So I don’t know if this is something that I missed entirely in the documentation, but a while back, one of the drives in my NAS gave up on life and decided to stop working. Being the lazy person I am, and relying on the uber redundancy of RAID6, I left it for a few weeks (including the time after I purchased a replacement drive). In my defence, I lost the key to the drive trays and had to wait until a friend of mine could find me one. (To skip my long winded path to the end solution, just jump to the last paragraph)

In any case, today I swapped in the replacement and in an anti-climactic fashion, nothing happened. In fact, it didn’t even pick up the new drive. I feared that the NAS itself was dead and I would have to go through the painful process of getting a replacement and everything. None the less, I decided to would take a chance and reboot the unit. Luckily, this did the trick and while it still didn’t automatically rebuild the array, it now detected the new drive.

Checking the RAID configuration page, the only available option was to assign the new drive as a spare.

After some digging on the Thecus Forums, the only mention I found was indirectly through another person’s troubleshooting post where he mentions that setting the drive as a spare fixed his issue.

I was hoping to get some solid information that would support this, but I figured I had nothing to lose and at the very least, I’d have a RAID5 array with a hot spare to back me up.

9 hours later, I’m back up and running, and the RAID 6 array is healthy once again. It would have been nice if Thecus had some better documentation available, but I suppose piggybacking on a forum is better than nothing.

In short, if a drive in your RAID array fails, and if after replacing the drive it doesn’t automatically rebuild, just go into the RAID configuration screen and set it as a spare and the NAS will start rebuilding the array at that point.

By now I’m sure everyone has upgraded to the latest FireFox but what most people night not know about is that FireFox3 was a long awaited release for those of us in photography. Why? Because FireFox3 added colour management to it’s list of features. A few browsers like Safari, and I believe Opera as well already had this functionality but FireFox now joins this elite few.

However, this functionality isn’t enabled by default and infact, there isn’t even an option to turn it on without going into the about:config page.

So here’s how you do it.

In the address bar of Firefox, type in about:config.
Scroll down to gfx.color_management.enabled. By default this is set to false. Double click on it to change it to true.
Restart Firefox.

Now stare in awe as your colour managed images appear the way they should!

UPDATE: The Daily Gyan has a great guide on other tweaks you can enable for FireFox3! Check it out!

Anyone who uses a Blackberry with the Redirector probably knows that while their Outlook mailboxes are spam free from using spam filters (or at least cleaner), their Blackberries unfortunately aren’t so lucky. One of my clients uses a Blackberry and has Cloudmark Desktop installed which works great, except that all the spam that comes in still gets forwarded to the mobile. The issue apparently has to do with timing. The Redirector essentially gets the jump on the email before anything else gets to process it allowing spam to sneak by. But, with this simple fix, all that should come to an end!

Step 1. Go to Start > Run and type “regedit” and click OK.
Step 2. Go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER > Software >Research In Motion > BlackBerry > Redirector. Change the value of the ProcessMailDelay entry to 30. If this value fails to address the issue, then modify the value to be 60.
Note: If the ProcessMailDelay value is not present, create it as a DWORD Value and set the Value data to Decimal 30.
Step 3. close the Redirector and Desktop Manager applications, then restart both to force these changes to take effect.

Now this is something I had never heard of until I Stumbled Upon it. Ever wonder what one can do with the mysterious SysRq key on your keyboard? (I just noticed my Logitech S510 keyboard doesn’t have it marked but it’s usually the Print Screen key)

Well, for you Linux users, it can actually be a bit of a life saver. If your system is frozen and you can’t kill the X server with Ctrl+Alt+Backspace or you aren’t able to jump to another terminal using the Function keys, most people will just go and hit the power or reset button and reboot, risking damage to the system. I know I would…

Well, next time, press and hold Alt+SysRq and enter REISUB (Raising Elephants Is So Utterly Boring).

This will send the term signal to all the processes (except for init), then the kill signal to all process (again except for init), mounts the filesystem as readonly to prevent triggering fsck, and finally reboots.

There’s actually a lot more you can do with the SysRq key combination, all of which you can find on Wikipedia.

I also came across this post which talks about how to disable the Ctrl+Alt+Backspace key combination while trying to find out what it did

So this actually happened to a client of mine before and not able to find an answer, my only thought was to contact Norton and have them check it out. Unfortunately Norton doesn’t have any kind of contact number, or any real way of contacting anyone for that matter, on their website. The solution at that time was to purchase another copy and be done with it.

Unfortunately it happened again. This time to my sister and because I had made sure to create a Norton account which notes the subscription start and end date, we were positive that we still had a good 2 months left on the subscription. This time I did more digging on and off and finally found the fix.

The steps however are a little out of date so I’ll post the updated ones here after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

So today is a pretty big day for all you iPhone fanatics. A New Jersey teen has confirmed today that he was able to unlock the iPhone from AT&T and is using it on T-Mobile. The instructions have been posted on his blog and basically requires you to solder 2 wires and then from there on out, is all about editing the firmware. This is not something for just anyone but I’m sure in a few more days there will be software to do all this apart from the soldering.

Get ready for the flood of unlocked iPhones on eBay!

Anyone with a Logitech keyboard with multimedia keys knows that Setpoint does not play nice with foobar. In fact, there’s no actual support by Logitech! BUT there is a fix! Check out this post over at Weyland.be for instructions.

I’ve always wanted to get a Wacom tablet and a Cinq would be even better but I probably wouldn’t use it enough to justify the cost of getting one. But why buy one when you can build your own for cheeeeap!!?

Drew Northcott thought the same thing and embarked on an adventure to get it done! For only about £100, he was able to purchase an old Wacom tablet and 15″ Dell 1501fp LCD off eBay (along with a few other small bits and pieces), and combined them into a beautiful Cinq replica!

What’s even better is that he’s posted his steps and pictures on his site for all to see for anyone else daring enough to do the same!