Gavin Campbell Online

Been using Storage Spaces on my home server for a few months now and other than the speed of my parity pool being slow I have had no issues.  It is a new technology and very advisable that you still have another backup of your data in case of issues but I’m still happy with using it for my home server needs.

The below article is an in depth look at storage spaces with instructions on how to set it up.  If your interested in storage spaces its worth a read.

Windows 8 Storage Spaces: a how-to guide | Features | PC Pro.

If you have a laptop with a Synaptics TouchPad then you may be in luck.  You can improve your Synaptics TouchPad experience in Windows 7 and 8 by installing the driver directly from Synaptics.

First of all you should know that you are doing this at your own risk.  There may be some features in the OEM drivers that may no longer work but on my  Lenovo T400 this added extra features.  However with that being said, you should be able to easily roll back the driver if you are not happy.  If you don’t have a Synaptics TouchPad I recommend you check your own vendor’s site for updated drivers as well.

One of my favorite features that was enabled on my Windows 7 machine was the ability to do two finger scrolling.  I was always jealous of my Mac friends that had this feature and am now happy I have it.  I must admit though that the Mac’s still feel so much more responsive.

On Windows 8 I noticed things like swiping in from the left or right side, as well as the top and bottom, gave you the same features as swiping from those same sides on a touch screen.

You can access the drivers from the Synaptics site directly and try it out for yourself.

I love this commercial. I actually laughed at the end. Reminds me of the old Jordan vs Bird commercials from back in the day. I hope they do a few more.

We have all heard the stories of crashed hard drives and lost data. Some of which is critical. We never think it will happen to us but I assure you, it will happen at least once in your  life and it will not be a good day when you lose your important data.

I always encourage my friends to backup their data. And I also stress to them that that doesn’t mean to move your data to an external drive and work from that.

Backing up data requires having more than one copy of it on different physical media at minimum.  You can get then make it more complicated to help prevent data loss in other scenario.

My home backup solution is more complicated than most would probably require but I have had a few hard drives die over the years and want to ensure that I don’t lose any critical data when it happens again.

When first designing it I put together the following list of requirements.

1. The solution must be automated as much as possible.  The less manual work I have to do the more it will actually get done.
2. The solution must have reporting.  I prefer to get status reports via email so I will know when something is working or not working.  I like to have both success and failure backup reports in my email.
3. The solution must backup everything and allow me to do a fully system restore.  This is more of a requirement on my primary systems.

For my backup solution I settled on Microsoft Windows Server 2012 Essentials for a number of reasons that I will not cover in this post. But it was able to meet all of my requirements for my workstations, virtual machines as well as the server itself.

All of the live server data is stored on a storage spaces drive set up in a parity configuration.  If one of these drives were to fail I could replace and rebuild it.

The server itself is backed up to a separate drive that is connected as well.  This backup includes the servers primary drive as well as some other critical data sitting on the storage space drive.  The drive is always connected as this is a nightly backup.  If the server drive were to die I could easily restore it.

All of my workstations and virtual machines are backed up to the server automatically in the background twice a day via the Server 2012 Essentials connector.  The backups themselves are stored in the storage space and I am notified every morning via email on the status of my computers and their backups.

As an extra precaution my most critical data I also have backed up automatically to the cloud using Crashplan.  I had received a free 1 year subscription to Crashplan on black Friday and didn’t think twice about jumping on it.  The service runs on the server and backs up the data in folders I have selected every evening.  This data does not change often so usually it doesn’t have much to do.  But it is great knowing that if anything happened at home this stuff is safe in the cloud.

The one manual step I do is a monthly task.  I backup my most critical data and some not critical on a monthly basis to an external drive that I keep offline and disconnected.  My main reason for doing this is in case of a situation where my data is lost via a virus or an accidental deletion.  All of the automated processes would apply this loss to the backups as well which would make the backups useless.  In case of this happening my offline drive will be at most 1 month out of date.  Which shouldn’t be too much to lose.  It is just one extra line of defense to safe guard my data.  I plan on upgrading the size of this drive and backing up more offline in the near future.  I have a few extra drives to spare for this.

Below is a diagram of my backup solution.  I’m sure it will change slightly in the future but for now I feel safe with this solution.  If in a worst case scenario my house is totally destroyed.  My most critical data is backed up in the cloud.

With all the excitement this year in the NBA I jumped in early in the season and signed up for NBA League Pass online streaming.

