared to many existing offerings.

I have used almost all online backup and sync and share type applications out there, my favorite remains DropBox. SafeSync used to be Humyo, before being acquired by Trend. I used Humyo when they were in Beta, it was just ok, but between then and now their product seems to have come a long way.

Will your online backup or sync and share provider survive?

Fri, 31 Dec 2010 20:18:00 +0000

I have been using online backup for many years. I won’t call myself an expert, experienced maybe, but I have tried almost all online backup and sync and share services. My biggest concern is still the longevity and trustworthiness of the provider.

My biggest disappointment is definitely Streamload. Streamload was a great service, they provided unlimited storage, had a client up-loader, supported FTP access, and had a great web frontend. And this was in 2005, long before many other online storage providers existed, and nobody else offered unlimited storage. The concept was great, take any of your online files, and present them in a web friendly way, e.g. play your backed up music collection from your browser, watch your backed up movies from your browser.

NCP VPN not quite Windows 7 compatible

Wed, 21 Jul 2010 23:24:00 +0000

I got so frustrated with the NCP VPN client software, specifically a recent update, that I decided to let my frustration out by writing about it.

For a long time I used the, IT approved, Cisco VPN client to access our corporate network. And as the OS technology moved along, so did my systems, meaning Vista, Windows 7, and 64-bit. While, for the most part, our IT approved systems remained to be only 32-bit XP. Cisco, for some reason, maybe they are representative of IT organizations as a whole, was late to support Vista, was late to support Windows 7, and for the longest time never supported x64.

Zotac ZBOXHD-ID11 MKV H.264 Video Playback Performance

Sat, 29 May 2010 00:28:00 +0000

When I started writing about the ID11, my intent was to document video playback and use as an HTPC, several posts later, and I am finally getting to MKV H.264 playback configuration and performance.

This is the sixth post in a series of posts related to the Zotac ZBOX ZBOXHD-ID11.

Summary:

The CPU is not powerful enough to render / decode H.264 video, and GPU acceleration via DXVA is required, as well as a DXVA capable player.
The Microsoft DTV-DVD Video Decoder, included as part of Windows 7 x64, worked perfectly for H.264 playback, and compared to other H.264 decoders had the lowest CPU usage.
As a standalone player, Media Player Classic Home Cinema, is a perfect choice, it supports MKV, H.264, DXVA, and subtitles without the need of any other software.
Playback of MKV H.264 in Windows Media Player, Windows Media Center, MediaPortal, or XBMC requires the installation of Haali Media Splitter, and ffdshow audio and video decoders.
For AC-3 / DTS pass-through playback via S/PDIF / HDMI, the ffdshow audio decoder is required.

I am not an expert in how these things work, but I have a basic understanding of video playback on Windows platforms, so let’s start with the file format; an MKV file is a Matroska Media Container file. An MKV file can contain multiple audio-, video-, subtitle-, and other, streams. An MKV file is not a video or audio compression format, it is just a container.

Zotac ZBOXHD-ID11 Case Positioning Impact on Fan Noise

Thu, 27 May 2010 19:55:00 +0000

As I was testing the ID11, I noticed differences in the thermal behavior based on how the case was positioned.
I tested three positions; case open, case vertical, and case horizontal.

This is the fifth post in a series of posts related to the Zotac ZBOX ZBOXHD-ID11.

Summary:

Place the case in a vertical position for best cooling.

I used the Beta BIOS for testing. I let the system sit idle, placed it under load, then back to idle, while I recorded the fan speed and temperatures. The ambient temperature was 21C / 70F.

Zotac ZBOXHD-ID11 Beta BIOS Reduces Fan Speed and Noise

Wed, 26 May 2010 21:18:00 +0000

In a previous post I measured the fan speed and noise under load, and I found it to be unacceptably high.
Zotac support notified me that a new Beta BIOS is available that addresses the issue.
In this post I measure the difference between the release BIOS and the Beta BIOS.

This is the fourth post in a series of posts related to the Zotac ZBOX ZBOXHD-ID11.

Summary:

The Beta BIOS reduces the fan speed and noise significantly.
The default BIOS values need some adjustment to get acceptable results.
Similar results may be possible with the current BIOS by setting the target temperature to 65C.

The Beta BIOS was first announced on the global Zotac site, it only later appeared on the US site. I would recommend that ID11 owners look for updates on the global site instead of the US site.
The Beta BIOS is available for download from here.

Zotac ZBOX Mini-PC ZBOXHD-ID11

Wed, 26 May 2010 17:53:00 +0000

I created this page as an index to all my posts about the Zotac ZBOX Mini-PC ZBOXHD-ID11.

