In my last post I was lamenting the premature demise of my old Squeezebox server, caused by a nasty plague that afflicts tech gear: burst capacitors.

After a long search, sifting through eBay listings, reading the fine details of each offering, comparing options, I was able to find a nice newish Shuttle server, sporting good drives, far better cooling than my older one, much more memory, much better processing power, and a snazzy paint job applied by the former owner.

It was barely out of the box when I was off on my Mac burning a CD for Ubuntu Lucid Lynx 10.04 LTS. The Ubuntu install went flawlessly—I set it up with a standard LAMP stack. By the evening I had installed the latest version of Squeezebox Server (now called Logitech Media Server) and was serving up tunes to the local Squeezeboxes.

A Fresh Start

Now I am looking into what kinds of neat stuff to do with this device. If any of these turns out to be particularly compelling, I will eventually write them up here.

• I am playing around with photo gallery servers for photos within the house, so all of our family members can see our photos in the house without the need to put them on an Internet gallery.
• The Squeezebox playlist sync tool is limping along, but it needs work.
• I already put CVS on the box, to hold any ongoing project work.
• The wiki (MoinMoin) that I use to keep track of technical meanderings is already installed.

But the box is going to get lonely pretty soon if I don’t figure out some exciting things to do with it. Setting it up as a media server sounds fun, but I would probably have to trade my Apple TV for a Roku if I went the Plex route for serving media on Linux.

I’m also looking to see if I can automate some of my photography workflow tasks, getting photos moved to the right place for backups to happen and the right place for the gallery software to pick them up. That kind of work isn’t as exciting, but is still needed.

By the way, the capacitors are Shuttle’s new solid cans that don’t burst. Nice!

It has been quite a long time since I have posted anything here—the spam bucket was choked with well over a hundred pages of who-knows-what when I first came back.

One thing I did notice was that several folks have taken advantage of the iTunes-to-Playlist script that I put together last year, and that’s always encouraging. I haven’t really done any work on tweaking or refining the script because there was a small bit of a problem in the homestead: my happy little Shuttle server died an untimely death.

I bought it off of eBay brand new for a little over a hundred bucks last February and was quite pleased with my purchase. It was a Shuttle K45, a pretty old platform with a lightweight processor, but more than enough horsepower to be a home Squeezebox server as well as a Wiki server and a CVS server.

But it was too good to be true. After I had settled in and set up my workflow around my silent little Shuttle box, it simply died one day. I pressed the power button to restart it and was greeted with a blinking light that was anything but encouraging—the server was dead. An autopsy revealed the probable cause of death to be bad capacitors.

If you find yourself dealing with wonky hardware problems, such as a PC that doesn’t boot or frequent BSOD when watching video, pop open the case and give the caps a gander. You might save yourself hours of troubleshooting effort. See below for details…

Shuttle K45 = Bad Caps

I now know why I occasionally find new-in-box K45s on eBay: there was a bad production run of them.

Just do a quick search for “Shuttle K45 bad capacitors” and you will find plenty of complaints. Here is a good example of a post about the problem from Tom’s Hardware.

Here’s the Problem

This is how the motherboard looked. That bit of brown goop that is oozing out of the top of the capacitor on the left is a sure sign of death. You might note that the one on the far right seems to be bulging a bit at the top as well, ready to blow. In fact, that’s why the manufacturer put the little cross hatch in the top of the aluminum can: it’s a sort of safety release when pressure gets to great within.

I checked all of them, and there were a half dozen of them that were oozing brown stuff.

Not the first time

As I had alluded to at the start, I have seen this behavior before: I once wasted many hours of my time trying to track down the demons that were causing random blue screens on my old Windows Media Server box.

I had re-imaged the machine twice with the factory disks and had even gone so far as to run a live CD version of Linux in order to eliminate Windows and the hard drive from the equation. Indeed, watching video in Ubuntu caused similar hard crashes, so it was clear that I had a hardware problem.

I had a distant memory of having read some article talking about bulging electrolytic capacitors, so on a hunch I popped off the cover and looked at the video card. Sure enough, the caps on that old ATI card had little brown dots in their crowns. That episode ended fairly well: I bought a new video card and that particular machine returned to service for several more years.

A Heroic Repair Attempt

I really did like my little Shuttle server and hated to see it go, so I immediately began looking in to how I might bring it back to life. I have wielded a soldering iron before and so I decided to roll up my sleeves and fix it myself.

I didn’t find the right capacitor sizes at Radio Shack—it’s sad to see that their selection has diminished greatly from my childhood memories of going to buy parts for radio kits with my dad.

I ended up going to an outfit called Badcaps.net that sells prepackaged kits for the usual suspects, and they do indeed sell a Shuttle K45 18pc Capacitor Kit for $17 and shipping.

