software – Page 10

Windows 10 Technical Preview

January 27, 2015 at 8:27pm by windracer

Microsoft announced Windows 10, the successor to Windows 8, last September. Like I’ve done in the past with Windows 7 and Windows 8, I downloaded the first tech preview in October and installed it on a spare laptop at work to get a jump on learning my way around the newest iteration of Windows. Last week, after an official media event for Windows 10 (at which Microsoft also announced HoloLens!), another big update to the tech preview was released so I grabbed the ISO and did a fresh install on my (original) Surface Pro tablet.

Image corruption

January 11, 2015 at 5:37pm by windracer

During my recent web photo gallery conversion to Piwigo I realized that a lot of my JPG photo files were corrupted! I think this happened last March when I copied everything from my old NAS to a new one. I suspect the network/connectivity issues I had with that new NAS caused the file corruption. I ended up returning that device and getting a Synology Diskstation, but by that point the damage was done. I didn’t notice then because the thumbnail images in my Gallery software were still fine, it was the originals that were messed up. Unfortunately, since the corruption happened so long ago, I no longer had backups I could restore from. My only option was to try and repair the files.

Migrating from Gallery to Piwigo

January 10, 2015 at 11:48pm by windracer

I guess I’ve never written about it here (except in passing) but for the past 10 years I’ve been running Gallery to manage my photo websites (before that I hand-coded HTML pages!). I started with Gallery v1.4 way back in October 2004, upgraded to Gallery v2.x in November 2005, tried the Gallery v3.x alphas and betas in 2009 and 2010 (but didn’t really like them) and then finally upgraded to v3.x in October 2011. Then, in June 2014 it was announced that the Gallery project was going into hibernation. I wasn’t too worried as the software was pretty stable and there weren’t a lot of security issues, but always in the back of my mind I knew at some point I’d have to move on.

My theme of choice for Gallery was Grey Dragon by Serge, a heavy Gallery user who also contributed themes and modules to the project. After the Gallery team announced the hibernation, Serge starting looking at and evaluating replacement candidates, which I followed with interest. He eventually settled on Piwigo, a French-based open source project (which believe is pronounced “PEE-wee-go” and was formerly called the PHP Web Gallery), and converted all of his G3 sites to PWG (including porting his Grey Dragon theme). Over the holidays, I decided to give Piwigo a try.

Upgrading to Utopic Unicorn

November 1, 2014 at 10:15pm by windracer

(Ok, that one was too easy)

I was on my business trip to New York when Ubuntu 14.10 (Utopic Unicorn) was released on October 23, so I just got around to upgrading my server this weekend. No problems so far, as usual and expected.

Next up … Vivid Vervet. What happens after we reach Z? Plenty of time to figure that out … it won’t happen until version 17.10 (October 2017).

Apple iPhone 6 Plus

September 27, 2014 at 8:11pm by windracer

I’m not what you’d call an Apple fanboy, but for some reason I felt compelled to wake up at 3am on September 12 to place my 64gb iPhone 6 Plus pre-order with AT&T. I was disappointed to learn (later that day after finally receiving my order confirmation e-mail) that my new phone wouldn’t even ship until between October 2 and October 11!

Launch day, September 19, came and went, but the Plus was hard to find so I didn’t feel too bad about not having it right away. In fact, I felt a little foolish for getting up early and drinking the Apple kool-aid. Oh well, whatever.

Surprise! Early Wednesday morning, September 24, I got a shipment notice from AT&T, and it was already out for delivery! After all of that, I ended up getting my new big (and yeah, it’s big!) phone just 5 days after launch.

WIJFR: Masters of Doom

August 13, 2014 at 10:07pm by windracer

Doom, the video game in which you navigate a dungeon in the first person and messily lay waste to everything that crosses your path, represented a milestone in many areas. It was a technical landmark, in that its graphics engine delivered brilliant performance on ordinary PC hardware. It was a social phenomenon, with individuals and companies hooking up networks specifically for Doom tournaments and staying up for days to blast away on them (well before the Internet went big-time).

I just finished reading “Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture” by David Kushner and am itching to hook up some old PCs and do some deathmatching. Who’s with me?

Dell XPS 18

August 10, 2014 at 8:22pm by windracer

Our family laptop (an hp Envy 14 Beats Edition) has taken a beating (no pun intended!) over the past few years and recently (thanks to be carried around by the screen by my daughter) the LCD has gone wonky, requiring a bunch of futzing to get the display to work properly.

The recent tax-free weekend here in Florida (for back-to-school) was different than in years’ past in that the first $750 of a computer purchase would be tax free. This seemed like a good time to get a new family PC before the new school year started so I did some quick research and ended up with the Dell XPS 18.

TRENDnet TV-IP311PI outdoor camera and TPE-TG44g PoE switch

June 10, 2014 at 7:32pm by windracer

Now that the wireless network re-design was done, I wanted to replace my aging Foscam outdoor cameras with newer, HD models. Installing the Ubiquiti UniFi AP was my first introduction to power-over-ethernet and I decided to move to PoE (instead of wireless) cameras. I already had TRENDnet cameras in my current setup, along with TRENDnet switches, so I decided to stick with that brand and selected the TV-IP311PI outdoor cameras and TPE-TG44g PoE switch.

Trusting in the Trusty Tahr

April 17, 2014 at 10:49pm by windracer

Yeah, yeah, so it’s getting harder to write these “witty” Ubuntu post titles … 😮

Ubuntu 14.04 (Trusty Tahr) was released today so as usual I upgraded my server immediately. Despite upgrading on the first day the download only took about 30 minutes but then it took a few hours for the “do-release-upgrade” to finish installing all the new packages plus a little more time for me to re-apply my affected configuration changes. This was a pretty smooth upgrade, no issues to speak of yet! I did double-check to make sure the version of OpenSSL included has the Heartbleed patch (which of course it does).

Next up is version 14.10 in October, but it doesn’t appear to have been codenamed yet. The “U” name should be fun, lots of possibility there …