Random Short Take #107

Posted on 2026-05-18 by dan

Random short take #107. Looking for old news? I’ve got just the thing. Let’s get random.

This article from Matt Allford struck a chord. I have an awful lot of USB cables in my house, and I have no idea what the specs of most of them are.
Speaking of things I only have a superficial understanding of, this article from Christian on Intel Arc SR-IOV hardware transcoding with Plex on Proxmox VE was great.
Still using an Apple Time Capsule? You’re out of luck and in luck at the same time, as is explained over at The Register.
Speaking of backup and recovery, this article about Backblaze has me questioning everything I’m doing to keep stuff safe at home. I’ve checked that my iCloud data is protected (and recoverable), but only because the machine I have Backblaze installed on has downloaded copies of that data. For the stuff I keep on Dropbox and Google Drive, it doesn’t seem as straight forward. Not that I’d ever recommend you only keep data with one provider. Maybe I need to write something more about this, if only to confirm that I’m doing correctly myself.
In resilience news (is that really a category?), this was an interesting article on AWS and what’s happening in the Middle East. The response from AWS has been fascinating, as have some of the hot takes from so-called “disaster recovery experts”. I’m looking forward to talking with customers in Western Queensland about the risk matrix they’ve drawn up that has them in a tizzy about losing three availability zones. There’s preparedness and then there’s how you recover, I guess.
Missing using FireWire with the most recent version of macOS? This article from Jeff Geerling might be of use if you still have a MiniDV camera you need to connect to something. It just won’t be with macOS.
Speaking of things not working after updates, you could always follow John Birmingham’s advice and just never update. But I’m not sure that’s really sustainable.
I think Netflix does some really cool stuff from a technical perspective, but for the most part the catalogue seems to be trash. So these kinds of posts from people rediscovering physical media are always nice to read.

Random Short Take #101

Posted on 2025-01-30 by dan

Welcome to Random Short Take #101. Happy new year. This one is focussed on technology things around the house. Let’s get random.

Aaron Parker put together a comprehensive guide outlining his experience with setting up a Mac mini as a home server.
Speaking of the Mac mini, Howard Oakley published a brief history of the Mac mini that made for great reading, particularly if you’re new to the Mac mini.
Meanwhile, Stephen Foskett put together a great article on how to monitor Linux server stats in Home Assistant. I’ve been looking for ways to waste more of my leisure time, and it might be time to get back into Home Assistant.
This article from Misty de Meo on what you might miss when backing up CDs is tremendous.
Want to know how to setup MinIO S3 Object Storage on TrueNAS? Paolo Valsecchi has you covered.
Chris Wahl has a new podcast available now.
In press release news, MagStor has joined the Active Archive Alliance.
I like records, and Sonic Youth, so I found this article on Discogs interesting. Although I can say I don’t have quite the same relationship with records that Thurston Moore does.

Random Short Take #96

Posted on 2024-08-07 by dan

Welcome to Random Short Take #96. I’m pouring one out for Geordie Guy this week. Let’s get random.

It’s been a tough week, but in what can only be considered excellent news, someone has gotten Windows NT 4 working on a few Apple PowerPC variants. Would you want to do that? Of course not. If you’re looking to run NT 4, you’re much better off finding some nice beefy DEC Alphas. But it’s always nice to have the option. You can read more over at The Register.
And in more good news, JB found out recently that 7-Eleven stores in Australia are going to become more like 7-Eleven stores in Japan. Hooray!
But it’s not all good news. Nicholson has published an interesting article on some of the problems with 10Gbps. “Networking speed is a luxury for people who have tigers on gold leashes, and we needed to save money somewhere” may be my new favourite quote.
You want more bad news? Fine. Tom Andry dives into why HDMI has sucked and continues to suck. I’ve had mixed experiences with HDMI over the years, but I can confirm that it’s not always been smooth sailing, despite the advertising to that effect.
It’s not all bad though. Found yourself struggling with sudo on Debian? Vivek has you covered with this comprehensive guide.
Talked yourself into building your own NAS but don’t know what case to use? Check out this post from Brian Moses.
In PR news, Leaseweb recently launched an object storage solution in Canada. Read more about what’s on offer here.
In other PR news, Pure Storage is investing in Cerabyte. This company is doing some cool stuff.

