Hardware

I have a Synology NAS that has starting acting up.  By acting up I mean I can’t connect to it and it requires a unplugged reboot to fix it.  Power button no work.  After doing some detective work I’m not sure if the problem is with the hard drives or the Synology it’s self.

To help me narrow down the problem I thought I’d run SpinRite which is a hard drive diagnostic tool.  I heard about SpinRite from the Security Now podcast.  It was created by Steve Gibson, one of the hosts and they talk about it’s virtues often on the podcast.

Just a quick public service announcement (PSA) that the Arduino H Bridge is sharp and pointy.  Both my daughter and myself hurt our fingers but only I was lucky enough to draw blood when one of the H Bridge pins got stuck under my finger nail.  I mean look at this insect looking pointy bastard.

All that pain and blood was worth it as we did finally get the lesson 10 (Zoetrope) from the Arduino Start Kit working.  We couldn’t get the example as shown in the book to work because we didn’t understand how the H Bridge worked.

All my development work is done on virtual machines (VM), Virtual Box to be exact.  In the past I’ve only needed one VM open at a time and only one version Visual Studio, or other IDE, running in the VM.  On my Core 2 Duo with 4 GB of RAM this was fine with the VM being allocated 1.5 GB of RAM.  Sometimes it would run slow but only for short durations and I could live with it.