Author: Roo

Review: WD Caviar Green 1TB

It was probably 2 years ago when I started talking about the terabyte club.  This was before 1TB drives were common (and cheap), the sweet spot for price/capacity was around 250Gb – but four of those would net you 1TB for under $500.  Considering I spent $2000 on my first 1Gb SCSI drive back in 1990 – being able to get 1000X the storage for a lot less, still makes me sit back and think wow.

I failed to properly join the terabyte club 2 years ago, I suspect that sometime in the last year or so the total sum capacity of my machines at home topped 1TB of storage – but just recently my purchase of a WD Caviar Green 1TB drive ensured that I was “in the club”.  (It also lives in my webserver, so its effectively “online”)

I had my eye on the Caviar Green series ever since I saw the Tom’s Hardware review that showed that the Green drives had real savings in power consumption.  While their power use under load is closer to typical – for the most part my server is idle (but always on).  At the larger capacities, I just don’t trust the even more power friendly laptop drives.

I watched the price canada page for the 1TB model over a couple of weeks, and once the price fell below $100 I knew it was inevitable I’d buy one.  Initially I was going to get it at PCCyber for $87.99 (the price has since dropped), but karma dictated that they were out of stock the day I was going to buy one.  I then decided to head off to Canada Computers where they had it for $84.99.  Wouldn’t you know it, when I got back from the store with my purchase in hand there was a NewEgg.ca deal for $79.99 (with free shipping).  It seems the best local price currently is $77.77.

The D945GCLF2D (dual core Atom system) that is my server has only 2 SATA ports, both which are full.  So I used the PCI to 4 port SATA card I had from a previous machine to host the new drive.  Sadly, after booting I noticed the following message(s) in the log:

Oct 24 14:47:03 lowtek kernel: [  246.357277] BUG: soft lockup – CPU#0 stuck for 11s! [kacpid:62]

Previous to this new hardware addition, my server had been up for 172 days – so it has been very reliable.  The other symptom of this was the kacpid process eating 100% CPU.   It turns out this is a known bug – and there is a work-around.  Strange how it was the addition of the PCI card which triggered the problem for me.  Simply disabling the System Fan Control in the BIOS remedied the problem, and the system seems solid once again.

Continue reading “Review: WD Caviar Green 1TB”

iPod Touch location service: Skyhook

So the iPod Touch doesn’t have GPS built in, but it does provide location services if you have the right magic.  nolocationIf you were lucky and once you had hooked up to your local WiFi access point, your iTouch was just magically able to figure out where you were (at least a rough approximation – ie: within a block or two).  If you were lacking magic, then you’ll be familiar with the “Your location could not be determined.” dialog.

The magic is due to Skyhook:  They’ve taken the same information you’d gather wardriving – and turned it into a generally useful bit of data.  Those of you that have regular  GPS devices, will know how poorly they function indoors.  However, indoors is exactly where WiFi works fairly well.

They have a reasonable How It Works page, where you can also submit your own access point if you don’t happen to be in the database.  There are three bits of data you need to submit: your address, an email address for confirmation and your wireless MAC address.

If you happen to run DD-WRT on your router, it is very easy to find from the routers status page.

macYou’ll notice there are 3 MAC addresses: LAN, WAN and Wireless.  The LAN address is the wired address for your internal network, the WAN is what is broadcast over your broadband connection and the Wireless is for WiFi.  Skyhook relies on the latter, which is the MAC address that your iTouch is associated with.

I submitted my information on Saturday Sept 26th, and it went live on Monday October 5th.  They say it may take up to 2 weeks.  If you don’t get the right MAC address, it won’t work, so make sure you’ve got a handle on that.

You can check the coverage for your area, but with an iPod Touch you are limited to being able to make use of it only in areas where you have a WiFi connection as well.  Why?  Well, simply put the database is out there on the web – if you can’t find the database, you can’t look up your location.  Of course with the iPhone, you can use your cell data connection to query the database and get the increased accuracy and/or have it work indoors.

While I figured this out the hard way, while writing this post I came across the following blog posting that covers this as well as other useful tips.  There is also a slashdot article on Skyhook.