Finally, and I’m a little late to the party, I just wanted to call out Jetpack for being a bunch of pumpkins and wanting me to upgrade my stats plan because I run a “commercial” site. If you think I want to pay $12.99 a month to see different numbers from those that Google and my hosting provider give me you’re wildly mistaken. And sod knows how I qualify as commercial (unless it’s for posting GoFundMe links for people who are dead or dying) but you can seriously get fucked. Sorry for swearing Mum.

Random Short Take #94

Posted on 2024-05-15 by dan

Welcome to Random Short Take #94. Let’s get random.

Starting off with something a little heavy, but I thought this article from John Birmingham, entitled the map of days, was a fantastic exploration of aging and definitely worth a read.
Chin-Fah recently wrote about deduplication reimagined in OpenZFS. The Fast Dedupe Table (FDT) could really improve the experience of deduplication with OpenZFS.
Howard asks if the Fusion Drive was a good idea? I never had a system with one installed, so can’t comment, but for a period of time they made a lot of sense. Nowadays, I’m not so sure.
In press release news, Zerto has unveiled an updated Cyber Resilience Vault solution using HPE Alletra Storage MP.
In other PR news, Panasas has become VDURA.
You want to do cool stuff with Raspberry Pis? You should probably be following Jeff Geerling (if you aren’t already). Check out his post on building a Pi Frigate NVR with Axzez’s Interceptor 1U Case.
I giggle-cried my way through this article – ‘My whole library is wiped out’: what it means to own movies and TV in the age of streaming services. I just received an e-mail from Amazon encouraging me to “build up my movie library”. Yeah, not if I can avoid it. Remember kids, if it’s not delivering value to shareholders, don’t expect it to last. That includes your digital libraries purchased from major studios. I might do a separate rant post on the rise and fall and rise and fall of physical media in the future. I still buy physical media, but I’m very much in the minority.
Speaking of accessing physical media, I came across the plexupdate utility on GitHub. It hasn’t been updated in a while, but it’s doing the job at the moment. Yes, I am the kind of person who will randomly run scripts from GitHub without checking first – hire me as your CISO ;)

Random Short Take #72

Posted on 2022-05-12 by dan

This one is a little behind thanks to some work travel, but whatever. Let’s get random.

Ethan Banks has some great advice for bloggers looking to load up on payola from their blood, sweat, and blogging tears. You can read his article on how to work with a sponsor for your blog here.
I love Howard’s Explainer articles, and this one on Thunderbolt doesn’t fail to impress.
Over at El Reg there’s word of problems for the Linux kernel NTFS driver as author goes silent. I’ve used these products from time to time, and will be curious to see how it plays out.
Cormac recently announced that the vSAN Deep Dive book has been updated for 7.0 U3.
In PR news, Aparavi recently announced Version 2.0 of its Data Intelligence Platform.
Speaking of press releases, Zerto recently announced version 9.5 of its platform. You can read the release here.
Sometimes you read articles and you think “Nah, that can’t be what they did”. But then you realise they did. Nicholson has published a typically entertaining article on why running a database on a dedupe appliance is a cosmically bad idea (TM).
In home theatre news, this article on XLR vs RCA – which cable is better? makes for good reading, particularly if you’re starting to convince yourself that you need to take things in a certain direction.

Random Short Take #71

Posted on 2022-04-26 by dan

Welcome to Random Short Take #71. A bit of home IT in this one. Let’s get random.

Ever written a script that did something entirely unexpected? This one is a tough read, but it looks like that’s what happened to some folks at Atlassian.
There was a new release deployed for VMware Cloud on AWS recently, and you can read more about what’s new here.
In news that should surprise no-one, Zerto has published a press release that talks about research revealing that ransomware readiness is essential to mitigation, yet significant gaps exist pretty much everywhere. I don’t want to be that guy, but if you’re not worried about this stuff, you should be.
I love my Harmony remotes, and hate that Logitech has shut it down (ostensibly). Is the Sofabaton X1 what we’ve been waiting for? I hope so.
Howard published a typically thorough article on M1 Macs and their lack of support for USB-C.
Jeff Geerling doesn’t just mess about with Raspberry Pi devices on YouTube. He also updates his old articles on DVD and Blu-Ray ripping. So that makes two of us who still bother to do this.
It’s a good thing I was only ever a storage consultant, and not in charge of choosing the products, because I would totally buy hardware based on looks. Well, mostly. Check out these Blackmagic Design Cloud Store devices.
I switched to Google WiFi at home a few years ago. Generally speaking, it’s been good, although mesh networks are a special kind of hell at the best of times. But I experienced this issue recently, and I found it tremendously frustrating because it was one of those problems that wasn’t a problem, but somehow was. I was thinking of replacing the Google WiFi stuff, but to be honest I was hoping to get a bit more than 3 years out of it.

