I finally bought a NAS - The Asustor Lockerstor 4 AS6604T 4-Bay NAS. A brief review and my experiences with it.

A year back, I’d rebuilt my desktop with some components from home and most others bought here. I was pretty happy for the most part - however, there was one aspect that kept annoying and worrying me - the temperatures. I noticed that the temperatures were running hotter than usual. Idle temperatures were more than 80 degrees, and full-load temperatures crossing 90 degrees. To reduce the temperatures, I tried various options including BIOS updates, adding in some new intake fans and changing the fan curves but those did not help.

It’s been more than 7 years since I last built my home desktop. It hadn’t remained static - there had been a steady trickle of updates over the years but the base foundation: the processor motherboard cabinet remained the same. The processor I had i.e., the Core i5 3470) wasn’t exactly top-of-the-line back then, it had still enough horsepower, especially coupled with the GPU (nVidia Geforce 970, replaced later with the Geforce 1080) to crunch anything that I could throw at it, VR included (check my previous post for my impressions of the Oculus Rift).

This is a huge rant I sent to Jo. Some backstory: Few months back Jo bought a Kwikset 910 deadbolt) (more like I asked her to buy - hindsight I should have done more and better research) and I was trying to setup the remote locking feature using Alexa/Google Assistant via SmartThings Hub. Here’s a copy-paste of the entire message. I’ll have a separate post on my home automation setup.

Jo’s been inquiring about a new system since quite some time - her current laptop is in a state of broken mess(half the keys don’t work/battery ded etc) and she’d require me to give up my desktop if she needed to work on something for a bit. She does read quite a bit, but that’s something she’s sorted using the Kindle PaperWhite and her Nexus 5X. Past Friday, she gave me a reminder about having it would be nice and me being a bit free, decided to come up with a new build.

I’ve been tinkering with computers for well over 15 years now - and since 2007 I’ve been using laptops almost exclusively - prime reason being space(or the lack of it) since I moved away from my home, to a new city. Staying in a PG meant there was no space. Since the past year and half I’ve been in Bangalore, staying in a rented house and though wanted to own a desktop, there wasn’t a decent justification to get it, especially since my laptop, HP Envy 14 was coping well.

I’ve been going to Barcamp Bangalore since quite a while now, and it was only at last time’s Barcamp Bangalore that I actually gave a techlash session on Automated backup. This time, I decided to give a general session with focus on how & why people people should improve their passwords & password management skills. Embedded below are my slides. And the very next day after my talk, Evernote gets compromised & has issued a password reset.

It’s been a bad, bad week for couple of my gadgets. First, my 500GB internal laptop drive, which I had swapped out for a Kingston 128GB SSD and converted into an external drive, crashed. It is my fault, tbh – I had disconnected it before sleeping the previous night and next day morning, after waking up, breakfast et al decided to listen to some music & plugged in the drive to the USB port.

Today seemed like just another day. Little did I know, in a span of about 20 minutes, the resulting set of events would be hugely embarrassing for me. I had barely woken up, when my phone started going bonkers with notifications coming from emails, chats & twitter replies. A glance at the notifications indicated that my email account had been compromised and phishing emails had been sent to every one in my contacts list.

Quite some time back Kingston was kind enough to send me their v100 128GB SSD for review. Due to my travel back to India, I had to stall the SSD shipment since I wouldn’t in the US by the time I would have received it. Once back here, I had to further delay since I had planned to take a short week-long vacation to Mangalore. While the SSD was in transit, I started researching on how would I be able to fit the SSD into my laptop, with the SSD as the primary drive and the existing Seagate Momentus 7200rpm hard drive as the secondary drive.