Cantanko

It irks me somewhat that various NAS vendors are currently scrambling to support Mac OS X Lion’s implementation of Time Machine. Long story short, it requires that the device providing a network resource to act as a Time Machine volume supports DHX2 authentication.

So far, it would appear that LaCie, Western Digital, Iomega, Synology et al have completely failed to produce a DHX2-authenticated NAS even though the various Lion developer previews have been around for ages now.

What’s more, this hasn’t stopped the very excellent Netatalk project from supporting DHX2. Admittedly it’s still in beta, but at least it’s there and it does work. As my local file server / satellite recorder / general dogsbody machine is running Gentoo Linux, compiling and installing the latest beta is trivial and fixes all of the problems, allowing my iMac to continue to use it as a Time Machine volume.

For those interested, a very comprehensive howto for installing the Netatalk beta is available here.

I’ve been deliberating long and hard over what computer to buy. For the last decade or so I’ve run Linux on my desktop, mainly because the things that I do with my machine are all, with the notable exception of video editing, covered admirably by both free software and not exactly cutting-edge hardware.

Having said that, I’ve recently bought a new DSLR camera and found that the video it churns out to be astonishingly good. Yes, it’s a pain to handle and yes, it has a CMOS sensor so it has a rolling shutter, but again for the kind of stuff I’ve found myself shooting (mainly outdoors) it’s done a marvellous job.

This leaves me with the problem that my existing Core-2 laptop wasn’t exactly man enough to properly wrangle the photos and video this thing churns out, be it either multiple exposures for HDR image processing or high-def footage. The first thought was to build a top-spec PC, but to be frank I’m starting to get bored with build-it-yourself hardware, especially if it’s not doing anything particularly specialist. continue reading…

Probably of absolutely no interest to the vast majority of visitors to this site, but we’re now IPv6 enabled! continue reading…

After much gnashing of teeth, I have a working OpenRD box! continue reading…

I took delivery of a new toy today: it’s an ARM-5 powered development platform known as OpenRD that gives you a 1.2GHz ARM-5 CPU, 512MB RAM, 512MB flash, a MicroSD card slot, internal SATA drive mounting point, eSATA, dual gigabit ethernet, 7 USB ports etc… continue reading…