Making stuff is fun. But sometimes you need a 3D printer, and Bunnings are out of them - besides, they’re thousands of bucks. What to do?

There’s a place in the USA called TechShop which is a workshop fully fitted out with most imaginable tools, industrial grade. I lust after it. $30 for a day-pass, $100 for a month. Only problem is, cool ideas like this don’t seem to get financial traction. If something like this opens up in your area, make sure they’re going to hang around before you part with long-term payments.

Parallels have been drawn to the MIT FabLab, which is in a number of countries, but seems more focused on technology than materials.

For the story so far see Part 1 and Part 2. If you’re totally bored, then please don’t read on… this is the longest post yet!

So I got my Linksys NSLU2 home. I thought I’d fire it up and make sure it worked. There’d be nothing more frustrating than flashing it with the Linux OS, find it doesn’t work and then wonder whether the issue is with the new Firmware or the actual hardware.

Plugged it in, fired it up, plugged in and formatted a blank external drive I dug out of the cupboard. All good so far! I can’t plug in a disk with anything on it because the LinkSys requires disks to be formatted with EXT3.

Hmmm… what’s this… a firmware upgrade to the NSLU2 that allows it to read NTFS! That’d make the device usable until I get my head around the Linux options!

Loaded up the upgrade, all went smoothly. Plugged in my external hard drive to see if it works. Get “Drive not formatted” message in the NSLU2 admin screen, so it must not support NTFS after all. Oh well. Plugged the external drive back into my desktop PC.

“This disk is not formatted. Do you want to format it now? Yes/No”

My

heart

stopped.

An entire disk’s worth of data… gone. Video from when the kids were little, lots of photos… gone. I know what you’re all thinking… why wasn’t this data backed up? I have two responses to this. 1) It’s not that easy to back up a 14GB video file. 2) Part of the reason I was setting up this solution is to make automated backups more accessible!

Some have said that I shouldn’t have trusted the device with my data, but in my defence, it’s a shrink wrapped consumer device that’s designed to have drives plugged in to it. If I can’t trust this device with my data, I don’t have much use for it!

I kicked off a File Recovery scan and went to bed very sad.

In the morning, the file recovery had found a bunch of deleted files, but none of the files that were not deleted at the time of the corruption! I tried loading the drive up in a couple of EXT3 file viewers, but they couldn’t read the drive either.

I’d pretty much given up hope of getting my data back.

Then my neighbour nonchalantly suggests I try a partition table repair tool. I load one up and run it. It tells me “The partition table on the disk is incorrect. Would you like to fix it?” I click “Yes”. Bang. All my data is back!!!

Yay! Waves of relief! Not to mention proof that the Linksys had screwed up the disk. The partition table was written for an EXT3 disk, even though it was still formatted in NTFS.

Yesterday I took the Linksys back to Harris Technology and threw it at them as hard as I could. Actually I didn’t and they were incredibly helpful, giving me a full refund without any hassle.

So back to the drawing board. Now that I realise how precious that data is to me, I’m going to have to get a proper, RAID based network drive solution. More money I’ll probably go for a Thecus N2100.

Lesson the First
Imagine losing all your data that is not backed up. How do you feel about that?

Lesson the Second
No, really. Losing it. Right now. Seriously, how do you feel about that?

Weigh your reaction to the above questions against the cost of getting dedicated backup.

Here endeth the lesson.

Update: I was talking to Josh last night and he said it wasn’t clear that I hadn’t installed the funky open source firmware on the LinkSys box yet. It was running the latest official firmware release. I probably also didn’t emphasize enough that I wouldn’t recommend anyone buying one of these pieces of junk

I’ve purchased my Linksys NSLU2

Now I want to make some modifications. The issue is that there are a number of different firmware options to choose from.

My requirements:
- Serve files for media (Basic functionality for all firmware)
- Read from FAT32 formatted external drives (isn’t provided by the base firmware!! The device requires all disks to be formatted!)
- Bittorent client
- Subversion server

Based on this comparison of different firmware options I’m going to have to look at a full linux based OS. Unfortunately I’ve never used Linux, so trying to get it to work on a small memory/slow processor device is going to be a steep learning curve.

Stay tuned for the next exciting episode.

I’ve annexed a room at my house to be my ‘den’. First order of business is getting some entertainment in there.

Requirements:

• Watch DVDs
• Watch other media from my computer
• Reasonably inexpensive

My current solutions contains the following components:

• Xbox running XBMC as a games/media streaming console (just purchased from Global Consoles)
• Some sort of network storage so I don’t need to have my PC running constantly.

The network storage decision is narrowing down. I considered solutions such as the Thecus N1200. I dismissed this as being overpriced and probably overkill for my needs.

My current front runner is a Linksys NSLU2. It doesn’t have any internal disks, but has two USB ports to plug in external drives. The real beauty of the device (affectionately known as the ’slug’ by fanboyz) is that there is an open source Linux based operating system that can be installed to it. This adds lots of extra functionality like all sorts of servers (print, bittorrent, iTunes, media/photos). I was even thinking I could install svn on it and it can be my source control repository.

I’ll let you know how my plans proceed. Any advice/comments would be very welcome!

Geoff has built a Homemade Air Conditioner - by running ice water (made from ice-cubes, and bottles of water he’s frozen in his freezer) through copper tubing at the back of a stand fan - fluid motion provided via capillary action.

Once the water runs out, the house has cooled off enough that the fan alone provides sufficient cooling.

That would be evaporative cooling, Geoff.

Geoff also suggests adding salt to your mix, because

this will drop the freezing point of the water and increase the cooling effect of the fan.

Uh, no. That would be lowering the freezing point of the water. It doesn’t lower the temperature of the water, it means that it takes more energy to freeze the water in the first place. But you’re already dumping frozen water into your water bucket, so you’re too late.

Geoff apparently had to “poke a little hole” through his flywire for the exhaust of his water tube, but draws the line at digging up his landlord’s garden to make a geothermal cooling system. I’m glad for his landlord, but what’s the problem with digging up a backyard only to cover it up again? A hole in your flywire is there for good!

Geoff goes on to suggest that if you hang a car radiator off your fan - in a bid to increase the efficiency of the system - you might want to check it can handle the weight.

Nice work Geoff.

Full, step-by-step instructions (with pcitures) on building your own cheap and easy Digital Picture Frame. Answering an unasked question on the selection of componentry, the author says:

Why a toggle switch? Because toggle switches rule, that’s why. We don’t want no puny sliding power switches. Oh no, this power switch is 25 percent functional, 75 percent hardcore awesome.

But why do this? You can buy one for a few hundred bucks. I guess it’s just the whole DIY thing, isn’t it? I guess you’re also recycling unloved tech into totally hardcore awesome tech.