Here they are, fresh out of the plastic baggie:

My soldering exercise took about two hours, after which I understood the following statements to be true:

• Desoldering is much more annoying than soldering.
• Those solder sucker tools just don’t work. Maybe I needed to use that desoldering braid.
• The motherboard of a K45 is a sweet pain in the backside to extract from the case.
• The server was just as dead after my efforts as it was before.

I decided that I had already invested too much time and effort into this exercise and threw in the towel. I lost no data in the process—it was all backed up elsewhere. Life is good!

Last week I set up a new server on an aging Dell PC, but I’m on the hunt for a new server.

I have been dealing with situations like this for years, working with computers in a small school and at a nonprofit volunteer organization, shared by many. It seems that whenever I turn on any of these machines, the background is set to something ugly, the screen resolution is weird, there is some cute animated mouse cursor, and someone has left their most intimate secrets in a document on the desktop.

Microsoft Steady State solves all of these issues by providing a means of creating a golden configuration that is restored to absolute perfection the next time the machine is rebooted. But download it before the end of the year, when it will be pulled by Microsoft!

Steady State Magic

This free product gives you the ability to configure accounts on your XP or Vista machine with several fine-level access controls. For example, you can prevent users from changing screen settings or prevent them from writing to anywhere other than their personal “Documents and Settings” directory.

But by far the coolest feature is the ability to turn off hard drive writes altogether. When you do this, Windows slips a layer between the OS and the physical hard drive that intercepts and tracks all hard drive activity during a session. During the session, the user can browse the web, create documents, install programs, whatever…but when the machine reboots, the cached list of hard drive changes is discarded completely: the hard drive is restored to the way it looked before the user booted the machine.

What can you use this for?

There are many places where a completely protected machine would be of great use…

• A shared computer in a public area, like a hotel lobby
• A home computer that is used by the kids and the cat and the dog
• Computers in a school or library setting
• Shared computers in a setting where many different workers use the same computer

Anything to worry about?

• All of your users must remember that everything must be saved to a USB stick before reboot. Steady State warns you of this every time you reboot the machine.
• There are some annoyances that might happen, such as that silly “Desktop Cleanup Wizard” popping up every single day because it thinks it hasn’t been run in five months, or “New Programs Installed” balloons that come up every single day because, again, the machine is restored totally to day-one upon reboot.
• Microsoft is killing the product at the end of the year. Now it will likely remain functional for XP and Vista, but they are not upgrading it for Windows 7. But this is too cool a product not to try out. In theory, you could create a steady state machine today and keep booting today’s version of Windows XP for the next five years.

Additional Features

With the hard drive protection enabled, you can add programs at any time from an administrator account. When you shut down, Steady State will ask you if you want to commit your changed hard drive data to the Steady State disk image.

Even without the hard drive protection enabled, you have plenty of security constraints you can enable for other users to keep them from installing their favorite annoying toolbar and blinking mouse cursor. Think of this as a poor-man’s version of the domain policy tool used in enterprise environments.

More Information

• Microsoft Steady State. How to remotely remove and retain changes on lab computers.
• Defending the C disk with SteadyState from Microsoft
• Alternatives to Steady State for Windows 7: Creating a Steady State by Using Microsoft Technologies
• See Episode #129 of Steve Gibson’s Security Now podcast: Security Now! Episode Archive

Conclusion

I did not understand just how slick a tool this is until I installed it on a spare machine. It took about fifteen minutes to configure things right, but that machine has been running for the past few weeks with the locked-down golden configuration. Whenever it reboots, it looks exactly as it did when I installed Steady State.

Give it a try before it’s too late!

I’m serious. You don’t need to know anything at all about Linux to use one of these. Just download the image, install, and you suddenly have a full featured NAS file server, or you might have a database or a source code repository.

Last year I wrote an article on how to set up a NAS device using Ubuntu Linux. I have been a fan of Ubuntu since the start because it is a very easy distribution to install and configure. The down-side of using Linux has always been the fairly steep learning curve. Before you can get around to using the server, you need to get down in the weeds with configuration files and other stuff.

TurnKey Linux changes all of that.

Painless Installation

A few weeks back, I was setting up an aging PC as a standalone wiki server for a small office—this machine was going to provide a place for the office staff to document their procedures, how-tos, and other things.

I was about to set up an Ubuntu server, as I have done before many times, and install MoinMoin, like I did some months back. I remembered that it was a bit of a pain to get everything tweaked just right, so I did a quick check to see what kind of standalone wiki options were available online.

This is how I found TurnKey Linux. This project is all about single-purpose preconfigured Ubuntu server images.

