The monthly board meeting of SPI will take place on irc.oftc.net #spi tonight (Wed 11 Feb) at 20:00 UTC. Members may have seen that the meeting announcement came out on time - hooray! It looks like minutes may also catch up to last meeting, too. There are two new associated project currently under discussion: the Helios Initiative and OpenWRT. I think both of them had been waiting for a legal opinion. I may still be travelling and without a stable network connection during the meeting, or I might have made it home by then. Either way, watch the comments below this article for a link to the summary when posted.

After a few hiccoughs, I m trying to gather live coverage of Voice09 in Birmingham today and tomorrow over on the software.coop site. I have access to the wifi, but picture uploads will mostly have to wait until I can bugfix some stuff this evening.

Another Monday, start of the working week and I m thinking about business again. Ian Lynch of The Learning Machine is a smart cookie who I ve collaborated with before. He leads a free-software-based business which is very different from TTLLP s cooperative model and he gave a talk about it to Manchester Free Software. Here are the headlines:-

Building a FOSS Business

• No fees from licenses
• Services allied to FOSS
• Something everyone needs
• Low cost to produce
• Low cost to distribute
• Encourage FOSS take up
• Increase the number of FOSS contributors
• Make money to support FOSS development

Background theory and research

• Clay Christensen and the theory of disruptive innovation
• The innovators dilemma
• Seeing What is Next

Business Growth

• 3 horizons of business growth
• Horizon 1 current profitable business
• Horizon 2 business with clear potential
• Horizon 3 possibilities currently being explored
• Pipeline for growth

Tipping points

• Critical mass
• Viral effects

The ideal product

• Something everyone needs
• Something that costs nothing to make
• Something that costs nothing to distribute
• Something that has increasing value the more that is bought.

The INGOTs

• International Grades Open Technologies
• Market disruption
• Lower barriers to entry
• Target those currently not in the market
• Provide products that are good enough
• Improve and add features over time

Primary Schools - KS3

• No-one targets primary schools
• Very little certification in KS3
• Use specialist schools community plans
• Upsell from primary to secondary
• KS3 add value at with less work for teachers

Developing world

• Enable developing countries into the qualifications market
• Target those making the transition to FOSS
• Ally to netbook/smartphone internet access to lower costs
• Use UK Awarding Body status for credibility.

The above points are under a Creative Commons cc-by-sa license and the original report was at Manchester Free Software. Sometimes FSUK-Manchester produce videos of talks, but I ve not seen this one yet. Watch their page for details. What can Ian s business analysis teach us about free software businesses? What interesting questions does it leave open? Have you had anything to do with the INGOTs? I ve not worked in education for a while, so I d love to hear tales from the chalkface about them.

Yesterday I phoned into The Phone Co-op AGM 2009 and heard the reports, most of which you can read in the PDF annual report from the AGM website. There were also various questions from members, which I scribbled down as follows:-

What does ADSL mean?

Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line. Essentially, what we sell as broadband.

How many day-equivalents of training did part-time employees get on average? (I think this was the question, but I got a bit lost.)

Information not immediately available. ThePhoneCoop will research and reply later. The number of part-time employees is an asterisk footnote in the non-financial performance indicators.

Where are the Phone Co-op s investments?

Most of the share capital is for investment in TPC, but surpluses arise for various reasons and are invested outside. Current locations include 40k in long-term investments, including 10k in the Co-operative Group, 20k in Westmill wind farm, 5k in a hydro power project; 60k is in the ICOF share account, 1.4m in the Co-operative Group, [...I missed some. I was struggling to keep up. Some of this may be wrong anyway...] 486k in Midcounties Cooperative share account, 20k in Chelmsford Star; total of about 2.9m.

Is ICOF deciding recipients of the sustainability fund or The Phone Co-op?

The arrangement with ICOF is now ending for various reasons and now TPC will partner with Black Country Reinvestment Society. Don t want to manage the fund directly because it s not a core task for a phone company.

The increase in turnover is described as mainly to existing customers. Has there been an increase in the number of customers?

The Phone Co-op is recruiting 150-200pcm residential and 30 business customers, but losing a similar number. Have recruited new staff to try to improve this.

Is share account interest being cut in line with banking interest?

Just cut to 3%, but there has been a net inflow of investment. Current interest receipts from TPC cover it due to long-term investments, but they will mature, so the interest rate will be cut gradually to keep it sustainable.

Purchase from other cooperatives is 11% and falling. What is being done to increase it?

[I missed the answer to this.]

What is happening about getting a new office?