This is my first post created using Windows Live Writer.
I used to create my posts using Google Docs, but a recent upgrade to Google Docs removed the ability to publish docs to Blogger. Ironic that I am now using a Microsoft product to post to Google ;)

Zotac ZBOXHD-ID11 4GB RAM

Wed, 19 May 2010 02:46:00 +0000

In this post I describe my experience while upgrading the BIOS, in order to support 4GB of memory.

This is the third post in a series of posts related to the Zotac ZBOX ZBOXHD-ID11.

Summary:
- 4GB is supported after upgrading the BIOS.
- BIOS has to be updated using less than 4GB, else ID11 fails to post.

[Update: 20 May 2010]
After writing this post, the machine started bluescreen / BSOD crashing.
Mostly MEMORY_MANAGEMENT / 0x0000001A errors, with occasional 0x000000BE and 0x0000003B crashes.
When I initially installed the 4GB RAM, I ran memtest for one cycle, and the RAM tested fine. I just reran memtest, and it is reporting the memory as bad.
I replaced the memory with a new stick, I ran memtest overnight, and everything seems back to normal.
I hope it was just a bad stick, and not the ID11 that killed the memory.

Zotac ZBOXHD-ID11 Fan Speed and Noise

Wed, 19 May 2010 00:38:00 +0000

In my previous post I discussed my initial impressions of the Zotac ZBOXHD-ID11.
In this post I continue my review, focusing on fan speed and noise.

This is the second post in a series of posts related to the Zotac ZBOX ZBOXHD-ID11.

Summary:
- High fan speed and noise while under load.
- Fan never returns to silent operation after load is removed.
- Need DXVA capable player for video playback.

[Update: 26 May 2010]
I tested the Beta BIOS, and it produced significantly better results. Effectively the new BIOS runs the CPU at 65C vs. 50C, as such you may be able to achieve the same results with the current BIOS by simply changing the CPU temperature threshold to 65C.

Zotac ZBOXHD-ID11 First Impressions

Sat, 15 May 2010 06:30:00 +0000

I am sharing my experiences and first impressions of the Zotac ZBOXHD-ID11-U mini PC.

In the coming days I will connect the device to my home theater, and review the behavior running Windows Media Center, XBMC, and Media-Portal.

This is the first post in a series of posts related to the Zotac ZBOX ZBOXHD-ID11.

Summary:
- To enter the BIOS, cold boot and press DEL.
- To select a boot device, cold boot and press F11.
- To enable Aero, run the Windows Experience Index assessment.
- To improve performance, install updated drivers from the hardware vendor site.
- To correct HDMI audio output, install updated drivers from the hardware vendor site.
- To reduce fan noise, change the BIOS temperature thresholds.
- The fan is loud and the box runs hot.

Data Robotics DroboPro vs. QNAP TS-859 Pro

Sun, 31 Jan 2010 07:30:00 +0000

I previously wrote about my impressions of the DroboPro, and in case I was not clear, I was not impressed.

I recently read the announcement of the new QNAP TS-859 Pro, and from the literature it seemed like a great device, high performance, feature rich, and power saving.

The TS-859 Pro is now available, and I compared it with the DroboPro, and against a regular W2K8R2 file server.

NEC MultiSync LCD2490WUXi2 and LCD2690WUXi2

Sat, 30 Jan 2010 23:00:00 +0000

I recently replaced my DELL monitors with NEC monitors.

The primary reason why I replaced DELL with NEC is color reproduction, I could never quite get the wide gamut DELL’s to look right.

I chose the NEC MultiSync 90 series monitors because they have excellent color reproduction, and are reasonably affordable.

The alternative would have been EIZO ColorEdge monitors, but they are significantly more expensive.

Since I had a hard time calibrating the wide color gamut DELL monitors in the past, it was very important that the NEC monitors be correctly calibrated.

Intel DP45SG and Lian-Li PC-C33B HTPC

Mon, 04 Jan 2010 00:57:00 +0000

I recently built a new home theater PC using an Intel DP45SG motherboard and a Lian-Li PC-C33B case.

I am replacing my existing HTPC that appears to be not quite compatible with Windows 7.

The existing machine uses a Lian-Li PC-C31B case, Intel DG33TL motherboard, and ATI Sapphire HD 2600XT video card.

I started documenting the new machine installation, but the new case was on backorder, and I had all components except the new case, so I tried the HD 5750 card in the old machine.

DroboPro Impressions

Thu, 24 Dec 2009 03:49:00 +0000

In this post I am describing, and partly reviewing, my experience using a DroboPro over iSCSI.

I have been aware of the Drobo storage devices for some time now, but never used one or knew anybody that owned one.

