After too many years of upgrading from one Mac to the next, I’m starting from scratch with my latest Mac(book Air). It’s an opportune time since Mac OS X Catalina (10.15) deprecates 32-bit applications. So far it’s been lots of “fun”. All my apps have been re-downloaded, but I’m only installing them as needed. Lots …
Category Archives: Geek
Is DIY-BIO the Personal Computing of the 21st Century?
Last last year I ran across the following article in IEEE Spectrum: Tools for Would-Be Biohackers. Since I have a daughter with interests in Biology, I considered getting her one of these “mini-labs” as a Christmas gift. The high cost had me wondering if this was an outrageous idea. It works out that adjusting for inflation, …
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Getting FreeBSD 11 working on my Asus Zenbook UX31A
Sigh… not sure why this was so painful. After years away, I thought it would be nice to re-visit FreeBSD on my dedicated malware analysis laptop. While I had used FreeBSD for over a decade on personal server systems, I’ve never really used it as a desktop system, but I’m tired of the Linux disto …
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QNAP 451+: Hardware Accelerated Transcoding
I’m having problems with Plex using too much CPU to transcode files. Actually, I’m not sure why it’s transcoding to an AppleTV 4, it should be able to Direct Stream .mkv files. I’m trying to go ahead and use the QNAP hardware accelerated transcoding engine. First problem, all transcode requests are returning, “Failed: File read/ …
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QNAP 451+: SABnzbd/Sickbeard setup
Install the Python 2.7 from the QNAP app center. Install the following qpkg from the QNAP community app repository: GIT SABnzbdplus SickBeard Configure SABnzbd with Usenet servers, and SickBeard with shows to search. Make sure that SABnzbd is configured to post-process by using the nzbtosickbeard.py script.This will also require configuring the values in: /share/Download/nzbToMedia/autoProcessMedia.cfg. Specifically …
Hold on, your antenna is bent
More than a year later, we have this scene from Christmas…
Help me Obi-Wan…
I don’t think I ever posted this photo taken somewhat before the baby’s first birthday.
3D Printer: Rigidbot
We purchased a Rigidbot during their Kickstarter campaign last year, and it arrived in the middle of last week. It took 8.5 months longer than projected, but frankly by Kickstarter standards that’s not bad. Since it was so close to the end of the kids’ school year, I saved it as a project for the …
Seeking System 0.97
Lately, I have been dabbling with retro-computing (actually as part of co-adivsing a student group). One of the old machines in my collection is an original Macintosh from 1984. For the sake of authenticity, I have been looking for the version of system software that shipped on release day – Jan 24, 1984. That early in the Macintosh …
New Laptop: Asus Zenbook Prime
I hadn’t really thought about the long-term ramifications of teaching a Malware course, but it appears that I will be teaching it annually for the foreseeable future. Since I don’t think it’s the wisest idea to mess with live malware on my day-to-day system, I bought a “new” laptop last week. It’s actually a used …