The Phone Co-op still has an option on a site in Chipping Norton, but no planning permission. An alternative commercial building which was being discussed with its owner was lost to housing (planning permission granted there!). There is a general lack of suitable sites available and things are happening cautiously in the current climate.

If we re trying to save paper, why did members receive two envelopes in the post for this AGM?

The report was sent from Calverts directly, to save time, postage, staff and report miles

Is the description of non-white in the performance indicators a problem for mixed white+non-white people?

Will look into this.

How many affinity schemes are there?

There are currently 300 and they are being reviewed for the best way to work better with them.

Are acquisitions likely?

Expect the credit crisis to being opportunities. There are benefits from more traffic and so on. TPC has been contacting potential suppliers and intermediaries asking after other providers in difficulties.

What is the deferred income shown in the financial statements?

Pre-billed broadband and similar products.

Is the investment in the Co-operative Group risky?

TCG holds around 4bn in assets under and is one of the longest continuously-traded companies in the UK.

Are ThePhoneCo-op s 0845 numbers advantageous to TPC or the caller?

Still yes for TPC, paying 1p/min at peak; probably not advantageous to caller these days.

There are 15% sales to cooperatives shown. What s the largest cooperative and what % of that is it?

Shown in the annual report. [The numbers in report work out to about 15% of all sales I think. So, nearly all sales to cooperatives are sales to Midcounties?]

All errors and omissions in the above are mine. I heard the allocation approved, then I had to leave before the special meeting and the presentations. If anyone has links to them or coverage, please leave me a comment. Other comments welcome, too.

Well, in line with the Do Not Drive from the local police (and one from Gloucestershire), I ll be phoning in to ThePhoneCoop AGM today and doing a bit of work from home. While preparing for the journey that never was, I realised that I ve mentioned some of these phone tools in articles like Connecting from the k608i with SSL, but not all of them. So, here s my favourite Java phone applications:-

1. MidpSSH: this is my main workhorse, as long as I have a stable data connection (even 3G seems to freak sometimes above 120mph). I ll be connected to a screen session in our server (TERM=linux) using lynx, irssi, mailx and other tools I learnt back at UEA;
2. MujMail: if I don t have a stable network connection, this seems a good way to download email from SSL in bursts for offline reading;
3. Mobile RSS Reader: downloads RSS in bursts for offline reading;
4. anyRemote: this is my main workhourse at home, replacing the above three applications. My phone doesn t do WiFi, so I use bluetooth to run shell commands on my workstation, read RSS feeds and email and view web pages. Combined with a video-sender, it also acts as a remote control when playing internet video feeds on the TV. At a push, it can control the workstation s full GUI, but that s a bit slow and awkward;
5. JabberMixClient: I m having a few problems controlling this in version 2, but 1.x uses the basic GUI and works mostly fine. I guess I ought to fix its bugs, but I m terrible at Java;
6. MicroCalc2: a cool lisp-driven spreadsheet, handy for sums you want to keep and it went GPL about two years ago;
7. ReadManiac: much better than the built-in browser for text files and went GPL about a year ago. If only I could work out how to sign it with my local TTLLP certificate authority and get rid of the security prompts;
8. MFRadio: useful when the built-in FM RDS radio can t find anything interesting. The interface is a bit clunky and it really racks up data transfer charges, but it seems worth keeping around.

All of those are free and open source software, mostly under the GNU GPL. The only thing I feel I m really missing now is a free and open source FTP client, for uploading photos to my preferred photo-sharing site. Any suggestions?

On Saturday (7 February), I should be attending both The Phone Co-op AGM and The Phone Co-op Members Workshop before it. I ll be asking a question at the AGM, if we can get the wording nailed down in time. Sadly, travel from Bristol to Chipping Norton by train is totally screwed by engineering works near Didcot and the usual poor connections from the cross-country line, so I ll be making a 2 hour car journey instead of a 5 hour train+bus combination. If you re travelling from the Bristol area and can car-share, please get in touch. Next Tuesday/Wednesday is Voice09 in Birmingham and I should be there if things come together in time. This is the Social Enterprise Coalition s annual conference. Conservative Party leader David Cameron MP will open as keynote speaker, with Liam Byrne MP, Minister for the Cabinet Office, opening on Wednesday. Would live-blogging or similar be interesting to people reading this? If you d like to meet up at either event, get in touch somehow - comments here, instant message, email, or phone. If you ve something you d like to send to either, also get in touch.