Recently a coworker’s large home RAID system had a controller failure, and after recovering the data, he migrated to a DroboPro using iSCSI.

After he told me how quiet the device is, and how little power it uses, I wanted to try one out myself.

Hitachi Ultrastar and Seagate Barracuda LP 2TB drives

Sun, 11 Oct 2009 22:54:00 +0000

In my previous post I talked about Western Digital RE4-GP 2TB drive problems.

In this post I present my test results for 2TB drives from Seagate and Hitachi.

The test setup is the same as for the RE4-GP testing, except that I only tested 4 drives from each manufacturer.

Unlike the enterprise class WD RE4-GP and Hitachi Ultrastar A7K2000 drives, the Seagate Barracuda LP drive is a desktop drive.

The equivalent should have been a Seagate Constellation ES drive, but as far as I know the 2TB drives are not yet available.

Western Digital RE4-GP 2TB Drive Problems

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 02:16:00 +0000

In my previous two posts I described my research into the power saving features of various enterprise class RAID controllers.

In this post I detail the results of my testing of the Western Digital RE4-GP enterprise class “green” drives when used with hardware RAID controllers from Adaptec, Areca, and LSI.

To summarize, the RE4-GP drive fails with a variety of problems, Adaptec, Areca, and LSI acknowledge the problem and lay blame on WD, yet WD insists there are no known problems with the RE4-GP drives.

Power Saving RAID Controller (Continued)

Sat, 18 Jul 2009 00:20:00 +0000

This post continues from my last post on power saving RAID controllers.

It turns out the Adaptec 5 series controllers are not that workstation friendly.

I was testing with Western Digital drives; 1TB Caviar Black WD1001FALS, 2TB Caviar Green WD20EADS, and 1TB RE3 WD1002FBYS.

I also wanted to test with the new 2TB RE4-GP WD2002FYPS drives, but they are on backorder.

I found that the Caviar Black WD1001FALS and Caviar Green WD20EADS drives were just dropping out of the array for no apparent reason, yet they were still listed in ASM as if nothing was wrong.

DELL 2408WFP losing settings on power cycle

Sun, 05 Jul 2009 21:39:00 +0000

In my last post I discussed the calibration of my DELL 2408WFP monitors.

After calibration, and changing the monitor settings, the monitors looked pretty good, but I later found that the monitor colors looked all weird again.

It turns out that the monitors reverted to their default settings, invalidating the calibration.

It seems to me that as soon as my PC goes to sleep, or the monitors go into power saving mode, or power off, that on turning back on they revert to default settings.

DELL 2408WFP and Spyder 3 Elite

Sun, 14 Jun 2009 07:45:00 +0000

I upgraded my vista Ultimate x64 workstation to a dual monitor setup using two 24"DELL 2408WFP displays connected to an ATI HD4850 video card.

I immediately noticed that the colors were unnaturally bright and over-saturated.

I had a similar problem on another workstation with a 30"DELL 3007WFP-HC display. My original 3007WFP was great, until it started making a high pitched noise, and DELL replaced it under warranty, but they replaced it with a 3007WFP-HC model, and the color difference was very noticeably worse than the old monitor.

Amazon Unbox on x64 Vista

Sun, 14 Jun 2009 03:41:00 +0000

While shopping on Amazon I noticed that they were offering the Pilot of the Showtime series Nurse Jackie in HD for free, so I decided to give it a try.

The install (version 2.0.1.95) went smoothly, and the 1.3GB download also completed pretty quickly, and I watched the show.

Ok, now I wanted to stop the Unbox player service from running and terminate the tray icon application, I have no need to have it running all the time.

Power Saving SATA RAID Controller

Fri, 12 Jun 2009 19:37:00 +0000

I’ve been a longtime user of Adaptec SATA RAID cards (3805, 5805, 51245), but over the years I’ve become more energy saving conscious, and the Adaptec controllers did not support Windows power management.

My workstations are normally running in the “Balanced” power mode so that they will go to sleep after an hour, but sometimes I need to run computationally intensive tasks that leave the machines running 24/7.

During these periods the disks don’t need to be on and I want the disks to spin down, like they would had they been directly connected and not in a RAID configuration.

How to install SQL Server 2008 on Windows Server 2008 R2 RC

Thu, 14 May 2009 20:44:00 +0000

I was trying to install SQL Server 2008 on Windows Server 2008 R2 RC.

But, when I launch SETUP.EXE, Windows warns me that SQL Server is not compatible with Windows Server.
If I ignore the warning, the install proceeds but then fails to install .NET 3.5.

