Shuttle XS35GT: Installing XBMC 10.0 Live (Dharma)

After you’ve bought your Shuttle XS35GT silent media center / HTPC, you’ll want to install some good software to make the system work well. Personally, I like the XBMC software, and here I’ll describe how to install it on the XS35GT. In order to reduce costs, use less memory & disk space, and make the […]

Shuttle XS35GT: Installing XBMC Dharma beta 2 Live

After you’ve bought your Shuttle XS35GT silent media center / HTPC, you’ll want to install some good software to make the system work well. Personally, I like the XBMC software, and here I’ll describe how to install it on the XS35GT. In order to reduce costs, and make the system run faster, I have chosen […]

Shuttle XS35GT: The ultimate silent media center HTPC

The long-awaited Shuttle XS35 series of small form factor (SFF) PCs has finally arrived, after a long release delay caused by cooling problems. For home media center (HTPC) enthusiasts, this series of computers is ideal for making a media center because they are completely silent, due to the fact that the case houses no fans. […]

Climate change: Climategate

In the last few days the internet has been ablaze with news of leaked documents, emails and computer code from computers at the CRU — The Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, UK. In what is being called ‘Climategate’, evidence is beginning to emerge of collusion to exaggerate temperature increases, hide temperature […]

What happened to global warming?

On 9 OCT 2009, the BBC News site published an article entitled ‘What happened to global warming?‘ which claims that for the last 11 years, since 1998, we have not observed any increase in global temperatures. As we are bombarded on a daily basis with news telling us that man’s activities are producing carbon dioxide, […]

Link list: October 2009

Here are a few selected links from my trawl through the blogosphere and information super highway, aka The Internet for October 2009. The links here cover subjects including 10GbE, Storage, Sun, Oracle, “The Cloud”, Solaris, Linux, iLife, iMovie, Aperture, Final Cut, video editing, mind mapping tools, photography. Enjoy!

Link list: September 2009

Here are a few selected links from my trawl through the blogosphere and information super highway, aka The Internet for September 2009. The links here cover subjects including version control systems, git, Storage, Sun, Oracle, Solaris, Linux, Apple, Snow Leopard, ZFS, HP, self-improvement, getting things done / task management, mind-mapping, finding lowest price camera equipment […]

Home Fileserver: Handling pool errors

Until today I had never encountered even one read, write or checksum error on my ZFS NAS. Today I saw one checksum error coming from the mirrored SSD root boot pool which I have just installed. Unless you’re using a file system like ZFS (or NetApp / Veritas…$$$), then you’ll almost certainly never even know […]

Home Fileserver: ZFS boot pool recovery

If you should be unlucky enough to be unable to boot your OpenSolaris NAS one day, then these notes taken from a real restoration test might help you get back up and running again quickly. After setting up a supposedly robust mirrored ZFS root boot pool here using two SSD drives, I decided to give […]

Home Fileserver: Mirrored SSD ZFS root boot

When I started using this ZFS NAS for additional tasks, I realised that my boot environment was becoming more important, and was a weak point in this system. Initially I wanted to run a master copy of this website locally on this ZFS server, and that entailed installing WordPress and the OpenSolaris AMP package comprising […]