One of the most frustrating things about Copyright Expansion is that it s being driven through at international levels, far away from most of the people that it affects. When we try to contact our international representatives, such as national government ministers or officers, or Members of the European Parliament (MEPs), it usually takes me at least two attempts to convince them that I actually understand the issue that I fell they re about to bodge. So, here we go again:-

The European Parliament is being asked to nearly double the term of copyright afforded to sound recordings. Industry lobbyists suggest that extending copyright term will help increase the welfare of performers and session musicians. But the Term Extension Directive, which will be voted on by the Legal Affairs Committee in a few weeks time, will do no such thing.

Follow developments on EDRI s Copyright page and Write to your MEP, like Stuart Langridge did. I ll contact Neil Parish MEP directly and hopefully he ll remember me, so I won t have to do that stop sending me copy-pasta from Malcolm Harbour dance. I ll also see if I can get nice responses out of the other parties this time.

So now our annual reports have been submitted. Despite the problems with the tax office mentioned in that article, it all seems to have come together just in time. In general, we re in pretty good shape at the moment. I saw this in A Cambridge Co-operator: December and January s Area Committee Meetings and I think it applies to us too:-

It s become slightly surreal how, when the rest of the economy seems to be in dire straights, the monthly figures that the area committee receives for each of the locally-accountable businesses seem to be largely unaffected. As worrying as the wider situation is, it appears that it has yet to really impact on our businesses. Let s hope that the national enconomy improves before it does so .

Whether it s because we re cooperative or because small free software businesses are in good shape (Webconverger - well done!), I m not too gloomy. Most of the time. Thanks to all the members and associates who helped TTLLP in our year ending mid-2008! If you ve not already had a copy, an annual report should be with you shortly. We ll start work on the next one in a few months, aiming for publication in autumn 2009.

Last Friday, I wrote I m not going to FOSDEM again because there are better value-for-money events around now right near the start of an article on here. But on Wednesday, I was surprised to learn from another website that I find it necessary to not only whine, but also boycott a conference, because [I] believe that FOSDEM should not take money from [Novell], just because they also happen to be a company, and as such make business deals with Microsoft. That s just plain false. I also found a link from the Boycott Novell website holding it up as an example of the boycott working - huh? Firstly, my wording wasn t perfect (by not going to FOSDEM again , I meant I didn t go last year either, not that I ll never go), but I feel it was pretty clear that I m not boycotting FOSDEM due to Novell. Both schestowitz (on the boycottnovell site) and Wouter Verhelst (quoted above from his personal website) were naughty to suggest otherwise! Secondly, Novell didn t do a deal with Microsoft just because they happen to be a company . Lots of companies haven t done deals with Microsoft. Novell did it to make a net profit from the deal and so I have some admiration for campaigners who aim to make the deal a huge liability for Novell. That s just influencing corporations as they were designed to work, so don t blame the campaigners for trying. So, I feel that both No-Novell-ers and company-blinders should try to find some compromise instead of flaming each other from twenty paces. It looks to me like the No-Novell-er s request (roughly: tell us how much to donate to get rid of them) was a reasonable suggestion. If the organisers are so open-minded, why not make a counter-offer instead of simple they still deserve a place defence? To close, I repeat: if you re going to FOSDEM, I hope you have a safe journey and a fun time and why not tell them what you think of the Novell-MS deal. If you re helping run FOSDEM, thank you!

I ve been having fun with identi.ca and twitter recently, but some of my contacts, friends, followees, subscriptions (or whatever you want to call them) send many more messages than others. One contact gave a running commentary on his progress up the floors of a building yesterday. Fine, but a bit of a torrent of data. If someone posts and leaves it for a while, it s sometimes an explanation of where they ve gone, so I d like to check people s last tweets. I ve seen some clients do that and it seems there s a method in the API to do it. The API returns XML, so I m using XSL to transform it to xhtml (I ve still not taken the time to learn the XML CSS ways) with the following commands:-

	wget --no-check-certificate -O - https://username:PASSWORD@identi.ca/api/statuses/friends.xml   \
	sed -e '1a\
<?xslt-param name="site" select="identi.ca"?>\
<?xml-stylesheet title="Site Summaries" type="text/xsl" href="twitters.xsl" ?>
' > identica.xml

And here s twitters.xsl which converts the downloaded xml to xhtml:-

<?xml version='1.0' ?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"
 xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
 xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
<xsl:param name="site">twitter.com</xsl:param>
<xsl:template match="/" xml:space="preserve">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><head>
<title><xsl:value-of select="$site" /> Friends</title>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="mirrors.css" />
</head><body>
<dl class="statuses">
<xsl:apply-templates />
</dl>
</body></html>
</xsl:template>
<xsl:template match="/users/user" xml:space="preserve"><dt><a href="http:// $site / screen_name "><img src=" profile_image_url " /><xsl:value-of select="name" /> (<xsl:value-of select="screen_name" />)</a> - <a class="time" href="http:// $site / screen_name /statuses/ status/id "><xsl:value-of select="status/created_at" /></a></dt><dd><xsl:value-of select="status/text" /></dd>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

Have fun! (And what have I done wrong?)

