HP printers collate, now they don’t!?

Posted on February 24, 2011 by Nate Smith

At work we use many HP Laserjet 4515 workgroup printers.  In an effort to allocate more RAM for printing large PDF and Postscript print jobs we turned off the RAM disks on these devices.  Whoops!  Turning off The RAM disk disabled the HP 4515 collation function.  By turning the RAM disks back on we discovered collating worked again!

I wonder if the HP 4515s use the RAM disk to store the job to be collated and then simply reprint it over and over?  It seems there would probably be a limit (implied by memory size) to the size of job that can be collated.  I hope we do not find that limit.

Posted in miscellany | Leave a comment

Ubuntu no more

Posted on December 21, 2010 by Nate Smith

I’m back to running fracturednoesis on Debian.  I like Ubuntu for a Linux that “just works”, but keeping the machine updated can be difficult if you don’t upgrade after each release.  Debian is nice and conservative.  I’ll stick with Ubuntu on the desktop.

Posted in Debian, Linux/*BSD/Unix | Leave a comment

Sleeping with a CPAP and coping with Sleep Apnea part 2

Posted on May 27, 2010 by Nate Smith

SLEEP STUDY AFTERMATH

So the Doctor sends you to the medical supply store to get all machinery for your CPAP or biPAP machine and you get home and you have a bunch of tubes and a mask that looks like something Chuck Yeager would need at Mach two rather than you in your bed trying to stop sawing logs.

If you are lucky, the people at the medical store took some time to show you how everything goes together.  If not, you are like me.  Wait until you have some time to really read and put it together, don’t try to do it five minutes before bed when your spouse is already asleep.  Buy, or clear off your nightstand.  You may want to invest in one of those alarm clocks that shoots the time on the ceiling.

THE POINT

The whole point of CPAP or biPAP is to push air down (usually) your nose.  The air going down your nose pushes some skin and muscle out of the way.  The very same skin and muscle that vibrates when you breath cuasing a snoring sound.  Make the snoring sound now to yourself to feel that muscle.  Nice.  This is the same muscle that helps you hold your breath when you go deep underwater and let bubbles out your nose a little at a time.  We don’t have time to try that now.  As you age, that muscle changes and becomes flabby or less responsive.  Probably in the same way that you no longer get hiccups as much when you are older.

So as the air comes in through the mask, it helps push that flabby muscle and tissue flap out of the way.  The mask and machine are also designed to allow you to breathe out.  Should the machine stop working, you will not suffocate.  Vents in the mask will still allow you to breathe should you fail to wake up or your mouth fail to open.  If you are a mouth breather – aparently I was – you will have to get used to breathing through your nose.  If you are subject to sinus illnesses, infections or allergies, they may present additional complications to adapting to the CPAP machine and mask.  This will be discussed further.

Next we’ll get into actually learning to use the CPAP and mask.

 To be continued in part 3

Posted in CPAP, Sleep Apnea | Leave a comment

Sleeping with a CPAP and coping with Sleep Apnea

Posted on May 25, 2010 by Nate Smith

This is going to be a big departure from what I normally write about, but I meet enough people that never seem to learn to sleep with their CPAP (Constant Positive Airway Pressure) machine that I want to share how I cope with it.  None of what follows should be construed as medical advice in any way.  It is simply my story and what I have found works for me and I want to share it in case somebody else can benefit.  Check with your physician and use your common sense to decide what will work for you.

We will go through some background, the sleep study, and then get on to how the CPAP and mask works, and how you can cope with it.

I DON’T SNORE

Yes, you do.  Get over it.   Hopefully somebody who sleeps near you or even loves you told you you snore and you conceded that you might snore – at least long enough to do a sleep study.  (If somebody is telling you that you snore, and even stop breathing, you should listen to them long enough to take them seriously).  Worse yet, if they tell you you stop breathing a phone call to your doctor should be the very next thing you do.

THE SLEEP STUDY

Hopefully you’ve been through the sleep study.  For the uninitiated, they hook you up to about every conceivable monitor.  They watch your brain waves, the oxygen content of your blood, your respiration and your heart.  All these crazy wires dangling off you and your scalp while you try to sleep, which they are watching and video taping.  Go to the sleep study tired.

In my case they woke me up after a few short hours and said “here’s your mask”.  This is how they tell you you have apnea.  Using the mask they can try to determine how much pressure is needed to help you breathe.

Sleeping with that mask over my nose felt ridiculous.  I was gagging on too much air and I  felt like I could not breathe.   A blast of air was going out all over my eyes.  I didn’t really understand what was going on, or how this was supposed to help me sleep, we’ll get to that later on.  But after a few more hours sleeping with that horrible thing, I awoke, unable to sleep any more, and feeling better than I had in ages.  I was awake at 5:30 AM and felt ready to take on the day.  I thought about this for the next two days and I could not wait to get a CPAP and mask of my own so I could feel this awake and refreshed again.

Continued in part 2

Posted in CPAP, Sleep Apnea | Tagged , | Leave a comment

The e-book tipping point

Posted on May 25, 2010 by Nate Smith

I’ve been looking at e-book readers a lot lately and I like what I see.  We are still a ways away from a tipping point where people switch heavily to e-book readers.  It is probably safe to say we are in the second generation of readers, and it will probably be in the third generation that it really starts to take hold.  Once more readers are in the used market, color becomes available, and the price comes down.  The third generation of e-book readers might fracture a little too, with really inexpensive readers, and high priced-color readers that are super-thin, or have other features like multiple folding screens or can play music while you read.

For my part, I think I will know the tipping point has been reached when magazines and newspapers with high circulations – perhaps the AARP Magazine, Reader’s Digest or Wall Street Journal, begin to offer a free e-book reader with a subscription because the economics of electronic distribution will make it reasonable to do so.  Inexpensive e-book readers combined with ever-present wi-fi and rising shipping or postage costs.

