Archive for the 'hardware' Category

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Track your (Synology) NAS when it’s stolen

Published on April 16, 2011 in hardware and Linux. 1 Comment Tags: , , .

When a friend of mine recently got his MacBook stolen, I quickly verified if I had installed Prey Project on each laptop/desktop PC I have. For those who do not know Prey:

Prey lets you keep track of your phone or laptop at all times, and will help you find it if it ever gets lost or stolen. It’s lightweight, open source software, and free for anyone to use. And it just works.

Yes, I had Prey running on each PC. And then I looked at my Synology NAS (DS410, 4 disks, 8TB raw storage). It could be stolen too. And it’s basically a Linux box. And Prey is available for Linux …

So I figured out how to install Prey on a Synology box:

  1. login via ssh as root
  2. install the ipkg/’Bootstrap’ module on your NAS server – (from forum.synology.com) and this is a list of the right bootstraps for the right Synology model.
  3. install bash shell – “ipkg install bash” (from forum.synology.com)
  4. install textutils – “ipkg install textutils” (from forum.synology.com)
  5. goto /usr/share and download the latest Linux version of Prey (wget http://preyproject.com/releases/...linux.zip ) and unzip it
  6. create an account on Prey and get your API key from your Account profile.
  7. create a new device (e.g. ‘NAS8TB (Syn410)’), indicate OS as Debian (it’s close enough) and get the device key.
  8. edit the /usr/share/prey/config file and fill in the API and device key
    # you can get both of these from Prey's web service
    api_key='yyyyyyyyyy'
    device_key='xxxxxx'
  9. now run the “bash /usr/share/prey/prey.sh” a first time – you should get a “-- Got status code 200! -- Nothing to worry about. :) -- Cleaning up!” response.
  10. now edit /etc/crontab and add a line
    5-55/20 * * * * root /opt/bin/bash /usr/share/prey/prey.sh >  /usr/share/prey/lastrun.log
  11. Now restart crontab in the following (non-standard-Linux) way (from forum.synology.com):
    /usr/syno/etc.defaults/rc.d/S04crond.sh stop
    /usr/syno/etc.defaults/rc.d/S04crond.sh start
  12. And it’s running! When your Synology is stolen, you set its status in your Prey account to ‘Missing’ and you will start getting email reports every 20 minutes. Because it’s a NAS, there is no webcam and no screenshots can be taken, but the external IP address will let you see where the device turns up.
    Remote IP: 78.29.245.xxx
    Private IP: 192.168.0.108
    Gateway IP: 192.168.0.1
    MAC Address: xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx

Would this work on a QNAP server? I’m guessing, yes.

Fax 2.0: because fax won’t die in the internet age

Published on January 2, 2010 in hardware, internet and Web2.0. 3 Comments

In one corner of my apartment: my fixed telephone line. In another my printer/scanner/fax device. Challenge: run a wire from one to the other, every time you rearrange the furniture.

Recently I investigated web fax services like eFax, WebFax, RingCentral but for a low volume user like me they’re too expensive. You pay a lot of money for having a dedicated phone number for you, regardless of the number of faxes you send/receive. But I already have a dedicated telephone number, only it is completely disconnected from my ‘normal’ workflow: email, web, news reader. I would like to receive my faxes in my Gmail, because I never delete mails. With 7GB+ email storage, I don’t need to.

So what I would like to have, and what I don’t think exists yet: a Fax 2.0 device at home, let’s call it the FaxaPorta. It needs power and a phone connection, and … that’s all. So let’s make it look like this (not uninfluenced by the Apple Airport Express):

Faxaporta mockup

Here’s how it works:

  • You plug the Faxaporta in a power outlet and connect to the phone plug.
  • The device has built-in wifi and will connect to the internet in that way.
  • You associate the device with your account on the Faxaporta website.
  • Now you can configure how it is supposed to work:
    • Incoming fax: send it to an email address as a PDF file, print it (you can connect a printer to the USB port)
    • Incoming voice call: take a voice mail and send it to an email address as a MP3 file, forward the call via Skype
    • Outgoing fax: behave like a network printer, or you upload a PDF file to the Faxaporta web site (it is then downloaded by your own Faxaporta device and sent over your own phone line).
  • But because your fax is now part of your web-connected world you can do cool stuff like:
  • When you get a fax/voice call, the Caller ID (phone number of the sender) is being matched with your Google contacts to add name, company and email of the sender.
  • The faxes your receive pass through Faxaportas service and are OCR’ed so that you can copy/paste the text on it (cf. the ScanR service).
  • The voicemails are run through a speech recognition service so that you get a text transcript together with the MP3 file. (Google Voice has this)
  • The whole configuring of the fax/voice service is no longer done on a silly small screen on the fax machine with 15 cryptic buttons, but online, from anywhere you want. New response message? Upload the MP3 file! New front sheet for outgoing faxes? Create it in a WYSIWYG editor!
  • You have an RSS feed for your incoming fax messages, one for your incoming voicemails.
  • You could even make a ‘better’ (more expensive) service for companies:
    • try to route a fax to the right person (depending on who sent it, on names that were OCR’ed in the document)
    • set up a Interactive Voice Response system through the browser (“For Sales, press 1”).
    • create a searchable fax archive
    • How about a fax ‘out-of-office’ service?