Random Short Take #70

Posted on 2022-04-11 by dan

Welcome to Random Short Take #70. Let’s get random.

Want to setup OpenVPN Server on your Debian 11 installation? This article will get you there in 5 Minutes.
USB-C? Thunderbolt? Whatever it’s called, getting stuff to connect properly to your shiny computers with very few useful ports built-in can be a problem. This article had me giggling and crying at the same time.
Backblaze has come through with the goods again, with this article titled “How to Talk to Your Family About Backups“. I talk to my family all the time about backups (and recovery), and it drives them nuts.
In other data management news, Aparavi and Wasabi Technologies have teamed up to extract real ROI from high performance data management.
I loved this article from Preston on death in the digital age. It’s a thorough exploration not only of what happens to your data when you shuffle off, but also some of the challenges associated with keeping your digital footprint around after you go.
My friends at StorPool have announced some enhanced offerings for Managed Services Providers.
I’ve had the good fortune of having Sandeep on some calls with my customers, and he knows a thing or two about things that go ping. His latest blog post on VMware Cloud on AWS Advanced Networking and Routing features made for some interesting reading.
Finally, if you’re looking at all-flash as an option for your backup infrastructure, it’s worth checking out Chris’s article here. The performance benefits (particularly with recovery) are hard to argue with, but at scale the economics may still be problematic.

Random Short Take #69

Posted on 2022-03-28 by dan

Welcome to Random Short Take #69. Let’s get random.

The recent-ish announcement of Apple’s Mac Studio made for some interesting news. The Verge looks at it here.
When I was working with Veeam technologies, Anthony made things easier by doing a lot of the work for me. Now I work with VMC on AWS and it seems Anthony is still doing work for me. Check out his post on SDDC Network Import/Export and this one on firewall rules automatically disabling themselves.
Speaking of VMware Cloud on AWS, it’s now available on the AWS Marketplace. You can read more about that here.
John Nicholson asks if “luck” should factor into your DR/BC plans? Of course it shouldn’t, but you’d be amazed how often it does.
This episode of Gestalt IT’s On-Premise Podcast on the topic of storage being insecure got me thinking about some stuff.
Speaking of insecure, the Samba 4.16 release strips away more SMB 1, which can only be seen as good news. Read about that at El Reg.
Still on data protection, Kubernetes data protection is being neglected.
Ransomware: it’s something all the kids are getting into. Enrico wrote a great piece over at GigaOm about why it should be thought of as a data management problem.

Apple TV (1st Generation) – A Few Notes (2022 Edition)

Posted on 2022-01-27 by dan

Apple TV (1st Generation)

It seems silly to be writing about a device that went end of life over a decade ago, but I recently came across a 1st Generation Apple TV for less than a price of a carton of domestic beer and had an itch that needed scratching. You can read about the Apple TV family of devices here. There’s also an Apple TV (1st Generation) overview here. I think I bought my first one in 2009 or 2010 – not long before the end of its usefulness, if I recall correctly. At the time (and to this day), I was fascinated by the idea of being able to stream content to a television from my computer. I’d messed about with cheap hard drive based streaming devices, and even have a Pixel Magic HD MediaBox sitting in one of my cupboards. This was my first foray into Apple-based media handling (beyond plugging my iMac into the TV). The 1st Generation device was cool in that it was able to store data locally on its hard drive that was synced from iTunes. Unfortunately, the hardware was a little underpowered for what you paid for it, and you were locked in to the Apple ecosystem when it came to content selection. By that time I’d already invested in iTunes for music, but the video side of the equation was still a ways away from the relatively seamless experience that it is today.

Enter The FireCore

It took about 5 minutes to realise that only being able to watch Apple content was going to be a pain, so I paid for an app (aTV Flash) from FireCore that effectively enabled the Apple TV to load software like nitoTV and XBMC. You booted off a USB stick, loaded some code, and then you could run the FireCore apps and the Apple TV code at the same time. I thought it was pretty neat, although it again highlighted how the Apple TV wasn’t that great a performer when it came to watching any real variety of media formats. That said, it handled music videos pretty well, and I remember it playing standard definition DivX without too much trouble. FireCore Support is still up on the website, and I was even able to login to my account again and download the files I needed to get up and running with this new box.