After a little searching and experimentation I found a way to install without any problems:
1. Create a slipstreamed SQL Server 2008 SP1 install, follow the instructions here.
I set my PCUSOURCE=".\PCU" and that worked fine.
2. Add .NET 3.5 by going to server manager and adding the .NET 3.5.1 feature.
3. Install by running SETUP.EXE.

2008 VW Touareg Tire Pressure Discrepancy

Fri, 10 Apr 2009 23:16:00 +0000

I drive a 2008 VW Touareg with stock 17" Pirelli P255/60R17 Scorpion STR tires.

I noticed the VW recommended tire pressure was 2PSI higher than the tire’s maximum pressure rating.

The tire pressure sticker on the driver door indicated 46PSI, while the tire wall indicated a maximum tire pressure of 44PSI.

Overinflating tires is potentially very dangerous.

I posted my findings on the Club Touareg Forum, and other owners of similar vehicles confirmed the same information on their tire labels.

Archived Content and Templates

Fri, 10 Apr 2009 22:58:00 +0000

I have now moved all old archived content from my website to this blog, the old pages contain links to the equivalent blog postings. I know the copy-and-paste blog formatting is not very elegant, but it will do.

I was using the standard Blogger “Tic-Tac” template, but the readable area was not wide enough to fit many of the images I embed in articles, and this would either skew the text, or cut off the images.

Broken Symbol Proxy

Thu, 09 Apr 2009 23:24:00 +0000

This post is about Microsoft Debugging Tools for Windows, symbol servers, and symbol proxy servers.

You can read my posts about this problem on the Microsoft WinDbg group, and on the Google Chromium group.

We run several symbol servers, and a single symbol proxy server that provides transparent access to all our symbol servers, as well as the Microsoft symbol servers.

I was debugging a Google Chrome crash, and was looking for symbols for Chrome. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that both Mozilla and Google have public debug symbol servers for Firefox and for Chrome. I added the Mozilla and Google symbol servers to our symbol proxy server list.

DxO Optics Pro and Adobe Lightroom on Vista x64

Wed, 11 Feb 2009 23:15:00 +0000

I bought my first SLR camera, a Canon EOS 20D, and my first wide angle lens, a Canon EF-S 10-22, several years ago. Amongst the many articles and reviews I read, online and in magazines, I came across a product called DxO Optics Pro, a product that would supposedly correct, amongst other things, lens distortion. This seemed like the perfect tool to help me with my wide angle pictures that looked very “fishy eyed”. And since DxO, then version 4, was receiving good reviews, I decided to trial the product. In those days the DxO licensing model was to pay per camera body and per lens module, not a cheap investment, but I really liked the results and so I purchased the product.

Google Email Uploader on Vista x64

Sat, 10 Jan 2009 04:17:00 +0000

I am currently importing a few thousand email messages from Outlook 2007 to my email account hosted on Google Apps. Google provides an Email Uploader utility, and it is easy to use, but getting it to work with Outlook 2007 on Vista x64 was less than trivial.

The utility installed fine on my Vista x64 system, but it found no mailboxes to import. A little research showed that several other people using Vista x64 and Outlook 2007 have exactly the same problem.

How difficult can it be to transfer a .name domain?

Sun, 25 May 2008 00:52:00 +0000

How difficult can it be to transfer a .name domain?

I was reading an article where it was noted that .name names can now be used for OpenID registrations.

With a little more research I found that the sites only supported new registrations, unfortunately they did not support transfers.

Several years ago when the .name domains were new and the in thing to do, I registered my pieter.viljoen.name domain and pieter@viljoen.name with Register.com.

Asus P5E-VM HDMI motherboard

Fri, 16 May 2008 23:31:00 +0000

In the ongoing saga to get a motherboard that works well with Vista SP1 going to sleep, I have yet again switched motherboards.

As previously posted I’ve tried an Intel DG33TL board, and an Intel DQ35JO, and I am now using an Asus P5E-VM HDMI board.

I was happy with the Intel DQ35JO, but this did not last very long. A few days after posting I found my machine with garbage characters on the screen, requiring a cold boot. Intel support was of little help, but a few days later I updated the firmware on my ThinkPad T61, and I read that one of the fixes in the firmware was to fix garbage characters on the screen when sleeping or resuming from sleep caused by the AMT feature. The DQ35JO board also has AMT, so maybe that was the same problem.

Getting Vista to go to sleep

Sun, 13 Apr 2008 20:03:00 +0000

I noted my troubles with the Intel GMA drivers, the Intel DG33TL motherboard, and Vista SP1 blue screen crashing in my earlier post.

