Read the rest of this entry »Having received earlier this week a letter from Vidéotron, my ISP, about my account getting capped at 100GB monthly in the upcoming months, I decided I needed an easy way to monitor my monthly bandwidth usage. A Dashboard widget was a good fit.
Mac Widget: Vidéotron Internet Usage Monitor
January 30th, 2010Greyhole – Easily expandable & redundant storage pool using Samba
December 16th, 2009Read the rest of this entry »Greyhole is an application that uses Samba to create a storage pool of all your available hard drives (whatever their size, however they’re connected), and allows you to create redundant copies of the files you store, in order to prevent data loss when part of your hardware fails.
How I plan to implement my own WHS Drive Extender-like system [UPDATED]
November 29th, 2009Read the rest of this entry »I do like Windows Home Server Drive Extender technology. It allows oneself to aggregate a bunch of various-sized hard disks into one big storage pool. You can then define a number of shares that will share (!) that storage pool dynamically. And you can define which shares you want duplicated, which basically mean that DE (Drive Extender) will make sure that all the files on there are on two different physical hard drives, to safeguard those files against hardware failures.
I’ve been searching for quite a while to find a similar system that would fit my needs, and never found one. Then yesterday, I had an idea on how I could implement such a system myself.
Fix a suddenly very slow SATA hard drive problem
November 26th, 2009Read the rest of this entry »So, I was happily copying files around on my Windows Home Server, when I noticed that the speed of the transfers were now at 1.5MB/s… Uncool, when copying similar files from the same directories was at 50-80MB/s minutes earlier. […] I finally found a solution. Disconnecting the SATA data cable from the first SATA port on the motherboard (where it was always connected), and connecting that same cable into the last SATA port.
Remote-controlled air conditioning using Mac OS X and Shion
July 18th, 2009Read the rest of this entry »My central HVAC system has issues cooling down the 3rd floor of our house during the summer.
To solve the problem, I started using my central HVAC system to cool the 1st & 2nd floor only, and I’m using a portative air conditioning unit on the 3rd floor.
To control the AC unit, I use my PowerMac (which is always on), to which a SmartHome PowerLinc USB Controller is connected.
I created a small PHP script which runs every minute, and determine if the AC should be on or off, and tells Shion to turn it on or off. Shion talks to the USB controller, which in turns talk to the SmartHome ApplianceLinc, which then either activate or desactivate the power outlet.
Auto-start XBMC on Apple TV boot
July 3rd, 2009Read the rest of this entry »Here’s how to have XBMC auto-start when your Apple TV boots.
TV Forecast widget not working? Here’s how to fix it.
March 5th, 2009Read the rest of this entry »TV Forecast is a nice widget that Matt Comi created. You tell it what TV shows you watch, and it will keep track of the upcoming episodes for those shows.
The only down side to that widget is that it data-scrape TV.com to get its data.
Not only is this illegal, but it also tends to break the widget every time TV.com change their layout in any way.Getting tired of that, I decided to open the widget’s code, and change the data source to something more stable: TheTVDB.com
Encrypt Gmail offline (Gears) data
February 3rd, 2009Read the rest of this entry »Since Gmail released the Offline feature in Labs, I guess many people have enabled it. I did, as soon as the feature was available in my account. And one of the first thing I did after enabling it, is trying to see how I could secure the data it downloads.
Review of CrashPlan: Multi-platform backup solution for everyone
December 2nd, 2007Read the rest of this entry »CrashPlan, it’s a remote backup solution for (almost) everyone.
The principle is easy enough: install the software client (available for Windows, Mac OS X or Linux), change the default selection of files that will be backed up (if you want to) and you’re on your way to never loose a file again!
Clavier Mac canadien français sous Windows XP (Parallels, VMWare, Bootcamp…)
October 25th, 2007Read the rest of this entry »Installer Windows XP sur un Mac, que ça soit dans Parallels Desktop, WMWare Fusion ou avec Bootcamp, c’est parfois bien pratique. Ce qui n’est pas pratique par contre, c’est d’essayer d’utiliser un clavier Mac canadien français dans Windows! Plusieurs touches sont différentes, dont les accents, plusieurs Shift-chiffres, etc.
