Resurrecting those old 5.25" floppies

Those of you who are regular followers of this blog will know that I have a fondness for vintage storage mediums. In my last PC I had a 5.25” floppy as well as a zip drive all running on a core i7 motherboard under Windows 7. After the Intel Ivy Bridge processors were released I decided it was time for a motherboard and CPU upgrade, the only catch was that I still wanted to keep my legacy hardware which meant the search for a modern motherboard with onboard floppy and IDE began. Eventually I came across the Asrock Fatal1ty Z77 Ivy Bridge motherboard. Along with 10 SATA connectors, dual gigabit LAN and 6 USB 3.0 ports the motherboard sported both floppy and IDE controllers, something that is becoming increasingly rare in modern PCs. About a week after placing my order I received my new motherboard in the mail and began to assemble my PC.

2 hours and several 4 letter words later I came to the devastating realization that the motherboard’s on board floppy controller offered no configuration options, meaning it was hard-set for a 3.5” drive and wouldn’t support my 5.25” drive natively.

Enter the Kyroflux

Because I can be a little obsessive and never take no for an answer I began my search for either a PCI/PCI express floppy controller or a USB-floppy adaptor, and, after many hours of searching I came across the latter. The Kyroflux is a USB floppy controller built from an arm development board. Kyroflux is unique in that it reads floppies at an extremely low level meaning that the discs can no longer be accessed through Windows Explorer, but instead through the bundled Kyroflux software. Fortunately, using the Kyroflux software is fairly simple, although it is mainly command-line based. To read floppies one has to make an image of the inserted floppy and then use a third-party application to read it. After reading the instruction manual it wasn’t long before I was making .img files from my stacks of DOS-formatted 5.25” floppies.

Writing floppies is limited to only two image types at the moment although more image types will apparently be supported in future software releases. After building an Amiga disk file (*.adf) I was able to write the image to a spare 5.25” floppy disk. Days later I was able to create an image of the floppy and open it in Opus ADF to recover the files I originally wrote to it.

While the Kyroflux isn’t a perfect alternative to a 5.25” floppy drive running natively under Windows Explorer, it still allows data to be recovered from old floppies that you may have lying around. As more computer motherboards are being manufactured without any form of floppy support the Kyroflux is certainly a great way to add legacy support to a modern PC.

140+ Days of Uptime: A shout out to Linode!

The image really says it all; 141 days of uptime and counting. For myself, an amateur system administrator and website administrator, the VPS company Linode has been a fantastic fit. I first signed up for Linode’s Linode512 package in January of 2012. The package provides me with 512MB of RAM, 20GB of disk space, and my choice of Linux distribution. Linode also allows the use of a custom Linux Kernel but I haven’t yet tried my luck with one. Linode’s packages aren’t the cheapest in the world, the basic one (Linode512) starts at $20 per month and that goes up depending on how much disk space and RAM you need, but the reliability is worth the price. I installed Ubuntu Server edition (my favorite Linux Server operating system) in February of 2012 and haven’t needed to reboot it since, even after a full system upgrade. The server itself is responsible for hosting five websites, a web proxy server, a VPN server, a DNS server, and a file server and not once have I noticed it skip a beat. While my mere 141 days of uptime may not be hugely impressive how does 272 days sound or 365? I have friends with over a year of consecutive uptime on a Linode server. Linode also has an extremely simple user interface. Using their free Linode manager users can easily deploy different Linux Distributions, repartition their virtual hard disk, or reformat a misbehaving server. While reformatting is a drastic step, the fact that it can be done with the click of a button should set most folks minds at ease. For anyone looking for a user-friendly and reliable VPS Linode should be first on the shortlist.

A Start Menu Replacement in Windows 8

Microsoft recently launched the public beta of Windows 8 - their next operating system release. Windows 8 has been completely redesigned, the OS is optimized for tablets rather then mice and keyboards. I have been running the Windows 8 beta as my main system for about a week now and have encountered more then a few interesting changes.

One of the radical changes that Microsoft made was the complete removal of the Start Menu. The removal of this Windows icon initially left me scrambling to find new ways of performing basic tasks like shutting down the computer. Fortunately, a replacement for the start menu exists.... sort of.

Enter the "links" toolbar

The "links" toolbar is a toolbar that appears on your taskbar next to the notification area. You can enable the links toolbar by right-clicking on any empty space in the taskbar and selecting "links" under "toolbars". You can add shortcuts to your links toolbar by right-clicking on the word "Links" and selecting "open folder." Now you can add your own shortcuts here and they will appear in a drop-down menu when you click on the arrows in the taskbar.

Shutting Down and Rebooting

You can quickly reboot or shutdown your computer by placing a batch file in your "links" folder that runs the shutdown command. Place the following code into notepad and save it as shutdown.bat:

shutdown.exe -s -t 0

Now move "shutdown.bat" into your "links" folder and you can run the batch file from your taskbar. To create a reboot command replace "-s" with "-r" in the above line of code

While the links toolbar isn't a perfect start menu replacement it certainly goes a long way to reducing the shock in the conversion to Windows 8

A better Guide to Hamachi on the Pogo Plug

A few weeks ago I blogged about how to setup the PoGo Plug as an embedded Linux server, in my previous guide I hacked together an old version of LogMeIn Hamachi to get the server accessible through a VPN. The hacked together version of Hamachi was unstable to say the least and I have been searching for a better installation method ever since. Recently, I have managed to install the latest version of Hamachi, which is much more stable than the version I was using previously. In this guide I will explain how to install Hamachi version 2.1.0.18, the latest version to date.

Use a PKGBUILD

The easiest way to install software packages in Arch Linux is to use a PKGBUILD. A PKGBUILD is a series of instructions which automatically downloads a package, extracts it, and executes the installation. Some serious Internet searching revealed the the following package, which was designed to install Hamachi 2.1.0.17. Unfortunately this package was not written to be compatible with Arm systems so I had to make some modifications. You can download my modified PKGBUILD here link.

After you have downloaded my PKGBUILD you must move it to your root directory (/) and you must then cd to that directory. Run the PKGBUILD with the following command

makepkg –skipinteg

You also have to run the installer without integrity checks, just add the skipinteg argument as I have shown above.

Next, you will need to run the install.sh script located in the src directory.

cd /src/logmein-hamachi-2.1.0.18-armel
./install.sh

If it throws some errors don't worrry, I ignored them and mine is still running fine.

After the script finishes, you must initialize Hamachi by browsing to the logmein directory created during the installation and running the daemon:

cd /src/logmein-hamachi-2.1.0.18-armel
./hamachid

Now you can login to the Hamachi servers by typing "hamachi login" and join a network by typing "hamachi join (network name)"

It is important to note that when you reboot your arch system you must start Hamachi using the same "hamachid" script that you just ran. You may want to create a start-up script that automatically calls "hamachid" at boot so you don't have to worry about manually starting the program. You can add Hamachi to your start-up programs by adding the full path to the "hamachid" script in your /etc/rc.local file

It works!

I have been using this installation of Hamachi on my PoGo Plug for about a month now with no problems. I have rebooted my PoGo Plug numerous times and each time Hamachi has initialized without fail. Using the instructions I have outlined in this blog post you should have a stable, production-ready, version of Hamachi on your PoGo Plug.

The Pogo Plug - A Great Embedded Linux Server

I recently found the Pogo Plug on sale at my local computer store. After doing a little bit of research I discovered that this little NAS device can make a great, low power embedded Linux Server. In this tutorial I will explain how to get Arch Linux up and running on the pogo plug, how to install Apache, PHP, and Samba, as well as how to hack together Hamachi so that you can have a secure tunnel to your pogo plug from anywhere in the world.

First of all you need to understand that there are several different models of Pogo Plug and this guide is ONLY for the E-02 Model. you can check the model number of your pogo plug by looking at the sticker on the bottom.
If you have a different model, don't despair, just head on over to archlinuxarm.org to get a guide for your device.

Installing:

The first thing you need to do is enable SSH on your PogoPlug. Plug your device into the wall and into you router and head on over to pogoplug.com/activate. After you have set up an account, you need to go to the security tab for your PogoPlug and select the SSH access option. You will be prompted to enter a password. Once you have enabled SSH you can close the pogo plug webpage and look up the internal IP address of your pogo plug (you will likely need to look at the DHCP list on your router's config page). Once you have determined your pogo plug's IP address, you can connect to it using putty or your favorite ssh client. Note that your username will be root and the password will be the one you setup on the pogo plug webpage.

Now that you have connected to your PogoPlug, you will first need to disable the pogo software.

Command

killall hbwd

Next, make sure you disconnect ALL hard drives and USB flash drives except for the one you want to install linux to. All data on any connected drives could be destroyed, so it's best to remove everything. All the data on your target drive will also be destroyed so backup any data you may have on your target drive.

Now, you will need to download the bootloader which will be used to start Linux:

Commands

cd /tmp
wget http://jeff.doozan.com/debian/uboot/install_uboot_mtd0.sh
chmod +x install_uboot_mtd0.sh
./install_uboot_mtd0.sh

now that the bootloader is installed we will format the flash drive:

Commands

/sbin/fdisk /dev/sda

**this is assuming that you only have the one flash drive inserted. if you insist of leaving multiple drives attached, make sure you are using the correct drive path

now that fdisk has been launched:

• type o to clear all partitions
• type n to create a new partition
• type p to create a primary partition
• type 1 to make it the first partition
• hit enter to accept all the default options
• exit by typing w

now we will make an ext2 filesystem in the new partition

Commands

wget http://archlinuxarm.org/os/pogoplug/mke2fs
chmod 755 mke2fs
./mke2fs /dev/sda1
mkdir usb
mount /dev/sda1 usb

Now that we have created a compatible partiton, we will need to download and install the ArchLinux distribution we will be installing.

Commands

cd usb
wget http://archlinuxarm.org/os/ArchLinuxARM-armv5te-latest.tar.gz
tar -xzvf ArchLinuxARM-armv5te-*.tar.gz # This will take a long time
rm ArchLinuxARM-armv5te-*.tar.gz
sync # Takes a while when using a flash drive

at this point everything should be installed... unmount your flash drive and reboot

Commands

cd ..
umount usb
/sbin/reboot

After about a min or two your device should be ready to use. You can now ssh into it (the IP may have changed) using the username root and password root

At this point you should change your password:

Commands

passwd
enter new password

At this point linux has been installed and you can go ahead and use it as you see fit, or continue following this guide to install PHP, Apache, Samba, and Hamachi

Installing PHP and Apache

Install Apache using the following command:

Commands

pacman -S apache php php-apache

pacman -Sy lynx

By default a user called 'http' may not have been created so use the following command to create one:

Commands

useradd -d /srv/http -r -s /bin/false -U http

If it says the user already exists, then you're good to go and needn't worry

now test apache and make sure it starts:

Commands

/etc/rc.d/httpd start

browse to the IP address of your pogo in a web browser and you should see the default webpage.

Now it's time to get php working.
Edit the http.conf file:

Commands

nano /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf

Add the following line of code at the END of the "Load Modules" section

LoadModule php5_module modules/libphp5.so

Add the next line of code at the END of the "include" section

Include conf/extra/php5_module.conf

Uncomment the following lines:

TypesConfig conf/mime.types

MIMEMagicFile conf/magic

(it should be found after IfModule mime_module)

Now edit /etc/httpd/conf/mime.types:

Commands

nano /etc/httpd/conf/mime.types

and add this line:

application/x-httpd-php php

now restart apache to make sure it starts:

Commands

rc.d restart httpd

Now make a sample php file with some script it it and place it in "/srv/httpd" and then access it through your web browser

Installing Samba

Samba will allow you to share folders and files over your local network so that Linux, Windows and OSX computers can access them

Commands

pacman -S samba

cp /etc/samba/smb.conf.default /etc/samba/smb.conf

At this point Samba can be started with the command

Commands

rc.d start samba

In order to make changes to shared folders you will need to make changes to your configuration file found at "/etc/samba/smb.conf". There is plenty of information online about configuring Samba, so I won't cover it in this post

Installing Hamachi

Hamachi is a zero-configuration VPN client. It allows computers connected to physically different LAN's across the Internet appear to each other as though they were on the same LAN.

Unfortunately Hamachi is far from stable on the PogoPlug, I have managed to hack it together, but please note that the method I am about to describe is far from perfect. If you have a better method of installing andf using Hamachi on this unique platform please Contact Me

OK, with the discalmer behind us let's get started. Download the older version of hammachi for arm devices and install it:

Commands

wget http://files.hamachi.cc/linux/nokia-770/hamachi-0.9.9.9-20-lnx-n770.tar.gz

tar -xzvf hamachi-0.9.9.9-20-lnx-n770.tar.gz

cd hamachi-n770-0.9.9.9-20

./install

Now that Hamachi is installed we need to start it:

Commands

tuncfg

hamachi-init

hamachi start

hamachi login

hamachi join ''

hamachi go-online ''

At this point you should be able to access your PogoPlug through the Hamachi network, however if you have the same problem as me, then the connection becomes stale after a few min of inactivity. The solution I have come up with is to continuously ping each client in your Hamachi network using a shell script that runs at start-up. If you don't notice your Hamachi connection becoming stale, then you don't need to make this script.

the following shell script will automatically configure your VPN tunnel, launch Hamachi, and continuously ping each client in the network. You will need to edit it according the the IP addresses in your network:

Shell Script

#!/bin/bash

tuncfg

hamachi start

while [ 1 ]
do

ping - c 2

ping -c 2

....etc....

sleep 15

done

you will need to add this script to your start-up by editing rc.conf:

Command

nano /etc/rc.local

and add the path to your script

If you have followed this guide, then you should have a PogoPlug that is running Arch Linux with Apache, PHP, Samba, and Hamachi. There is a wealth of information online regarding Arch Linux, just head on over to the arch wiki for more information.