I’ll probably get an e-book reader soon. When will be the right time for you, how much would you pay for an e-book reader?

Posted in crystal-ball, ramblings | Leave a comment

CoRAID is growing, ATA over Ethernet is going to be big

Posted on January 27, 2010 by Nate Smith

Watch out EMC, CoRAID is getting ready to grow. 

CoRAID just got an infusion of Capital and a crack management team.  Whithin 5 years they will be a common data center name or owned by a company that is already a big data center name.

http://brainstormtech.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2010/01/25/startup-with-all-star-backers-aims-to-disrupt-storage-market/

Posted in AoE | Leave a comment

Tomorrow is an Apple product Announcement

Posted on January 26, 2010 by Nate Smith

Unless you have been living under a rock, or perhaps in the electrical power-less tundra of the Midwest, you probably knew Apple was making an announcement on 1/27/2010.  I have been predicting and prognosticating about what Apple might be up to on other entries here tomorrow we may find some things out.  Here are the questions I would like to see answered:

  • If Apple introduces a new device, is it a tablet, and how many displays will it have?
  • Will apple somehow redefine a product category or create a completely new one?
  • What kind of secret deals has Apple been up to in order to secure whatever new content might be available on a new device (books, newspapers, magazines)
  • How does the new Apple device fit into the Google picture?
  • How does the announcement further extend the iTunes media monopoly?
  • Will there be a new iPhone or iPod touch in addition to a possible new device?
  • Will there be a new firmware or OS for iPod or iTunes?
  • Will a new wireless network provider be involved?

And Finally, one more thing….

  • Will Steve Jobs be stepping down at Apple?

That’s a lot of questions, but there have been a lot of secrets, rumors and questions about how Apple could change another media category like books and magazines, and how they could subsidize an expensive new device to make it more affordable to the masses.

Once the announcements are made and the dust settles we can start guessing at how long it will be until the next revision of a potential new product and when it will cost $100 less than it did at the announcement.  Apple fanboys, warm up your wallets.

Posted in Apple, Geek Culture, Google, ramblings | Leave a comment

Upgrading MySQL

Posted on January 21, 2010 by Nate Smith

Recent glitches required me to update a server I had running Php and MySQL.  Before upgrading mySQL I dumped all of my databases using the dump command.  When I went to recreate a couple databases in the new installation using PhpMyAdmin a few databases were a little too large and timed out as they were imported.  I found a hint to a nice way to import saved tables here (http://www.modwest.com/help/kb.phtml?qid=241&cat=6) but my favorite tip was in the comments: ”

 

"you can also get to the mysql shell and then type "source file.sql",where file.sql is your dump file"

This turned out to be very handy. Good stuff.

Posted in Hacks, Linux/*BSD/Unix | Leave a comment

Frozen hard drive trick – yes, it really works

Posted on December 16, 2009 by Nate Smith

Many people are suspicious of the reported trick of freezing a hard drive in a last ditch effort to recover it.  Freezing a hard drive to recover data really can work.  I don’t know why it works, but I have used it successfully on a disk that would not boot and I can tell you that heat is absolutely an enemy of hard drives.    In a nutshell this is how it is done:

You remove the  dead or clicking hard drive  from the machine.  You obtain a second hard drive of equal size or larger.  Once frozen you restart the hard drive and quickly copy off all your important data or use dd, ghost, or some other tool to copy all the data over to the second hard drive.  You might also hear about using tools like SpinRite to try to repair the damaged drive to get it to a state where it will work under normal or non-frozen circumstances.  I prefer to consider the drive damaged goods and get all the information off it and then retire the drive.

 There are some important things to know in order to freeze a drive for recovery: 

  • You need to keep moisture away from the hard drive.  Seal the hard drive in an antistatic bag.  Use a dessicant in the bag if you have one.  You want to keep moisture away from the drive as much as possible.  Seal the antistatic bag inside one or two other plastic bags reducing the amount of trapped air as much as possible.
  • The drive has to freeze a long time.  This is not an instant process.  The drive needs to be really cold.  Leaving it in the freezer for a 24 hours or more to get the drive chilled completely is a good practice.
  • You have a limited amount of time to recover the disk becuase it will warm up fast.  Really fast.
  • If you need more time, you can buy dry ice at a grocery store and put the drive and dry ice inside a cooler.  This is what I do when I recover with some of the linux-based dd tools because they take so long to run – on the order of days for a really big drive.

On new hard drives larger than 350 GB I try to make sure the drives have additional cooling installed.  Extra fans or heat sinks to cool them down.  I also like to do an initial format of  the hard drive and let it warm up, copying some data to and from it to warm it up to “burn in the drive”, before finally formatting it.  I do this under the theory that once warmed up the platter sizes are probably different from their cold size and that there is probably a point where the warmed up drive will not get any hotter unless it is under stress.  Testing the hard drive before putting it into use also gives it a chance to fail or throw SMART errors before you put anything important on it.

You can freeze a hard drive to make a final try at recovering it but you need to work fast to keep the drive cold and dry.  Sometimes a dead drive is truly dead and if it contains critical data or programs it must be sent to professionals to try advanced recovery steps.

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Using the Intel Intel PRO/Wireless 2200 with Debian

Posted on December 11, 2009 by Nate Smith

You may wonder why this card does not work once you have it installed and the drivers are loading.  Check your logs, you are probably missing the firmware that the drivers need to operate.

Here is a good site to reference for getting these devices working in Debian:

http://wiki.debian.org/ipw2200

Posted in Debian, gadgets, Linux/*BSD/Unix | Leave a comment