High Definition, Or More Than Standard Definition?

I harp on a bit about the specs of the Apple TV, but it really wasn’t all that bad. If you wanted support for 1080p content, however, you really needed to install a third-party card: the Broadcom Crystal HD card (model BCM70015). FireCore support for the card is outlined here. You can view an installation guide here. There were a few different options for accessing the capabilities of the Crystal HD card, including using FireCore. I think I booted a USB stick running Crystalbuntu. There’s also an article on playing non-iTunes video that’s worth looking at.

Other Notes

You probably won’t be able to watch Netflix with it, even with the HD card installed and a working copy of XBMC. The native youTube app won’t work anymore either, I think. And there’s no chance you can log in to the Apple servers, or watch or listen to any of your content with modern versions of Apple Music or TV. I will admit, I have some old versions of macOS running as VMs, and I haven’t fired them up to see whether I could get iTunes to connect to the AppleTV at that point. Maybe something to waste a few more hours with on the weekend.

If you try to ssh into the box, you’ll likely get an error and you’ll need to configure your client to deal with a legacy ssh connection.

ssh -oKexAlgorithms=+diffie-hellman-group1-sha1 user@legacyhost

Once you’ve done that, you can login to the box and have a poke around. The username is frontrow. The password isn’t hard to guess.

Also, if you’re having trouble with the Smart Installer for nitoTV, you’ll need to track down a copy of MacOSXUpdCombo10.4.9Intel.dmg and ftp it to ~/Documents. You should then be able to run the installer.

Thoughts

I get what I need from my Apple TV (4th Generation) box nowadays via Plex and various streaming services, but my fascination with these little boxes that can connect you to various media sources remains a drain on my disposable income. Just as my Boxee box is no longer anything more than a fancy paperweight, so too has the utility of my various, older generation Apple TV devices waned over time. It’s not just an interesting lesson in the useful lifecycle of technology devices (“How dare I expect something to be functional after ten years”), but also an interesting reminder of how little control we have over the content we continue to pay the big studios for. I’m sure I’ve opined over the years about the number of times I’ve purchased Enter The Dragon and various Star Wars episodes on a plethora of different formats and resolutions, never really owning a “license” to consume the movie across various resolutions and devices. But the Apple TV (1st Generation) really brings home the fact that, even when I’ve purchased a copy of media from Apple, when and how I watch that piece of media is somewhat out of my control.

Hey, I’m not saying you need to be a weirdo like me and buy everything on physical media and then own multiple players of various formats. Heck, they’re just movies after all. And when you’re buying digital content from Apple they are reasonably clear about the fact that you’re really not in control of said media. But it’s nonetheless a scary thought to think about how much money we plough into this stuff. Just to have working devices sitting obsolete on the shelf within 5 years. Which reminds me, I should fire up my 2nd and 3rd Generation devices and see what they can do.

Random Short Take #64

Posted on 2021-12-01 by dan

Welcome to Random Short take #64. It’s the start of the last month of the year. We’re almost there.

Want to read an article that’s both funny and informative? Look no further than this beginner’s guide to subnetting. I did Elizabethan literature at uni, so it was good to get a reminder on Shakespeare’s involvement in IP addressing.
Continuing with the amusing articles, Chris Colotti published a video of outtakes from some Cohesity lightboard sessions that had me cracking up. It’s always nice when people don’t take themselves too seriously.
On a more serious note, data hoarding is a problem (I know this because I’ve been guilty of it), and this article from Preston outlines some of the reasons why it can be a bad thing for business.
Still on data protection, Howard Oakley looks at checking the integrity of Time Machine backups in this post. I’ve probably mentioned this a few times previously, but if you find macOS behaviour baffling at times, Howard likely has an article that can explain why you’re seeing what you’re seeing.
Zerto recently announced Zerto In-Cloud for AWS – you read more about that here. Zerto is really starting to put together a comprehensive suite of DR solutions. Worth checking out.
Still on press releases, Datadobi has announced new enhancements to DobiMigrate with 5.13. The company also recently validated Google Cloud Storage as an endpoint for its DobiProtect solution.
Leaseweb Global is also doing stuff with Google Cloud – you can read more about that here.
Finally, this article over at Blocks and Files on what constitutes a startup made for some interesting reading. Some companies truly are Peter Pans at this point, whilst others are holding on to the idea that they’re still in startup mode.

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Category Archives: Apple