January 2014 archive

dis-unity

The “cloud” is achingly trendy at the moment and new companies offering some-bollocks-as-a-service (SBaaS) keep popping up all over the ‘net. Personally I am extremely unlikely to use any of the services I have seen, I just don’t trust that particular business model. I checked out the website for one of these companies today following …

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://baldric.net/2014/01/22/dis-unity-2/

backblaze back seagate

In October last year I noted that the Western Digital “Green” drives in my desktop and a new RAID server build looked to be in imminent danger of early failure. That conclusion was based on a worryingly high load-cycle count which a series of posts around the net all attributed to the aggressive head parking …

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://baldric.net/2014/01/21/backblaze-back-seagate/

thrust update

I have just run a search for further evidence of the possible compromise at thrustvps and found threads on webhostingtalk, vpsboard, freevps.us and habboxforum amongst others. All of those comments are from people (many, like me, ex-customers) who have received emails like the one I referred to below. So, I guess thrust /do/ have a …

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://baldric.net/2014/01/20/thrust-update/

rage against the machine

I know it is futile to rant about banks. I know also that I should not really expect anything other than crap service from an industry that treats its customers as useful idiots. But yesterday I met with such appalling and unforgiveable stupidity and intransigence that I feel the need to rant here. I have …

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://baldric.net/2014/01/19/rage-against-the-machine/

thrustvps compromised?

I have not used thrust since my last contract expired. I left them because of their appalling actions at around this time last year. However, today I received the following email from them: From: Admin To: xxx@yyy Subject: Damn::VPS aka Thrust::VPS Date: Sat, 18 Jan 2014 03:28:06 +0000 This is a notification to let you …

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://baldric.net/2014/01/18/thrustvps-compromised/

strip exif data

I have a large collection of photographs on my computer. And each Christmas the collection grows ever larger. I use digiKam to manage that collection, but as I have mentioned before, storing family photographs as a collection of jpeg files seems counter intuitive to me. Photographs should be on display, or at least stored in …

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://baldric.net/2014/01/11/strip-exif-data/