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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...