The littlest Thumper: OpenSolaris NAS on an MSI Wind PC

Thursday, February 26th, 2009

I recently started to really need more disk around the house. More specifically, reliable disk.
Now that we’re starting to take photos of our son, and to shoot video, and do to all of this at
relatively high resolution (I love our 30D in RAW, but those files aren’t small) I wanted storage and I wanted it [...]

Getting an OpenSolaris bootable USB drive

Tuesday, February 24th, 2009

This was not a straightforward process.
What I would have loved would be a ‘dd’able image. That way, from a linux server I could (as far as I know) write the image out and be done.
In any case, this was not to be.
First problem, I needed a Solaris system to create the USB image from.
For this [...]

Useful Electronics: Cat Accident Preventer

Monday, February 23rd, 2009

I am the owner of a generally very awesome product — a Litter Robot automated cat litter box.
However, we occasionally have an issue where the box malfunctions in some way. This is either because

The switch which gets tripped when the cats go in stops working, thus never initiating the self-cleaning service. Horrible consequence: the house [...]