The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

Jeroen W. Pluimers on .NET, C#, Delphi, databases, and personal interests

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Archive for August, 2012

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Pricetracker/-watch/-drop alters/-history charts for Newegg.com, Amazon.com, Best Buy, BackCountry.com, Zzounds.com

Posted by jpluimers on 2012/08/06

Cool: sites that allow you to do track prices, get history charts, get alerts for price drops, etc. Got there through SSD prices in steady, substantial decline – The Tech Report.

Your account works at all of our price tracking sites:

And your account will work at any new sites we launch!

The SSD price drop together with the HDD Prices Not Expected to Decline Until 2014 makes me think: if/when I should finally ditch my RAID 5 storage server and build an ZFS server with server hybrid storage (which is totally different from desktop hybrid storage).

Many of the great references at Understanding how to use SSD as Hybrid Storage Pools for ZFS point to the old sun.com site, and suffer from link rot. A few I found back: Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Hardware, Internet, LifeHacker, Power User, SSD | Leave a Comment »

When your WiFi fails, use Device Manager to disable/enable the Wireless LAN device

Posted by jpluimers on 2012/08/06

I’ve seen this happen on various brands of hardware, and various flavours of operating systems:

over time (usually a few days or even weeks of use) suddenly your WiFi connection doesn’t want to connect to some or any of your wireless networks. Most often this happens when you wake up your machine from sleep.

What doesn’t work is flipping the Wireless LAN device off and on using a physical switch.

What usually works for Mac, Windows and even Android is either of these (from least intrusive to most intrusive): Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Power User, Windows, Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP | Leave a Comment »

OpenVPN connect to the same LAN (bridged mode) (via: The VPN Menu — Endian UTM Appliance v2.4 documentation)

Posted by jpluimers on 2012/08/03

Another research item:

Need to provide access through OpenVPN to the same LAN as where the OpenVPN server runs on.

This is unusual, and requires a bridged OpenVPN solution.

Jürgen Schmidt wrote a nice article on this in 2008.

Endian community edition seems to support this out of the box:

Server configuration

In this panel you can enable the OpenVPN server and define in which zone it should run.

OpenVPN server enabled

Click this to make sure the OpenVPN server is started.

Bridged

If you want to run the OpenVPN server in one of the existing zones check this box. ..

note:

If the OpenVPN server is not bridged you must set the
firewall rules in the VPN firewall to make sure clients
can access any zone - unless you do not want them to.

VPN subnet

This option is only available if you disable bridged mode, which allows you to run the OpenVPN server in its own subnet that can be specified here.

Bridge to

If bridged mode has been selected here you can choose to which zone the OpenVPN server should be bridged.

Dynamic IP pool start address

The first possible IP address in the network of the selected zone that should be used for the OpenVPN clients.

Dynamic IP pool end address

The last possible IP address in the network of the selected zone that should be used for the OpenVPN clients.

–jeroen

via: The VPN Menu — Endian UTM Appliance v2.4 documentation.

Posted in *nix, Endian, Linux, OpenVPN, Power User | Leave a Comment »

Clearing the CodeRush SolutionCache directory from your roaming profile @CodeRush (via: The Curly Brace: How to Clear DevExpress CodeRush Assembly and Solution Cache)

Posted by jpluimers on 2012/08/02

Your CodeRush SolutionCache folder (which is in your roaming profile, how bad!) can grow to multi-gigabyte proportions as it is not auto-cleaned.

This can lead to very long times for doing logon/logoff in a corporate network.

Mike Christian describes how to clean it.

Note that as of a few versions ago, the AssemblyCache is now a subfolder inside the SolutionCache folder.

Another reason to clean it is when CodeRush starts acting weird.

–jeroen

via: The Curly Brace: How to Clear DevExpress CodeRush Assembly and Solution Cache.

Posted in .NET, C#, Development, Software Development, VB.NET, Visual Studio 11, Visual Studio 2005, Visual Studio 2008, Visual Studio 2010, Visual Studio and tools | Leave a Comment »

Dear fellow social media users, please post screen shots as PNG, not as JPEG image files

Posted by jpluimers on 2012/08/01

I still see many people post screen shots as JPEG images.

JPEG images introduce distortion, and usually are bigger than PNG images.

The PNG images are more crisp, and have more vibrant colors.

So dear fellow social media users: please post screen shots as PNG images.

Comparison: the JPEG on the left is 120 kilobyte, the PNG on the right only 60 kilobyte and looks much better.

JPEG PNG 

Posted in G+: GooglePlus, LinkedIn, Power User, SocialMedia, Twitter, WordPress | 4 Comments »

on my .NET research list: Mini (Raspberry Pi) and Micro (Arduino)

Posted by jpluimers on 2012/08/01

Computing on not so common platforms it so much fun, especially when you can use familiar tools for it.

A couple of years ago, I did a fun project with an USB WebCam, a Pololu USB servo controller, two servo motors, a servo relay and a laser pointer. The device would point the laser pointer at the biggest moving object in the WebCam view, and flash the laser pointer at it.

All code was C# running on Windows.

Basically there are two classes on “small” devices that run .NET code (apart from smartphones and tablets):

  • Raspberry Pi:
    Mini devices with more than a couple of megabytes memory running a kind of regular .NET Framework.
  • Arduino:
    Micro devices with maximum of a couple of dozen kilobytes memory (a megabyte if you are really lucky) running the .NET Micro Framework

This might be a chance to lift it to a new level and embed everything in one device (:

The cool thing about the .NET Micro Framework is that you can do real time stuff.

–jeroen

via:

Posted in .NET, Arduino, Development, Hardware Development, Raspberry Pi, Software Development | 2 Comments »

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