"Nothing but the rain"
Here are a couple of photographs taken of the glorious colours in the morning skies above Kent.
I know they are sunrise because both of these photos have the camera facing to the East.
The weather for the last few weeks has not been usual. We are in the middle of October and I’ve only had the heating on for two days and that was me being luxurious.
I went to visit the RAF Museum at Hendon. It’s a lovely place, partly because it costs nothing to go in* but also because it’s full of aircraft.
My main issue with the museum is that the aircraft are parked close together and it’s hard to get decent photographs of them. Also, some of the rooms are pretty dark and getting the white balance correct is a pain. Maybe I need to be a better photographer!
Anyway, here are a selection of shots.
Within this communication I essentially told you that my NAS Drive had died and I was reasonably convinced I had lost my data but had a plan to get it back.
I had originally thought I could plug the hard drives into a Sata socket and the PC would be able to read them. It didn’t. This was because they were in a RAID configuration and also Linux so I would need the iOmega NAS to be able to read them.
The data recovery software did manage to find half a terabyte of data but as I explained this wasn’t formatted well and the file names were missing, because the files were RAIDed. This was my last resort really. I have spent a LOT of time arranging the files into a decent directory structure and using decent naming conventions.
Next plan was to order exactly the same enclosure as the one that died and hope I could put my disks into it and it would read them for me to copy the files over to the new NAS drive. I found one on eBay but lost that auction at the last moment because I was busy at that time and my phone didn’t notify me. I was gutted about this.
So, I ordered the next best thing. A complete iOmega NAS drive the same as the one which died. There were no more enclosures on eBay. This was costly. However, it arrived and was as described.
The tricky bit now was wondering whether it would read my existing disks with the data, try to format them or just die in the process. I decided an order of operations which minimised my chances of data loss.
I was quite distressed at this moment. The new enclosure wasn’t reading the old HDD at all and I didn’t think I would get my data back. Then I had an idea. Maybe, just maybe, the old iOmega enclosure would power up? I was convinced it was the power circuitry on the board that had died. I mean there was smoke last week.
So, I thought. I’d plug the new power cable into the old box with the HDDs just slotted in to see what would happen. The fucking thing only went and started and seemed to run just fine. I have no idea what happened last time. I don’t know what the smoke was. All I had to do now was hope that the old enclosure would survive for long enough for me to get data. In all it took about three hours to transfer everything to a HDD inside the PC. Then I had to transfer everything to the new NAS drive. This was quicker as I think it has a far better read-write rate than the old box.
So, the data was restored and I now had two copies.
I had formatted a plan. The Synology is to be the main NAS and storage centre in the house. I have also installed one of the HDD from the old enclosure into the PC and it will have only NAS drive data on it. I can used an FTP program to sync that once a month or so. This way I have a separate copy of the NAS data in a useable format. The next thing will be to get a large capacity USB memory stick and create a shortcut in in the new NAS so that whenever it is inserted into the USB port the NAS will automatically back itself up.
So, ultimately what happened:
This incident has caused me over a week’s worth of stress and worry.
I hope my new backitup plan will work. I’m working on two degrees of redundancy, I might include a third with cloud storage.
After my return from a trip to the Lake District, to be chronicled here at some point, I powered up the house. There’s quite a bit to do with IoT lights, Google Home, wireless speakers and the NAS Drive.
The NAS drive is where I have stored all my music, movies and photos for just over six years. I’ve replaced the hard disk drives once but never really thought I’d have a problem with it. So, I powered it up and went and did some stuff. When I got back to the black box I noticed there was no power light on. I checked the lead and socket power. It was all on. I pressed buttons but nothing. I then tried taking out the power lead from the box to then plug it back in. This was the second sign of trouble.
The power cable didn’t really want to leave the black box. When, after some good tugging, I got the lead out there followed a small spark, some smoke and general bad things that happen to electrical goods. Bugger.
After a quick check to see that it was definitely dead I panicked about getting the data off the HDDs. So, I ordered a USB Sata connection to join the drive to the PC. This seemed reasonable. When finally connected the PC didn’t want to read the HDD drive the drive was formatted in Linux and also had a RAID configuration. I was now starting to feel sick. The most recent photos are backed up in the cloud. But I have loads which are only on the NAS Drive. I thought I was protected because the HDD were in RAID1 configuration so the data should have been backed up in case of HDD failure.
More importantly I think was that my entire music library, along with the 100s of hours of organising it, was on the NAS. This has been a labour of love and the SONOS system uses the NAS as the music library along with iTunes [which I hate passionately].
The whole point of the RAID configuration was to make sure my data was safe. I hadn’t really considered the black box was going to be my downfall. It has died.
So, I now have some data recovery software and it has found 250GB of data but the file names are gone. I have those files transferred to the PC at the moment but my main hope is that I win a NAS enclosure the same as the one I did have. I will use this to get the data from the HDD assuming I can just plug the drives into the enclosure and it will be happy to let me read the data from them.
