My Blog

Category: Events

  • Turnigy Brushless 4WD Monster Beatle suffers first failure

    I didn’t really post about this, but I gave my 4 year old son a 1/16 scale Turnigy Brushless 4WD Monster Beatle that completely adores. You can check it out over at HobbyKing via the direct link here.

    He is allowed to use it when supervised and in a nice open area like a park, since running it on 2S LiPo means it moves pretty quickly. This could of been limited by the use of a more expensive controller, but I opted to get all the bits from the Australian Hobbyking Warehouse to limit postage costs.

    Anyways, long and the short of the story is that it suffered it’s first failure. The steering servo looks as though it probably has stripped some gears, although I am not surprised as everyone mentioned this would probably happen. I think the main reason it did as he actually ran the thing into an object by accident.

    Not to fear, some spare parts ordered on Sunday.

    Still impressed with the Remote Control car itself, as its a lot of fun for the price.

  • Raspberry Pi and Asterisk

    I’ve had my Raspberry Pi and Asterisk setup running now for nearly 2 months. It hasn’t failed me once in this time.

    If you remember back I ended up installing Raspbian and configuring Asterisk manually from command line. This setup suits me, as I want to learn about how it all works, not learn how to use one of the dedicated images that has a fancy web GUI (and learn how to use that). I might end up changing to that type of setup eventually, however what i have now works with all the features I need.

    Will be sure to post back as time progresses with this setup.

     

  • Traxxas Telluride 4×4

    I got an email 2 days ago from Traxxas that was advertising the new Telluride 4×4 1/10 scale remote control coming out.

    I must say it really got me interested, as I am interested in getting some more R/C gear, and this looks like a good robust truck.

    Stay tuned, I might end up buying one much later in the year.

    I bought two other R/C car’s earlier this year and will be unwrapping those when I get them as a gift, more details will follow when I open them.

  • Ubuntu 12.04.2 LTS and lxc

    Have completed my Ubuntu 12.04.2 LTS install and configured lxc (Linux Containers). I am so far very impressed just how easy it was to get this working out of the box. I think the Ubuntu team who produce Ubuntu 12.04.2 LTS has to be given a big clap. Very fine job.

    I’ve install some Debian squeeze lxc’s and Ubuntu ones. All seem to work great and I will post more details soon on what I have done and how it was performed, as it might help anyone thinking of doing the same.

    I wanted to do this so I could run some other software on the containers and not clutter the host install. Although the host will see the processors for the container etc. But that’s fine and expected on how lxc works.

    My aim was to install Mythtv as a master backend into a container and have it use my HDHomerun network based tuner. This has actually worked, and I am currently running it now, however I noticed during reboot/auto start of the container that the mythtv-backend wouldn’t start. Turns out the upstart configuration is not going to work on a linux container. Wiki page here is the link to the config that ships in Ubuntu 12.04.2, and below is my change I made so that I could get it to start automatically, it’s a hack and needs some further investigation, but I was in a rush to get it working in my environment.

    root@delta:~# cd /etc/init
    root@delta:/etc/init# cat mythtv-backend.conf | grep start
    #start on (local-filesystems and net-device-up IFACE!=lo and started udev-finish)
    start on net-device-up IFACE!=lo

    As per above, I hash out the original start on line and create the amended one below it. This is perform in the file /etc/init/mythtv-backend.conf

    Now it will start correctly in my container at boot.

  • Upgrades and installations

    These days I run a HP Microserver N40L with 3 x 2TB drives in a software raid5 on Debian linux. This machine has been performing a number of tasks, I did upgrade it to Debian 7.1, however wanted to really rebuild it.

    I’ve been wanting to implement lxc, however I got it working on a virtual machine with some hacking around with a Debian host, however when i went to redo it couldn’t get it to work. Despite the research I did.

    Looks like Ubuntu 12.04.x LTS has a good out of box setup for lxc, and based on that fact I think the first time in a long while I am going to change the machine from Debian to Ubuntu purely to make use of lxc which seems to work out of box without much fuss.

    I attempted to do the install lastnight and as part of that install I changed my boot drive from a 500Gb to a 250Gb drive. Post install all I got during grub boot was GRUB displayed in top left corner. I tried all sorts of things to resolve it. Wasted a bit of time doing so. In the end I went hang on I changed the drive, is it possible the drive boot order got screwed up. Sure enough it had, and once I set the order correctly we could now boot. Looks like when the system tried to boot one of the other drives which had no grub files (basically nothing for stage 2 etc).

  • Mourning for Bindi

    Still mourning for Bindi.

    She is in our thoughts each and every day. Missing our loyal friend and pet. Forever in our hearts.

  • Farewell Bindi – several months on

    It’s now been nearly 2 months since our Labrador Bindi passed away. You can see the post here for more details on that very sad event.

    Immediately post the event I must say I was feeling pretty sad, and it was really difficult to be reminded of it. We miss her and it’s been hard when our oldest son asks about her. What can you tell a 4 year old? Not a lot I don’t think. Can’t talk about death that’s for sure. We merely said she was away getting better with the vet.

    Even nearly 2 months on I still find myself thinking about her every so often. Especially when we see something that might remind us of her.

  • Farewell Bindi

    Today my wife and I had to say farewell to one of our two dogs. Below is a picture of Bindi from lastnight, as always she would be laying on the floor in the home office while I would be doing what it was I had to do. She would always do that, even from when she was a pup.

    Bindi was a very loyal friend and would do everything you would tell her. She was a great dog, and will be missed a great deal. She lived a good life and we got to spend 11.5 years with her.

    Farewell Bindi, you’ll be forever in our hearts and in our thoughts always. Buddy will miss you and I am sure he will not forget you either, you’ll both meet up with each other again in the future.

    Bindi - 10th May 2013
    Bindi – 10th May 2013

     

    (12th May 2013): I should add that the issue was a toe tumor. To my surprise based on some recent research this seems to be very common. Something I wasn’t even aware of at the time. Bindi lost her nail several months back, could of been even longer. I do not remember when, just remember it happening and thought nothing of it. But I do believe this nail coming out was probably the linked item to the whole saga. I also remember her limp from time to time, I would check her foot for something caught and find nothing. She would again walk normal. I believe this condition was also related to the tumor in her toe too. Events that I didn’t link until now.