One of those preconfigured images happens to be a MediaWiki appliance—the wiki engine behind Wikipedia—and I was in business.

The installation took about fifteen minutes, with very little user interaction. I answered a few basic questions and the installer took over from there. As soon as the install was done, the machine rebooted and displayed a message on the monitor with the IP addresses where you can browse to from any other machine.

Full Featured

The work that has gone in to these appliances is amazing. In fifteen minutes I had installed a complex configuration that has the Apache, PHP, MySQL, MediaWiki core, as well as maintenance utilities such as a neat tool that provides a Flash-based pure-AJAX-based SSH command line in a remote browser (i.e. your browser becomes a terminal). Even someone with Linux experience would have to spend quite a bit of time fiddling around with different packages and configuration options in other to provide the same functionality that TurnKey gives you out of the box.

As with most open source projects, the documentation is about 80% complete, with deep detail in some areas, but leaving others fairly sparsely documented. But don’t let this deter you: in most cases users know how to use the product they are installing (e.g. MediaWiki) but don’t want the hassle of configuring it on Linux. That’s where TurnKey shines.

Some Examples

In minutes, you can set up a NAS device. If you want to try advanced content management in your office, try Joomla or Drupal.

If you are working on a small project team and want to protect your source code, try Redmine or Trac and do your bug tracking using Bugzilla.

And while you are at it, you can document your organization’s working practices using a wiki such as MoinMoin or MediaWiki.

Don’t forget to back it up!

As with any computer, you should include your new TurnKey appliance in your backup strategy. The nice thing is that you don’t really need to care at all about backing up Linux or the other software; just back up the data. I don’t need to back up my entire MediaWiki machine; I just need to back up the database and image files. If anything goes wrong, you can rebuild the TurnKey appliance from scratch in minutes and then restore your data.

To save yourself some pain, keep notes on any small tweaks you made to the configuration.

One Machine, One Purpose

These disk images share common Ubuntu underpinnings, but they are referred to as Appliances because they turn your PC into a purpose-built appliance.

This means that if you want a content management system and you also want a ticket management system, you will need two old computers—not a rare commodity these days.

Take a look at what they have to offer and give TurnKey a shot—specialized software used in corporate environments is now within reach of small offices at the right price.

I have a nice iMac that I use daily; my wife has a MacBook Pro which she has taken quite a liking to. And I carry around my iPhone (she really couldn’t care less about smart phones). It looks like these devices all converge on and overlap the territory of the iPad. Again, what’s the point?

I walked into the Apple store last Monday expecting to enjoy a few minutes of playing around with an over-sized iPod Touch, and then walk out. Then it hit me: they did it again—they created a device, akin to the iPhone, that is so slick and easy to use that you must handle one and play with its features before you can truly understand.

Alex Payne put it quite nicely in his blog:

“Human-computer interaction has found a sweet spot on the iPad. It’s all the power of desktop computing, plus the valuable constraints of mobile devices, minus the limitations of both. It just makes sense. Use one for a couple hours and your desktop or laptop will seem clumsy, arbitrary, and bewildering. It is, simply, how (most) computing should be.

You can be as cooly aloof as you like about the device, but it won’t change the fact that it’s a fundamental step forward in computing. … [I]f you work in tech, you should spend some time with an iPad. If it doesn’t change the way you think about what you do, you’re either a genius or an idiot.”

— The Moderate’s Position on iPad Openness

He’s right, you know.

As soon as I held the device in my hands it was clear why this device has earned its own new niche that it was wedged into, between smart phones and laptops. The touch interaction that was so revolutionary with the iPhone has become more palpable, and more natural. I find myself gently sweeping my hand across the screen as I read the newspaper, watching the words gently glide by.

It really sank in when I looked at how my wife uses her MacBook Pro. She lays in bed with the machine in her lap, listening with headphones, as she goes through her email, listens to iTunes, searches out videos of old friends in Brazil posted on YouTube, and does some Google searches for whatever is on her mind. Meanwhile, the machine’s legendary thigh-roasting fans are running and she fidgets and fumbles with its bulk.

Everything she does with her MacBook is better with the iPad. It is more like a TV than a computer in the sense that you simply turn it on and choose what you want to do, with no knowledge of its internals. There are no fans blasting searing heat. The device is not cumbersome; she can curl up with it like a good book.

And it does Netflix.

What more could you want?

Well, there are few things I see right away that I would like, but for the most part I want more proper iPad apps. Old iPhone apps offer two equally unpleasant views: either you use the app in a horribly cropped iPhone-sized letterbox view, or the app is displayed in grotty pixelated full screen mode. Fortunately, folks are coming out with new iPad apps every day, some are even free upgrades if you own an app on the iPhone.