Reading online there are people who keep three or four copies of their data. This is something I am going to do in the future. I will have copies in the following locations:
This will take a little organising but seeing as I was only at around half a terabyte on the old NAS I think I’ll be ok for a while. One of the disks I have taken out the old enclosure will be fitted into the PC and be used as the PC backup disk. I will use a USB stick plugged into the NAS to back that up and I will generally transfer stuff to the cloud as often as possible. I am currently a little sad about it all and I’m hoping that in a week’s time I’ll be fixed, up and running and generally a lot more cheery. There will be updates.
There’s a competition where I work involving the still image. I have entered with one of the following photographs. I have been meaning to take a collection of photos of the place for a number of years. There are certain aspects of the buildings that I find curious and interesting. I think they would make good images if taken from the correct angle. Sneaking in to take these photos has been on my “holiday to-do list” for a number of years but I’ve never got around to it.
Anyway. Here are four shots I took this week. No explanation, just interesting images IMHO.
After watching Blade Runner 2049 for the second time it was late at night and I was driving home. There’s a paper mill near me, there were two but one shut down and I suspect it will turn into housing soon. The other seems to be working well and has expanding recently. The original location of these next to a major waterway made sense after the war. This area used to make bricks and cement but is slowly changing to a mostly expensive housing area rather than making stuff.
There is a need for communities to make stuff and to be based near things where tangible things are made. You can’t fill whole swathes of the country with just housing for all the people who work away. I see so much of the land around me going to housing when more is needed for enterprise and making things. Society doesn’t just exist or work because of people living there, you need decent work for locals too [spot the socialist].
Last night when I took these photos it was misty and the light was lovely. Here’s the current paper mill, Smurfit Kappa.
The colours here were just beautiful and the way the steam and water vapour was drifting over the sky made this stand out. The darkness surrounding the plant broken by the light of the manufacturing makes this stand out like Eden in the wilderness.
Once I turned down Bull Lane the view was just as lovely but more monochrome. I stopped my car and turned the lights off. I only had a short while to take some photographs before another car turned on to the road. I probably suddenly appeared when I put my lights back on! This picture makes me think of the Exorcist poster.
I put some pictures on here from Gran Turismo Sport in this communication. However, I had used an iPhone app to get these pictures. I have now messed around with exporting straight to a USB stick from the PS4 and, not surprisingly, I get better resolution and quality pictures. So, here they are:
First, Triumphant:
And then there was more:
I know you aren’t that bothered by these pictures but I do like them and after winning [or losing] some races it’s nice to relax and mess around within the game without having to concentrate so much.
I like the photo feature from Gran Turismo Sport. Here are two more offerings:
I suspect there are going to be quite a few of these communications as we go through time. I have found the photograph mode in Gran Turismo and it is gorgeous. I need more time to get used to the settings and options. Of, course I’ve downloaded the extra Scenes pack from the PlayStation Store.
I need to re-take the above photograph so the cars are the same size. Also, to get all three rear lights on the RHS I had to angle the car a little unnaturally.
St Pancras station is where my usual train to London terminates so I like this view.
I lived for two years, and worked for four, around the corner from here.
Sometimes you work with or know people who don’t use the correct terminology. It can occasionally be a minor irritation but also is a problem because using specific language is important to be able to communicate or understand a particular topic. So, in the past, people I have worked with have used the term “screen saver” when they meant “desktop background”. It’s a minor problem but they are wrong. Screen savers are quite specific and no longer necessary although possibly fun.
Below are the pictures I use as my desktop background at home. All were taken by me and so I own the copyright on them. Yes, I am rather proud of all the pictures. Yes, I like aircraft.
I will probably change these over time, but I do want to see many more flying machines. It’s a fascination and passion. Somewhere in these erstwhile communications there are pictures of my iPhone backgrounds, somewhere. Use the search box.
My phone background is currently an obsession with the M’Era Luna festival in Hildesheim.
Some pictures from the East Kent Coast.
Well, I have X-Plane installed on the home PC and good fun it is too. I’ve downloaded lots of extras including some HD mesh scenery. Here are a collection of screen shots I have taken [for no real reason].
I love my new Nikon camera. It takes great photos, is easy to use, has brilliant settings and feels great in my hands. It’s a great bit of kit.
I like my iPhone camera. It’s small, pretty much always on my person and, surprisingly, takes pretty good low light photos.
The problem is that my iPhone camera is getting on a bit and has flaws in every picture it takes. Normally these can’t be seen because there’s plenty of detail in those areas. However, when there is a steady area the flaws show up a lot. Just see this photo of Whitby and spot the problem areas.
I’m not sure if these can be cleaned away or if they are internal. I also can’t be bothered to find out.
Here’s a few photos taken by son #1 while we were walking around Rochester Airport. I think he has a pretty good “eye” for the shot.
Finally got some prints from my DC trip at Easter. Had my panoramas printed, only the lovely things obviously.
Here’re the X-15 and SR-71 in the dining room:
Here’s the orbiter Discovery next to my Cylon guardian:
And finally the Capitol sitting on the other side of my Cylon:
