Category: Technology

I present – Operation Overkill Overloaded Extreme Turbo expanded.

Whatever, I’m expanding/improving the capacity and capabilities of my storage. I was originally running 6 drives RAID6 using 3 shitty Chinese £5 SATA PCIe cards I got from ebay running some awfully cheap, slow chipset. I decided to upgrade to a proper RAID card, so that I was only using the 1 PCIe slot. I found myself an OEM Sun unit, that I installed the stock Adaptec firmware on. I’ve coupled this with an extra 2 2TB drives ( the card supports 8 drives so why not eh?). So once this little lot arrived from eBay I was on my way:

Originally, I wanted to use ZFS, but alas, the card won’t do JBOD properly. It still insists on writing meta data onto the disk anyway (I therefore ask the question, WTF is the difference between a single drive RAID unit and a JBOD unit on this card, if both involves writing meta data?). After messing about with it for some time trying to get it to work, I said fuck it and just used the card’s own RAID ability – this turned out to be faster than my server’s ZFS anyway, even if it is less versatile and hardware independent.

One thing I did find though, is that the RAID card’s heatsink would get extremely hot even on idle. I assume these things are usually used in air conditioned data centres in server cases that actually have a decent amount of airflow, not a cheap 4u case that spends it’s time in a loft where the temperature varies from barely above freezing in the winter, to well over 40C in the summer. It was averaging 65C on the heatsink itself (I can assume the chip might be hotter still, but didn’t want to take the thing apart to show my thermocouple in there). One £5 expansion bay cooling fan later, and it halved the temperature of the heatsink. Anyone else installing these things in a similar location might want to bear this in mind.

After waiting several eons for the array to be initialised, then 40 billion years restoring my shit from backups, I’m now left with a fairly decent amount of space left, which in theory, should last me a few years.

Obligatory inside post for teh geeks:

Hmmm… might be slightly overkill for some HDD space.

Also, if anyone else wants to convert a Sun Adaptec 5805 to a stock firmware, links and shit are here:

http://ilaurens.nl/blog/archives/21
http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1696205

Recently I had a rather large tidy up in my loft, and apart from throwing away about 4 boxes of just cables, I came accorss some old phones, 2 of them had memory cards in so I could easily see if there was any data left on them, one however was way older than that.

I was pretty sure that at some point this phone did have some images on, so I went about reviving it. I couldn’t find a charger at all (thrown out years ago), and it was one of those retarded phones that wont charge over USB.

I therefore decided that… other methods had to be used:

I used this old ATX PSU that I’d desoldered all the leads from and added my own so I could get the voltages that it puts out (3.3,5,12,-12). I attatched some crocodile clip leads from the 5v line to the battery contacts on the back of the phone:

Once I found where the power button was, I was greeted with this:

Once I connected the USB cable, success!

If only I used my…talents for good.

Due to my never-ending requirement of having more hard drive space than I can use, I have entered into a new phase of ridiculousness; project overspend:

All I’m waiting on now is 2 more drives and some PCI-E SATA cards to arrive.

So after rummaging around at my Grans house looking for pictures one boring afternoon, I found an envelope of old negatives. Really old. After some  discussion me and my dad estimated about 1963. Anyways, I thought I’d take them home and try and scan them to see if I could make anything of them. After my first attempts at scanning them, most of them turned out…badly. This was the best of them, after much playing about in various programmes:

Pretty awful. Now my negative scanning attachment for my scanner only really does 35mm (although I have managed to do other, more exotic formats in there). However these negatives were much larger, almost the same size as some of the medium format stuff my brother had done for college, so they wouldn’t fit in the attachment:

Now all this negative attachment seems to do, at least from what I could see if back light the negatives so they appear better to the scanner. So in the shower (of all places), I had a thought of using my laptop to display a pure white screen and then putting this backwards onto the scanner so it’d work. Then the light bulb moment. My phone.

I remembered that my old phone had an app available that made the screen go completely white to use a sort of torch. Genius. So  I went onto the appstore and found the iphone version, and then put the screen brightness to 100%, and used it to scan the negative:

So I ended up with this image:

And after some messing about in Paint.net, inverting colours and such not even putting much effort into it, I ended up with a pretty decent picture. I could probably improve this a lot more, though:

Seems to work pretty well, at least with black and white stuff, I’m not too sure if it’ll work too well with anything else.