I use a Fujitsu U904 as my job’s daily driver. It’s approaching three years old and was subject to a few hand-me-downs along the way but it’s still a very capable Ultrabook and with the QWUXGA touch screens its perfect for onsite visits.
One remnant of its hard life was the temperamental touchpad, that would work on a level flat surface but moving it to a lap or similar and the “pinch to zoom” would kick in when trying to move the mouse.
Usual troubleshooting commenced with the latest drivers being installed, as this issue co-incised with a fresh install of Windows 10. Suspecting a grounding issue of the capacitive touchpad, off came the underside cover and checked to see any missing covers/captain tape that could have caused a short, without success.
Something that I’ve noticed to be cropping up more recently is an issue where Office applications hang when a users attempt to print, failing at the Print Preview stage. When this occurs there seemingly is no return for the program and has to be closed from the Task Manager.
From the experiences I’ve had with this error there have been a few constants. All machines are running Windows 7 Pro 64bit with Office 2013 or later installed. Also a factor is the use of Konica Minolta Bizhub printers as the default device but after research this is less of a contributing factor.
Something that’s been bugging me since starting my new role was that I could only listen to audio through the left channel. I initially chalked this up to using Apple earphones with integrated mic not being compatible with the audio out port of the PC.
Despair set in after investing a whole £3 on a dedicated set of headphones that turned out to exhibit the same issue. This narrowed it down to 2 main issues, hardware or drivers.
I found a hardware issue hard to justify, as audio through the working channel was fine, and considering how integrated a sound card is on a modern motherboard these days sound would be all or nothing. Moving on to drivers, the simple trouble shooting was fine, with the balance centred on both the Realtek software and the Windows sound manager.
Getting frustrated I methodically went through every obscure setting on the Realtek manager, choosing that as its usually undeveloped manufacturer software rather than the OS at fault. Then finally I found it:
It’s April and this is the first post of the year, so what’s happened? Well since being made redundant from my retail job last August I took the first opportunity of a job and ended up in a call centre for an energy company, and quickly discovered it was a terrible job.
While setting up a backup solution for my home network, I had an issue where my Windows Server 2012 R2 backup task would fail, with the following status:
“There is not enough disk space to create the volume shadow copy on the storage location. Make sure that, for all volumes to be backed up, the minimum required disk space for shadow copy creation is available. This applies to both the backup storage destination and the volumes included in the backup.
Minimum Requirement: For volumes less than 500 megabytes, the minimum is 50 megabytes of free space. For volumes more than 500 megabytes, the minimum is 320 megabytes of free space.
Recommended: At least 1 gigabyte of free disk space on each volume if volume size is more than 1 gigabyte.
Detailed error: Insufficient storage available to create either the shadow copy storage file or other shadow copy data.”
This doesn’t really explain the issue, as setting up a schedule with Windows Server Backup in 2012 involves the utility checking available storage before creating the backup task, and a manual check showed there was ample storage on the destination volume, with the source volume having 86% free space.
Delving into the Event Viewer for more detailed error message, I get this:
A little treat when ordering the latest Raspberry Pi was to add a camera module to it, at a price of £7 for the Noir (Not French, just meaning No Infrared filter) it was easy to justify getting even if there was not a set purpose to it.
For the price the Pi Noir camera was generous on the specs, with a 2592 x 1944, 5 Megapixel sensor it seemed capable of capturing high detail images. However, the 5Mp tagline applies to still images only, with video capped at a still respectful 1920 x 1080p.
The difference between the Noir and standard camera module is the lack of an IR filter on the lens, resulting in some washed out colours in daylight but still acceptable in a surveillance capacity, but has the ability to capture images in darkness with help of separate Infrared lighting.
Using the camera module on the Pi is pretty straight forward, connecting is done via a ribbon cable plugged into a dedicated port on the Pi board.
When running a website from a home server, viewing it locally will make it seem that the site is responding lightning fast and there are no issues. But what about the outsiders wanting a look at your content, are they getting the same performance? Chances are they are not, as a visitor’s machine needs to negotiate the internet and its equivalent of back streets and country roads to get to the home server’s location.
Where a home server can differentiate greatly from hosted solutions is the speed and relative location on the net. Visitors who view a website relies on the upstream connection at the server end to receive the content, and when this is via domestic internet connection the upstream can much smaller than the heavily advertised downstream connection. So it’s worth checking the theoretical upload speed to establish what kind of service and content can be served.
Viewing your website on a local network compared to the internet.
In terms of location, hosting companies are as close to the internet backbone as feasibly possible to get the best speeds and lower latency. The backbone of the net is handled by major operation companies that handle the bulk of all internet traffic between countries and continents, these in turn have datacentres where the traffic from countries are trunked to the different internet providers and down to the end user. As data makes its way from the backbone to the end user, it can hop between different servers as it meanders towards the final destination. For each hop the networking equipment has to read where to send it on, and route it on the right path. This all takes time, even though it is measured in milliseconds, an extended number of hops and the volume of data packets needed may produce a noticeable wait for a user to see the desired page.
All home user’s computers need deal with negotiating its way through the service providers’ local infrastructure to get to most sites, but when visiting a site hosted on a home server, data may need to navigate another service providers’ network to reach the site. This is where visitors may experience slower loading times compared to mainstream sites.
So how to tell if your home hosted website will be speedy when out in the wild? There’s a few different ways to check:
With the cooler outdoor temperatures, a bug in my original code for the temperature display has cropped up:
The DS18B20 returns temperatures with up to three decimal places, with the decimal point omitted, therefore a temperature of 10oC would be shown as 10000 by the sensor. To deal with this and for the display to show the temp to one decimal, I used this code:
About fifteen years ago I did Electronics as a course in college, and at the time my younger self didn’t fall in love with the topic, set down to a culmination of issues.
Now with time at hand and a rejuvenation I felt when getting to grips with the Raspberry Pi I thought it time to get involved again. I must stress that this time these are baby steps, and the Raspberry Pi helps me as it does most of the work for you, with any electronics added considered to be more of a peripheral rather than a self-sustained product.
Nothing grand to start with, but as a first project I thought to combine a 20×4 LCD display with two DS18B20 temperature sensors to monitor indoor and outdoor temperatures. This would replace a cheap display I had been using but was sceptical on its accuracy.
Getting the basics right involved making the device blend in to the current setup without the usual mass of wires protrude. From the last round of the seam ably endless cable management war I used a shoebox base as a stand for the webserver and network switch, with the box hiding the various power bricks and extra cable, with most coming from the Xbox 360. Still having the shoebox lid I thought it would be good to use as a modular part to house the Pi and display.