The first problem my wife will encounter (when I finally give her my iPad, as promised) is that she will want to print something from it. Printing doesn’t seem to be in the iPad’s repertoire. I have to admit that printing is a bit of a heavyweight for such a handy dandy device. She will still look at me and say “But it should be able to print.” And she’ll be right.

The second real issue I have with it is file management. There just is no simple way to move files onto an iPad: all file management is kludgy at best, usually involving iTunes. This was not so bad with the iPhone because our expectations are lower; after all, it is a cellphone first and foremost.

But the iPad is different. Its name screams “Documents” and begs us to flip pages with our bare hands. Why do all document transfers have to involve web browsers, email, and iTunes?

There are many different ways file management could be handled, but the way iPhones and iPads deal with documents and files is so un-Apple. This little bit of tarnish distracts from the beautiful polish of the device.

But I love it anyway

I can’t really criticize much more about my iPad. It does exactly what someone like my wife needs with little hassle, like a handheld flat-screen TV with cool features.

In other words, the iPad excels at being a computer for entertainment.

Check out some of the (currently) free newspaper apps. If you like Popular Science, drop a five-spot on their interactive magazine. You’ll like it.

And did I mention that it does Netflix?

[UPDATE: I spoke too soon—they only delivered half of the goods. See below.]

[UPDATE 2: Hurray! It's fixed! The birds are chirping and the sun is shining and life is good!]

When Snow Leopard came out back in August, I ordered my copy the first week and was so excited that I installed it the day it arrived. My joy was short-lived, however: the most important software package I use did not work!

I depend greatly on the OCR capabilities of the ABBYY FineReader software that comes with the ScanSnap scanners, and this was one of the many pieces of software that did not smoothly transition to Snow Leopard. I could scan documents, with limited functionality, but the OCR feature did not work.

Now that Fujitsu has released their official update, I will probably be installing Snow Leopard tomorrow evening. Now, do I do an upgrade or a full install? Hmmmm…

UPDATE

Well, they only delivered half of the goods.

I was reading through the seven-step process for updating the ScanSnap drivers and I arrived at step seven:

Step 7: The download for FineReader for ScanSnap update to Snow Leopard will be hosted by ABBYY but is not yet available. If you have already subscribed to be notified by Fujitsu regarding the Snow Leopard updates, an email will be sent to you when it is posted.

How displeasing. The only thing I really cared about was getting the OCR to work, and apparently Abbyy has not yet delivered their part (How hard can it be to update the part in your code that says “If the PDF metadata doesn’t match X then the document isn’t a ScanSnap doc” ?).

UPDATE 2

Instead of making us wait another month or two, ABBYY has delivered their patch in record time . I quickly installed the update and tested my ScanSnap script…

There are a few kinks to work out, but it is pretty clear that I will have my same old workflow AppleScript folder action up and running in short order. I will post the newer script as soon as I have it running properly.

And, as a side note, I had already purchased PDFpen from SmileOnMyMac as a backup plan. Their tool incorporates the OmniPage OCR engine, an engine that rivals that of ABBYY. My script was already running with PDFpen, but there were some issues with tables in documents that I forwarded on to SmileOnMyMac. One of these days I’ll post my scripts for PDFpen.

But…

I think a couple of the pages in their long evaluation checklist must have stuck together, because they clearly missed the part of the process where someone was supposed to actually try to plug one of the darned things in behind a computer in a dark closet with fifteen other cables bound in knots any sailor would be proud of.

Granted, USB cables plug in much better than many of their predecessors, such as those round multi-pin connectors found on older mice and keyboards, but the specification left one tiny detail out that would have made an already good idea better…

Which Side is Up?

There is no clear way to tell which side goes up. That’s it. I tire of trying to distinguish the vague impression of the USB logo on one side of a cable in dim lighting. All they needed to do was require a small bump be present on the top side, in perfect thumb location.

[I]t is not obvious at a glance to the inexperienced user (or to a user without sight of the installation) which way around the connector goes, thus it is often necessary to try both ways. More often than not, however, the side of the connector with the trident logo should be on “top” or “toward” the user. Most manufacturers do not, however, make the trident easily visible or detectable by touch. (Wikipedia)

My answer to the problem?

You see it in the picture above. I stole a bottle of coral nail polish from my wife and I carefully paint dots or stripes on the corresponding bits of any kind of connector.

My wife complained about the difficulty of fitting the tiny USB connector in her cell phone, so I placed a big dot on the top side of that one (though I left the phone untouched). I have also given similar treatment to many other connectors in my home.

Life is too short to keep trying to figure out which side of a cable fits where. Put little dots on them and be done with it!