Tag Archives: av

Random Short Take #75

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Welcome to Random Short Take #75. Half the year has passed us by already. Let’s get random.

  • I talk about GiB all the time when sizing up VMware Cloud on AWS for customers, but I should take the time to check in with folks if they know what I’m blithering on about. If you don’t know, this explainer from my friend Vincent is easy to follow along with – A little bit about Gigabyte (GB) and Gibibyte (GiB) in computer storage.
  • MinIO has been in the news a bit recently, but this article from my friend Chin-Fah is much more interesting than all of that drama – Beyond the WORM with MinIO object storage.
  • Jeff Geerling seems to do a lot of projects that I either can’t afford to do, or don’t have the time to do. Either way, thanks Jeff. This latest one – Building a fast all-SSD NAS (on a budget) – looked like fun.
  • You like ransomware? What if I told you you can have it cross-platform? Excited yet? Read Melissa’s article on Multiplatform Ransomware for a more thorough view of what’s going on out there.
  • Speaking of storage and clouds, Chris M. Evans recently published a series of videos over at Architecting IT where he talks to NetApp’s Matt Watt about the company’s hybrid cloud strategy. You can see it here.
  • Speaking of traditional infrastructure companies doing things with hyperscalers, here’s the July 2022 edition of What’s New in VMware Cloud on AWS.
  • In press release news, Aparavi and Backblaze have joined forces. You can read more about that here.
  • I’ve spent a lot of money over the years trying to find the perfect media streaming device for home. I currently favour the Apple TV 4K, but only because my Boxee Box can’t keep up with more modern codecs. This article on the Best Device for Streaming for Any User – 2022 seems to line up well with my experiences to date, although I admit I haven’t tried the NVIDIA device yet. I do miss playing ISOs over the network with the HD Mediabox 100, but those were simpler times I guess.

Random Short Take #68

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Welcome to Random Short Take #68. Let’s get random.

Sometimes hotels get it …

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I spent a good part of the long weekend in Sydney doing a CX300 – CX3-20 upgrade. The process itself was reasonably seamless, although my heart skipped a beat when the utility partition wouldn’t boot. Apparently this happens frequently enough that EMC wrote a Service Note about it, along the lines of, “try it again a few times and it should work”. And it did, and I was able to continue with the conversion. You’ll be happy to know that no data was lost, and thus no service partners were harmed.

I stayed at a hotel nearby. I didn’t have high hopes as I’d stayed there before and it was comfortable, but not amazing. So when I walked into my room I was pleased to see this:

Hooray, a slightly nicer TV than I normally get when travelling. The cool thing about this setup, however, was the AV panel they’d installed in the wall:

You could plug in composite video, vga or hdmi. It even had a usb jack to use as a charger if you needed. I thought it was kind of neat. The fact that they had set 4:3 content to pan and scan meant that the Broncos game I watched on Friday night looked like they had a lot of thicker than usual players, but the DVDs I played off my laptop looked just fine at 1360 * 768.