Still, it is of course quite odd that they sold the machine with bad SATA-cables….

A week or so earlier at a birthday party someone gave a bigger helicopter which looked very nice as a present. So by the time I was flying that bug I was pretty much ready to get my own helicopter. So I stared looking around.

First of all I was surprised to see what a wide range of products are available when you started looking for a remote controlled helicopter. You can get cheap small ones for as little as 30 euros and the big ones with flight models that are quite realistic go up to thousands of euros.

I ran into the Esky Belt CP V2 and it seems to be a sophisticated machine for a reasonable price. I bought it a few days later and picked it up at the ‘shop’. Shop is a big word as the guy sells these helicopters as a hobby from his garden shed. He was very nice though and showed me the basics and told me how to start it properly. So I went home and tried it out.

Charging the battery takes three hours. That’s quite a bit, but then it’s a powerful battery. That big battery only allows for about 10 minutes of flight though. After those ten minutes you’re back to waiting for 3 horus before you can have a go again. So of course I pretty soon ordered a second battery.

The first couple of times I was very careful. When that gave me mixed results I became a little less careful. That seemed to go well for a while, but then disaster struck. It went sideways and instead of powering down, I powered up by accident. It accelerated sideways and banged into a chair… The blades shattered at the tips and the helicopter came to a halt on its side…

So I ordered two sets of blades too. They don’t cost too much, so it’s not that bad. I just hope I didn’t damage any other parts of the helicopter. There’s a reason spare parts are so readily available… People crash them regularly when they’re still learning to fly

I did this and a day later I got a mail. The support guys at Synology think it’s an issue with the SATA cables. This seemed improbable to me as it would mean that I have two broken SATA cables. But after googling the issue I must say Synology could be right.

Lets hope the replacement cables come soon. Then we can see if they fix the problems.

First tests confirm that the issue has been resolved. After installing the patch the temperarture of the processor didn’t rise when I started playing music in iTunes. The processor also uses just 5 watss after starting to play music, instead of the 100+ watts before the patch.

I think we can thank the people who made a lot of noise on forums and the tech sites who wrote about this issue for bringing the urgent need for a fix to Apple’s attention.

Personally I’m hoping for an upgrade for the MacBook Air. I don’t need it to have more processing power, but it could do with a little more memory. These days 2 Gigabytes isn’t that much when you consider part of that memory is used as memory for the graphics card.

I have a late 2009 Mac Pro and I have tried to reproduce the issue. All I had to do to succeed in this was play a song in iTunes and within half a minute the temperature of the processor of my Mac Pro (a 2.66Ghz quad core) had risen by 15 degrees Celcius. That’s 27 degrees Fahrenheit. Rather silly when you think playing audio is a simple task for a fast processor like this Nehalem.

In discussions I’ve read the issue doesn’t exist when running Windows on the Mac Pro. This makes me think it’s a software issue. Well, at least software glitches can be easily fixed. Let’s hope Apple takes this issue seriously. So far they haven’t acknowledged it.

Later I tried to turn it on again, but it didn’t seem to want to boot after pressing the power button. I took the electricity off again and a few minutes later turned it on again. It did boot that time, but drive 2 seemed to be dead. The NAS beeped loudly to show its discomfort. I shut it down again, took drive 2 out and put it back in. Somehow the drive came back to life again and I could rebuild the RAID configuration.

But I was not comfortable with the situation. Why did the drive fail in the first place? Did it fail? Was it a loose connector? Or did the NAS malfunction? Oh well, the feeling of discomfort slowly disappeared with time as the NAS kept performing nicely.

Last week it happened again… Drive 2 failed. I bought a new 2 TB Hitachi DeskStar drive and replaced drive 2. Time will tell what will happen. Will this drive fail too?

So far I have observed it runs a bit hotter than the 1 TB drives in the nas.

I chose a 2TB drive because I am going to replace the other drives with 2 TB drives too.

The hypervisor seems to be free, but the software to manage it is sort of free. I haven’t been able to put in the serial key yet, but I must say the way it runs now is impressive. I’ve got three virtual ubuntu servers running on my old 2.4 GHz core 2 duo with 4GB of ram. It all runs smoothly. I do see some slowdowns, but it’s ok. The graphical client software (Windows only unfortunately) is very elaborate and offers a lot of functionality.

I’m still trying to find out though if I can stick to ESXi once the 60 day trial period runs out or if it just becomes unmanageable. So far I’m not sure. Anybody got any idea what I’ll miss then?

This blog had to go through 6 upgrades. The other blog will have the same amount. My Mac went through three. My Ubuntu laptop is complaining and I haven’t even dared to boot my work laptop. My phone wanted to be upgraded too. Not just it’s OS, but about ten pieces of software on it too.

I’m starting to feel I am serving the machines instead of they me….