Usage Based Billing is Dead in Canada

It was in January of 2011 that I first ranted on this blog about Usage-Based-Billing or UBB. In the months since the CRTC approved UBB there has been a public outcry against the practice. The following report from Global News sums up the situation:

Living in Victoria on the WestCoast, I have been very fortunate not to have to contend with some of the unreasonable data transfer caps that folks east of Alberta had to deal with, however, as a moderately heavy Internet user myself I can really appreciate the pain that my fellow Canadians suffered through.

So the saga continues into February of 2012 when Canadian Internet users can hopefully put all of this behind them.

Free TV is NOT Dead in Canada

Over the Air Television after the Digital Switch

There has been a fantastic amount of misinformation about Canada's digital transition spreading around the Internet and the media. I will try one more time to set the record straight about DTV in Canada.

an HDTV channel received FOR FREE with my antenna

It is important to realize that the switch to digital does NOT mean you need to subscribe to cable or satellite to continue to receive TV. You can continue to receive programming over-the-air with THE SAME antenna you used before the transition. Broadcasters are simply transmitting a digital signal rather then an analog one, and you simply need to purchase a relatively inexpensive converter box to receive these digital signals on your analog TV set. Have a look at my DTV page for a list of links and videos that explain the truth about DTV in Canada.

The transition on BC's South Coast

Between the evening of August 30, 2011 and September 1, 2011 a lot of changes happened in the broadcast TV market on BC's south coast. Here is a quick summary:

• August 30, CHNU-TV-1 (analog repeater of CHNU TV in Victoria) flash cuts to digital, the broadcast was a test pattern until the next day
• August 31, 12:02AM CIVT Vancouver shuts down their analog transmitter on 32 and their temp. digital transmitter on 33 and turns on their full-power digital signal on ch 32
• August 31, 12:30AM CIVI Victoria flash cuts their Vancouver transmitter on ch 17 to digital, they also shut down their Victoria analog transmitter and moved the digital signal to ch 23
• August 31, 10:00AM (approx.) CKVU TV Vancouver moves their digital signal from ch 47 to ch 33, the analog signal is terminated later
• August 31, 11:15AM (approx.) CHEK-TV turns on their digital transmitter on channel 49, the analog broadcast shuts down later
• August 31, 11:30AM - 11:40AM CHNU-TV shuts down their digital signal on ch 66 and turns on their full-power digital signal on ch 47
• August 31, 12:30 (approx.) CKVU and CHNM turn on their digital repeaters in Victoria
• August 31, 3pm(approx.) CHAN turns off their signal on analog channel 8, digital transmission was already active on 22 for months.
• September 1, 12:00AM CBUT (CBC) shuts down their analog signal on ch 2 and their temp. digital signal on ch 58, final digital signal on ch 43 is on-air by 1AM
• September 1, 12:00AM CBUFT shuts down their analog signal on ch 26 and turns on their digital signal on ch 26

With the transitioning of CBC and CBC French the digital transition on BC's south coast was complete

The repeater for CHNU in Victoria went live on Aug. 30

Reception in Victoria post-transition

Post-transition in the city of Victoria BC there are quite a few digital television channels that can be received over-the-air. The four channels that come from a tower located in Rockland can be received with an indoor antenna across most of the city. Of these channels two broadcast in full 1080i high definition. The channels are: CityTV (HD), CTV2 (HD), Omni TV, and JoyTV. With a larger antenna mounted on a rooftop stations like KVOS (Bellingham), CBC HD (Vancouver), CTV HD (Vancouver), Global HD (Vancouver), KBTC (PBS Bellingham), CHEK TV (Victoria), and CBC French can be received. In some parts of Victoria it is even possible to receive American broadcasters from Seattle such as ABC, NBC, CBS, and FOX.




All the stations that broadcast from Victoria, Vancouver, and Bellingham are on the UHF television band. These sets of frequencies are higher in the radio spectrum than the original television channels 2 through 13. Because UHF broadcasts are higher in frequency they require a smaller antenna then older VHF transmissions. A good antenna chart (built buy the great guys at the DHC Forum can be found here.
a UHF antenna suitable for recption from Vancouver, Bellingham, and Victoria.




There are a lot of resources available on the Internet, for a list of links and videos have a look at my DTV page.