If you are not familiar with this, the NBA League Pass gives you access to live video of all the games including live stats and scores and archived video.

Or so I thought.

Being in Canada I guess one of their requirements is that they have to black out all of the games that air on the local networks, which I don’t mind, but at least black out the games the channels that I get with the standard packages and not the addon packages. I found myself unable to get a number of the big games on cable or online. So I was still left in the dark.

The beauty of the service is that on a PC, you can watch 4 games at a time. And if you have a PC or HTPC hooked up to the TV you can see it on the big screen. The quality is pretty good too.

If you use an iPad or iPhone, you can download their app and watch the live streams in excellent quality on the devices. The bonus is that you can even see the scores of other games and quickly switch between them.

On your Xbox there is also an app. But to use it requires an Xbox live membership (which I can’t justify paying extra money for) and it allows you to watch two games at once on your tv in excellent quality.

I don’t think it’s offered on my Apple TV in Canada but I believe in other countries they get the app. I’m sure it’s good quality too.

The one really big thing I hate is when one or more of the games are blacked out and now you can’t fully utilize the service to watch the games. I have to use multiple devices to switch between the various games. To me this defeats the purpose of the whole thing.

Now this is not the end of the world. You can easily find ways around this and be able to use the apps to watch all games.

This is how I utilize it at home.

Luckily I have a jailbroken iPad 2 and to get around the blackouts I use a tweak called location spoofer that is available in the cydia store. I change my app location to somewhere like Spain and voila. I now have access to all games.

I use XBMC throughout my house and XBMC has air video built in. So now I basically just airplay the games to whatever TV I am sitting in front of and I can easily switch between the games as well as the TVs I want to view it on all through my iPad.

The quality is equivalent to watching the games on SD cable and I’m air playing them to screens larger than 50″. I wish it was better but I’m also ok with it.

One thing you need to take into consideration when doing live streaming is your monthly data allowance. It doesn’t eat much data in a month but if you have a small package it can be a significant amount.

Really and truly I can only recommend this if you can get around the blackouts. You may not have an iPad like I do but on a PC is very easy to do with some googling. Having access to all the games makes it worth while to us NBA lovers.

The entire season costs just over $100 CDN and you get a discount if you order before the season starts. You can also get 50% off deals half way through the season.

Recently had a situation where the command line uninstall (ccmsetup /uninstall) was not working so I had to manually uninstall the client. I don’t like doing things this way but sometimes you have no choice. After I found the instructions online I was back in business.

1. Stop SMS Agent Host Service
2. Stop CCMSetup service (if present)
3. Delete \windows\ccm directory
4. Delete \windows\ccmsetup directory
5. Delete \windows\ccmcache directory
6. Delete \windows\smscfg.ini
7. Delete \windows\sms*.mif (if present)
8. Delete HKLM\software\Microsoft\ccm registry keys
9. Delete HKLM\software\Microsoft\CCMSETUP registry keys
10. Delete HKLM\software\Microsoft\SMS registry keys

Last Sunday I made a guest appearance on BYOB to discuss virtualization in the home environment and also my current setup at home.

It was a great conversation and very informative. I was happy to finally get to join in on the conversations that I usually am a listener of and will hopefully be back in the future.

Here is a link to the episode: BYOB Episode 107

It also includes an outline of my setup. I plan to post a more detailed outline later on.

If your looking at setting up your own virtual server take a look at the articles over at . I referred to this post a lot when I was planning things out.

The 2012-2013 NBA basketball season has been great so far. And I love seeing these kind of videos.

I recently jumped on the Air Jordon shoe bandwagon and have started off my collection with two of the hottest shoes this season.

Started off on the 21st with the Air Jordan 11 Bred’s as seen in the photo with the Big Bang theory crew.

It was an exciting morning to get my hands on these which involved standing in 3.5 hours of lines. But well worth it.

The next day grabbed the Air Jordan 4 Thunders below. Really lucked out as I got the last pair in the store. And they happened to be my size.

Next up are the V’s coming in January and the XIII’s which I am really looking forward too.

In preparation for the new year I am doing some site updates. I updated the WordPress backend to prepare. I still have a few things here and there to touch up and will hopefully get back up to speed in the new year with some new updates on some tech I’ve been playing with.

For now I hope everyone has a good time at their various NYE events going on tonight and STAY SAFE. We’ll see you in 2013!