Since I was running the 15.8 version of the Intel GMA drivers, and Microsoft KB948343 indicates that, based on the driver version numbers, these newer drivers should not be affected by SP1, yet the crash details were clearly the same, and no new driver was forthcoming to correct the blue screen crash, I decided to take the GMA drivers out of the picture.

Installing Vista SP1 with an OEM key

Sat, 12 Apr 2008 01:45:00 +0000

I received my new Lenovo ThinkPad T61 notebook, pre-installed with Vista Ultimate, but also with 3rd party software I did not care for.

I wanted a clean Vista install, and that is exactly why I made sure to order the recovery media with the notebook, thinking that this would include an OS install DVD. It turns out that the recovery media is six CDs, I don’t know why not a DVD, regardless, the recovery media does not include a Vista install DVD.

Intel DG33TL motherboard

Wed, 02 Apr 2008 04:13:00 +0000

This article was originally posted here.

Introduction:

After my bad experience with the Abit F-I90HD motherboards, read about it
here, I purchased two Intel DG33TL motherboards.

Although these boards do not have HDMI onboard, they do have HDCP compliant DVI,
and by adding an ADD2 HDMI board you get HDMI and audio over HDMI.

The Good:

Onboard HDCP compliant DVI.
Intel ADD2 HDMI card support.
Vista installed very fast and with no problems.

Microsoft Expression Media / iView Media Pro to Adobe Photoshop Lightroom converter

Wed, 02 Apr 2008 04:08:00 +0000

This article was originally posted here.

Introduction:

Because of severe performance problems I experienced with both iView Media Pro and Microsoft Expression Media, I decided to switch to Adobe Lightroom.

Unfortunately Lightroom does not understand catalog sets nor does it understand people tags, so the transition is not that simple.

After I could not find a simple, or even complicated solution, I decided to write my own conversion application.

This application will convert hierarchical catalog sets into keywords, and will add people tags to keywords.

Abit F-I90HD motherboard

Wed, 02 Apr 2008 04:04:00 +0000

This article was originally posted here.

Introduction:

I was very excited to find the Abit F-I90HD motherboard for use in my HTPC,
primarily because it had an onboard HDMI connector.

I purchased two boards, but I ended up returning them both because of problems.

Instead I purchased two Intel DG33TL boards, read about that experience
here.

The Good:

Onboard HDMI with 7.1 digital audio over HDMI.

At least on paper, I never got to test it.

Antec Veris Fusion Black HTPC case

Wed, 02 Apr 2008 03:56:00 +0000

This article was originally posted here.

Introduction:

I purchased an Antec Fusion Black case to replace my aging HTPC.

The case looks very nice, until you turn on the LCD display…

The Good:

The case looks very nice.
The construction is solid.

The Bad:

The two included case fans do not have speed monitoring wires, I had to
purchase new fans.

For such an expensive case this is rather disappointing.

There are two fans on the side of the case, both set to extract hot air,
but hard drives are located in an area with no direct ventilation.

There are ample ventilation holes around the drives, but it remains to be
seen if the drives will overheat or not.

Philips digital photo frame

Wed, 02 Apr 2008 03:47:00 +0000

This article was originally posted here.

Introduction:

I have been looking for a digital photo frame for a while, and from what I
read the Philips Photo Frame
models appear to have very good image quality and good features.

I bought a Philips 9" wood border model 9FF2CWO.

The Good:

The frame looks very nice.
The image quality is really very good.
The frame’s built in software is very extensive and easy to use.

Printing from the network

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 06:15:00 +0000

I have made various attempts at sharing my printer over my home network. The criteria for sharing are simple; the printer must be available over the network and I must be able to print from Windows and Mac machines. In practice this turned out to be a little more difficult.

The simplest solution would have been a network enabled printer, but I had no luck in finding an affordable consumer grade home printer that can directly connect to the network.

Vista SP1 and Intel GMA blue screen crash

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 03:50:00 +0000

I previously commented on this problem here and here.

I participated in the Microsoft Vista SP1 Beta program.

After installing Vista SP1 Beta on my machine with an Intel DG33TL motherboard, and installing version 15.7.3 of the Intel GMA drivers, my machine would blue screen crash when it went to sleep.

The crash happens in the igdkmd32.sys and igdkmd64.sys drivers, and I could reproduce it on two machines, both with DG33TL motherboards, with Vista x86 and x64.

Getting my feet wet

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 03:40:00 +0000

Welcome to my new blog and my first post.

I really have little need for a blog, but I decided to switch to a hosted environment for my postings. This is a decision similar to when I decided to move my photo collection from my own server to a hosted solution.

I will be posting a few more product reviews, and eventually I may migrate all interesting topics from my server to this site.