So for about 2 years or so I’ve been using Crashplan to have a remote backup of our home computers. It worked great for $15.00 a month I had unlimited storage for up to 10 computers. All total I was/am backing up about two and half terabytes of data. Yesterday the news went out that Crashplan will no longer be offering a consumer version of their service. I have until November 5th to figure out another option. The problem is there really is no other option, at least not one that doesn’t cost and arm and leg and that actually has a Linux client. I’m doing my best to follow the 3-2-1 rule of thumb and having a very difficult time doing so.

Just so you know the 3-2-1 rule is

• Have 3 copies of your data
• Have 2 local copies on different storage types (one is the original, and the other is a copy on a local external drive or Network attached storage system)
• Have 1 backup off-site in another location.

Following this, if the original gets lost you can restore from your local copy, and if anything catastrophic ever happens (fire, lighting strike etc..etc..etc.) then you can get your data from the off-site backup. The problem is I’m running out of cost effective ways to have off-site backup.  I’m possibly looking into using Google Cloud storage, or Amazons S3. But I’m not quite sure yet.

In other news….. I went and took my placement test yesterday for college. Turns out I need two math classes. The bad news is they have no online math classes and I don’t know how I’m going to be able to the math credits I need. I’m still working on figuring that out…..

Here’s a few photo’s of Mark‘s new computer. Pardon the mess in the pictures we had the living room torn up moving things around.

CPU: Intel Core i5-4670K 3.4GHz Quad-Core Processor
Motherboard: MSI Z87-G45 Gaming ATX LGA1150 Motherboard
Memory: Corsair Vengeance Pro 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3-1866 Memory
Storage: Samsung 840 EVO 120GB 2.5″ Solid State Disk
Storage: Western Digital Caviar Blue 1TB 3.5″ 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive
Video Card: Asus GeForce GTX 770 2GB Video Card
Case: Thermaltake VN300M1W2N ATX Full Tower Case
Power Supply: Corsair CX 750W 80+ Bronze Certified Semi-Modular ATX Power Supply
Optical Drive: Asus DRW-24B1ST/BLK/B/AS DVD/CD Writer
Operating System: Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium SP1

This computer was a purchased to replace an 8 year old Gateway AMD Quadcore. It’s being used in the living as both my husbands primary gaming rig and our Media center using XBMC to serve up media off our home server.

We’ve built our computer, but this time we didn’t feel like the hassle. We have Microcenter about 15 minutes away and purchased all the component through them. We decided it was worth the cost ($100.00) to have them do the assembly. They Did a fantastic Job and had the rig ready for pickup within 48 hours. If you know what you want in your computer but don’t want the hassle of assembly and have a microcenter nearby I highly recommend their service.

So I heard about some argument  Time Warner Cable is having with CBS. Because of this if you’re a TWC subscriber you will be blocked from watching videos on their websites. We have TWC internet (due to lack of choice).  We live in Cincinnati, so we’re not even residents of one of the so called affected markets. If they are hoping to garner support from customers for their side this is a horrible way of going about it. Consumers in general could give two shits about whatever these two are fighting over.

P.S. if you’re really desperate to view one of their shows I suggest using a proxy or VPN. I tested it with Private internet access VPN and the video played fine.

Ok so after months of not being able to figure out why I couldn’t enable port forwarding on my TP-Link TL-WR1043ND router and not being able to remotely access my playon & plex media servers, I was able to get finally get it working.

I discovered that the cause of all my woes was the Motorola SBG6580 modem That Time Warner cable gave me. What I discovered was that it was working like a firewall & keeping my real router for doing what I wanted it to do. Thankfully that”s all fixed now.

After much googling I discovered that what I needed to do was get the modem into bridge mode. Basically the modem has 2 MAC Addresses, 1 for the actual modem (WAN MAC) and 1 for the internal router (LAN MAC).  Time Warner Cable provisions the MAC address (LAN MAC) of the internal router to have access on their network and any other MAC Address such as that of your PC or router, will simply not work.

When you enable bridging mode and turn the device into a cable modem, you’re then passing along your computers and/or routers MAC Address, which is not provisioned in their system. They will refuse to provision a new MAC address over the phone and your modem wont go online. To fix this and have your modem go online, follow these steps:

1. Unplug the coaxial cable from the Motorola modem
2. Hold down the  reset button on the back panel with a pen for 30 seconds, this will reset all settings to factory defaults. The modem will be auto-configured again once you plug the coaxial cable back in.
3. When modem is back on hook your computer’s ethernet cable into the modem.
4. Once you have a connection, open your browser and go to the address http://192.168.0.1 and login with the user name “admin” and password “motorola”
5. Your going to make a few changes to the configuration:
   1. Wireless -> Primary Network -> Disabled
   2. Basic -> Setup -> NAPT Mode -> Disabled
   3. Basic -> DHCP -> No
   4. Advanced -> Options -> Rg Passthrough -> Enable
   5. Copy and save the LAN Mac Address from the Basic > Configuration Section
   6. Then go to Advanced -> Options -> Passthrough Mac Addresses -> and Add the LAN MAC Address that you copied & saved.
6. Save all the settings and then plug the coaxial cable back into the Modem & power cycle it.
7. Unplug your computer’s ethernet cable from the modem and plug it back into your router.
8. You should now be able to forward ports correctly on your own router.

So now I have a working router and can actually utilize my playon and plex media servers from locations besides my local lan.