    Does the Faxaporta exist already?

    AC adaptors: standardize, please

    Published on April 25, 2009 in hardware. 2 Comments Tags: , .

    I was just cleaning up around my computer and I got annoyed again because of the utter lack of common sense hardware vendors seem to have in their choice of AC adapters (I’m not the only one, Douglas Adams wrote about it before).  I made a list of all the devices in a radius of 3m around me:

    Brand Product Plug Volt Ampere Watt
    Apple Airport Extreme (proprietary) 12 V 1.8 A 22 W
    Apple Mac Mini (proprietary) 18.5 V 4.6 A 85 W
    Apple iPhone charger USB + mini USB 5 V 1.0 A 5.0 W
    Asus EeePC 1000H Coax 12 V 3.0 A 36 W
    Canon Selphy ES1 Photo printer Coax 24 V 2.3 A 55 W
    Dell Latitude laptop (old) (proprietary) 20 V 2.0 A 40 W
    Iomega External USB disk Power DIN 12 V 1.5 A 18 W
    Jabra Bluetooth Jawbone headphones (proprietary) 5 V 550 mA 2.8 W
    Jabra Bluetooth headphones mini USB 5 V 180 mA 0.9 W
    Logitech Bluetooth headphones Coax 6.5 V 250 mA 1.6 W
    Netgear Cable router Coax 15 V 1.2 A 18 W
    Netgear External network disk Coax 12 V 5.0 A 60 W
    Nintendo Gameboy (proprietary) 5.2 V 320 mA 1.7 W
    Nokia GSM Charger N-series Nokia plug small 5 V 890 mA 4.5 W
    Nokia GSM Charger pre-N-series Nokia plug big 3.7 V 355 mA 1.3 W
    QPS Digital photo frame Coax 12 V 3.0 A 36 W
    Trekstor External USB disk Coax 12 V 2.0 A 24 W
    Tulip Laptop Coax 19 V 3.4 A 65 W

    Continue reading ‘AC adaptors: standardize, please’

    Touched by the iPod

    Published on September 26, 2008 in Apple and hardware. 9 Comments Tags: , , , .

    Apple iPod TouchAs most geeks in my circle of friends, I am known to buy hardware slightly more often than the average Joe. I have 3 Wifi routers at home (just gave away my 4th one), I have more than 2TB of hard disk storage, split out over half a dozen of PCs and devices, and I have more USB cables than teeth. But hardware that makes me *really* happy, that is uncommon. Don’t get me started on failing hard disks and non-functioning printers. So let me tell you about this new piece of hardware that I bought: the iPod Touch.

    No iPhone, thanks

    This is not my first iPod, I think I’m at n° 5. And before you start telling me “the iPod Touch is an iPhone, that can’t be used for calling. Why not buy an iPhone?”. Well, I don’t need a new phone yet, I’m probably gonna buy an iPhone in a year or so, when the GSM providers have reasonable data transfer prices, and there’s the price too: the 8GB iPod is slightly over 200 euro. The iPhone is 525 euro.

    Applications

    But this baby is really neat. It does music, sure, and video, like the previous one. But it’s got Wifi, a big, smart touch-screen, games, applications, and … From day one I’m using Google Mail (via IMAP), the Weather application, Google Maps. Then I started looking through the free applications on the App Store. So what am I using now:

    • Games: Dactyl, Cube Runner, BlueSkiesLite, Sudoku, TapTap
    • Stuff: iDoodle2Lite, WhiteNoise, Remote
    • Network: AirSharing, Speedtest, IM+, Palringo
    • Social networking: Facebook, AroundShare, GooSync, ShoZu, reQall
    • Info: BuienRadar

    I’ve just started using reQall, a kind of task list + shopping list, which allows you to add via the iPod/iPhone, via the web and via a IM (Gtalk) account. This looks promising.

    The games are not bad. Dactyl is strangely addictive, the movement sensors work really well with BlueSkiesLite, … I expect to see some killer iPod/iPhone games in the future.

    The only thing I miss now is a good sync with my Google Calendar. iTunes can sync my iPod contacts with Google Mail, but not my calendar. GooSync is supposed to be able to do that, but I can’t get it to work. Of course Apple wants me to use (paid) MobileMe, but I want to see if I can find a free way first.

    In any case, I discover a new use every day. It’s … exciting, actually.

    Continue reading ‘Touched by the iPod’