I’ve been using PopTop (a PPTP implementation) for quite some time now, but it appears that the PopTop Sourceforge site recently died and hasn’t come back.  In addition, PopTop hasn’t been updated in nearly five years.  Probably time to move on.

As discussed before, I have a HP Microserver.  Currently it was running my data volume group (vgdata) on a single disk.  Anyway, I finally bit the bullet and bought four 3Tb Western Digital Red drives for it.  Now, I want to re-lay out the four drive slots in my Microserver to be a single RAID-5 array, but I don’t want to have to backup/restore the existing VG anywhere.  So here’s what I did.

Recently, I’ve been worrying about how I have a lot of documentation in my home, and some pieces of it (receipts and other such proof of purchase) would be vital in the event of a disaster such as a house fire, God forbid.  I have a microserver backing up all my electronic documentation, but there’s nothing that’s offsite in case of such a thing.

Haven’t been doing too much on the electronics front lately, hence the lack of posts.  I did go and pick myself up a $12 cable tester and associated punchdown tools (Krone and 110/88).  I discovered that some of the ethernet ports in my house were nonfunctional, so with those tools in hand I was able to fix them all up.  Annoyingly, the wall sockets require a 110 tool, but the main patch panel is Krone.  Most of the failures appear to be related to the conductors being nicked when installed or excessive strain during installation pulling them loose from the punchdown terminal.  Aggravating, but at least the cabling in the wall is fine.

Many games appear to do horrible things with the viewport when you are using a display with a strange aspect ratio - such as a triple head setup.  The aspect ratio of my setup is 48:9, which plays merry hell with viewports in flight sims that are designed to look ‘normal’ with a 16:9 setup.  The usual result is that views are horrendously thin vertically.

I’ve recently been learning to fly in DCS: A-10c Warthog, deciding to stick to just one flight sim until I get good at it.  What I’ve been interested in is whether a head tracking system would be useful, and whether I’d like it.  The TrackIR 5 head tracking system runs about $200, which is a bit costly for an experiment - particularly if I didn’t like it.