Chrome recently implemented a change removing the ability to install scripts & extensions from 3rd party websites. You can easily work around this to install the ice quick stream script and other user scripts & extensions from 3rd party locations by doing the following.

• Find the google chrome icon on your desktop
• Right click on the icon and then select properties
• In the dialog that opens you’ll see a box labeled target
• The target box contains something similar to the following line
  C:\username\App Data\Local\Google Chrome\Application\chrome.exe
• at the end of the line add a space then paste the following:
  --enable-easy-off-store-extension-install
• your end result should look like this:
  C:\username\App Data\Local\Google Chrome\Application\chrome.exe --enable-easy-off-store-extension-install
• Click apply and then click OK
• close chrome completely by clicking the wrench and clicking exit and then relaunch it using the shortcut you just modified. You should now be able to install user scripts & extensions from any website once again.

I hope this helps.

p.s. this also works on linux launchers.

So I finally managed to get my new computer all built and put together. The only problem I have is my front audio ports don’t seem to work. I know I have them plugged in correctly, but after searching google it appears this seems to be a common issue with this case. Luckily I have a razer lycosa keyboard so I just use the audio ports on it instead. Seems to work fine.

So with Guild Wars 2 coming out and my current computer being about 4 years old and not really on the high end The hubby & I decided it was time for me to have a new one.

After having installed KDE 4.3 on my ubuntu installation and really enjoying using it, I decided I wanted the full Ubuntu/KDE experience. So I decided to wipe my Ubuntu installation and install Kubuntu 9.04. It turns out the switch wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be. There we’re definitely a few stumbling blocks along the way.

First I couldn’t get tomboy notes to work. I’m aware that KDE offers Basket Notepad but I really prefer Tomboy. I love the wiki style and simplicity of it. I could install it fine but attempting to launch gave me errors. I never did quite figure out what the issues was but I knew it was very important for me to get it working as all my installation notes we’re in tomboy which I sync to dropbox so I can have available to me anywhere (this is really handy as tomboy also has a windows version so I can run them back and forth). Well after much goggling I discovered it’s some kind of issue that won’t let tomboy run with out gnome. Well I thought, at the very least I can install ubuntu in virtualbox and access my notes this way. So that’s what I proceeded to do. Well I decided to have a look at the article on how to forge entitled The Perfect Desktop – Kubuntu 9.04 This article is very thorough and allowed me to get everything I needed on kubuntu without the primary use of my notes.

After following the guide and picking the software I wanted (I didn’t install all the software mentioned as I use alternatives to some of them) I then went to google to search for a way to test my browser plugins. This is when I noticed I had no sound in my browser. Flash, totem and mplayer remained silent. So off to google again. Many hours and much goggling later I discovered the reason for my sound issues was that Kubuntu does not install pulseaudio by default. So I needed to install it. So I followed the instructions found in this post. But for some reason I still had no sound. This drove me completely insane, at this point I was highly frustrated. Well somewhere in the mirad of google pages I came across a post and the reply to that post was that this person had discovered that their PCM volume was turned down and when they turned it up they had sound. So I checked my PCM volume using the mixer option available when clicking on the volume in the system tray and sure enough it was turned all the way down. Now I had sound in my browser. Flash, Mplayer totem they all worked!

Supposedly they are working on these sound issues and most of them should be fixed with the release of Karmic Koala in October. I really hope so as this is a bit complicated for anyone to fix.

I updated my KDE to 4.3 which is far superior to the KDE that ships with Kubuntu Jaunty. The widgets are great and I love using them, also I noticed that the networking widget, which refused to work under kde installed on top of ubuntu, now worked perfectly under Kubuntu. Also I no longer have annoying sounds when using gtk applications under kde this was the most annoying thing about using kde ontop of ubuntu.

I almost forgot to mention that after following the Perfect Desktop article, my tomboy notes began working. So I have installed now and running as well. From the error I was recieveing when attempting to launch it through the terminal, I know it was some kind of Mono error, though I can’t be sure what as I don’t know anything about programming.

I’m running Neverwinter Nights 2 with wine on my new rig

• Systemax PC
• CPU: AMD Athlon 64×2 4400
• RAM: 3 GB DDR2 800 (PC2-6400)
• Display: Nvidia Geforce 7600 GS

I installed using the 7 Disk PC/CD version in order to get it working I had to use winetricks I installed the following with winetricks:

• DirectX9 (not d3dx9 but the actual DirectX9)
• dotnet20
• vcrun2005
• vcrun2005sp1

in order to update to the latest version I ran

/home/angel/.wine/drive_c/windows/regedit.exe

and changed the value of

HKey_Local_Machine>Software>Obsidian>NWN2>Neverwinter>NWUpdate

from 0 to 1

The only issue I had was that the game only recognized a resolution of 1024×768 so I had to edit

/home/angel/Neverwinter Nights 2/nwn2.ini

manually and put in my 1600×900 resolution. All this info I found at The Wine Appdb.

I hope this information helps other people.

Well My monitor started going south, It started getting these lines on it at the top of the screen. I figured out it was the monitor and not my video card when I took a screenshot and they didn’t appear in it. It was an old CRT a 17 inch gateway evo700. Well yesterday the hubby says he’s going to walmart to buy the new underworld movie, but instead comes back with a brand new 20 inch acer LCD widescreen! This is my first experience with an LCD screen up until now all my monitors had been CRT, because well they seemed to last a good long while and so we would buy computers but no monitors, because we already had them. I’m totally blown away by the difference between the CRT and the LCD it’s amazing! It’s kinda strange getting used to a widescreen, but I’m loving it!