Monthly Archives: September 2011

Deal Extreme interesting items

http://www.dealextreme.com/p/digital-audio-mp3-player-module-with-remote-controller-for-car-90371

http://www.dealextreme.com/p/digital-audio-mp3-player-module-with-remote-controller-1-5-lcd-57557

http://www.dealextreme.com/p/5-7-tft-lcd-60mhz-2-channel-digital-color-storage-oscilloscope-54073

onsendesigns photo blog and gallery

Deciding how to manage my photography blog/gallery is not easy, however I think I may have found a theme that will do it all.

The theme is Portfolium by WPShower. The theme provides a capability to add and manage a portfolio set of pages. This is independent of Posts and Pages.

The setup I will use is:

  •  Main landing page is the blog page. Each blog entry will contain a group of photos from an event, which will then be assigned to categories and tagged. There will be one drop-down menu for the category structure.
    All the images on the blog will be managed by NextGen gallery.
  • There will be the customary About and Contact pages listed on the top menu.
  • The portfolio part of the site (which is integrated into the theme) will be handled by the theme.  Apparently the Portfolio pages are nothing more then a different “type” of posts, so changing themes doesn’t destroy them. Once switched back to Porfolium, everything is back.

File-server setup: Update

File Server seems to work.
WHM backups have been configured and are FTPing backups daily/weekly/monthly to the server.

Will want to test out the backups on the AlienVPS server at some point to practice recovery.

The rest of the file-server still needs configuring. There are WAY too many options (especially for Samba) so if I will make this into a public release I will certainly have to make some new modules for webmin. Simeple File server module.

I also want to move the whole LAN to a LDAP setup so that all users get their passwords from the server. I will let the File-Server do the LDAP serving.

File server setup

Setting up a file server at home. This server will take care of all external connections and working/active files. The UnRAID system will take care of all archived and inactive files.

I looked at solutions like FreeNAS and Openfiler and was left wanting a little more. On top of that, the updating of those solutions is scant at best. I prefer using up-to-date software and features as they becomes available.
So I decided to set up a file server myself. It will be based on OpenSUSE with Webmin as the GUI. I plan on making this a downloadable project from SuseStudio once it gets a little more mature.

I will document here the changes I am making to the system so that I can implement them in the SuseStudio version so there won’t be any configuration to the end user.

 

For Outsider’s File System, 0.0.1

– Added NFS server, and configured it.
NOTES: When setting up a share, for ‘Export to‘ option make sure that instead of Everyone, the option of Hosts is selected and * is entered in the field. That’s how suse sets up the share, and it doesn’t seem to work (at least not on my LAN) with Everyone selected.
See if this setting change can be made a default.
UPDATE: it doesn’t matter what the Export option is set to. The directory to be exported needs to be enabled. From the NFS Share module view, select (check off) the directory and click “Enable Selected” button

– Added Vsftp. The daemon seems to need to be started manually after a system reboot.
NOTES: Go into Webmin’s System > Bootup and Shutdown menu, select the service (or Action as it’s called there) and then click the Start on Boot button at the bottom of page.

-Samba configuration : read this HowTo.

– In Webmin, under the system modules, open the “Bootup and Shutdown” module, and make sure things like smb, nfsserver, (and other services) are started at boot.

Another Camera aid idea

Shooting with a flash often needs an assistant to keep moving the flash around to track the moving subject, as the camera also moves to track the subject.

In some situations where an assistant is either not available or not practical. In these situations the flash is set in a location which would cover most subject locations, with a wide flash beam. Lots of flash power is wasted,  and it’s very inefficient.

What if the flash(s) could track the subject by themselves, always aiming the flash at the subject? Well, it may be possible using one of these Direction Finder tools.

The way it would work is that the flash (with a remote trigger) would be on a servo controlled gymbal, and the camera would paint the subject with a pulsed IR laser (pulsed so that the tracker only tracks the pulsed signal and not other continuous IR sources).