The World Economic Forum opens today (28 Jan) and runs until the weekend. This year most of the high-power planning sessions and feel-good corporate social responsibility whitewash has been replaced by sessions such as What Happened to the Global Economy? (Er, it broke because you bet more money than existed in the world?) There s a report from France24 and a programme of sessions. Like WEF in previous years, selected sessions are broadcast on SFinfo in German and Original Languages (often English) on Hotbird at 13east. Additionally, this year, there are webcasts (maybe the podcast version will play on free software) but it seems that none of the computing sessions are up for broadcast. Economics rules the airwaves for 2009. My main reason for posting here is to boggle at the WEF myspace competition. Isn t Myspace about the least appropriate of the big social networks for an economics forum? I suspect some payment or benefits from the network that Rupert Murdoch s company bought. There s also @davos which seems to be talking much more than listening seems appropriate for WEF, no?

KohaCon 2009, the conference for the premier free software integrated library system (Koha) will be held in Plano, Texas, USA on 16-17 April 2009. This is a FREE conference. There is no registration fee, but we are requesting that all attendees pre-register. More details on koha.org, with links to schedules and notes and so on. It seems unlikely that I ll get to Texas at that time. Travel bookings have just opened, but I have a higher-priority event in April which hasn t fixed its date yet. With any luck, there ll be some social media around KohaCon for us poor Euros to watch and maybe even take part.

Moving on from the horrible tax situation, I m struggling to get three pieces of hardware working. I m terrible with hardware. Can anyone help me get these working better, please?

1. I ve been lent an Asus M5200N after I busted my shoulder with a 7kg laptop at #davebcs. I ve managed to enable processor scaling as ondemand, but like the page says, the fan is noisy. Other sites report that the Centrino s thermal limit is 100C, so is it OK to set the fan not to kick in until 78C on the sensor? The default is 40C which means it s permanently on - the coolest the fan makes it is about 74C.
2. The Asus has Ubuntu on it (intrepid I think). Is there an easier way to get my three GPRS connection working than copying the config files from the old laptop and using the terminal? Network Manager doesn t seem to work and I can t see what it s trying to do or why it s failing (where s its debug log?). Alternatively, is there a distribution better suited to occasional laptop use than Ubuntu?
3. I ve been lent an iPod Touch. However, when plugging it into the USB on the Asus, the screen says simply iTunes and the quick start guide says to connect it to iTunes. Can gtkpod do this, is there another way to start it up from Ubuntu, Debian or GoboLinux, or shall I beg access to a computer running iTunes?

Thanks for any answers. I may send out small gifts in return because questions 2 and 3 seem very awkward to me.

Time to Report After a good start, I ve hit a bump in the road getting all the various TTLLP annual reports filed with the various offices on time. Well, less a bump in the road, more of a gaping chasm. Well, less a gaping chasm, more of a black hole with the potential to consume as many resources as you can throw at it. As usual, it s the financial reports and rax return which are the problem. After making a good start by closing the 2007-8 books in plenty of time, we ve had some small problems which we ve overcome, but the blocking problem now is that HMRC are using an obsolete address for the company. I only just found out that was the problem yesterday. That s doubly odd because I changed my address at the same time (which they re using) and we ve submitted two tax returns since then with the correct address. Once I got through to the telephone helpline, they told me to go to the tax office (in the nearest town just now, but scheduled for closure) to change the address. At the tax office, they told me to use a telephone in the corner and I had no need to have gone in person. HMRC s left hand doesn t seem to know what its right one is doing! The guy on the end of the phone confused me with jargon, but the upshot is that it will take up to 3 working days to correct our address, then we can request new access to our accounts which will take up to 7 days which means we ll miss the filing deadline. I think it s time to complain about the broken address. I ll dent my progress. Anyone else finding the changed tax filing process bloody taxing this year? Finally, anyone got free and open source software for online filing of partnership tax returns? There s a 10 shareware Excel spreadsheet tool out there, but I guess I ll have to borrow someone s Excel to run it (it won t work in OpenOffice, will it?). Is there a better way? If not, I ll tell parliament.uk about HMRC driving Windows sales (slowly chipping away at the monopoly).

Giving up on a position within a free software project when you know you re no longer managing to do an effective job is a wonderfully liberating experience. Now that I have started to talk with Miriam Ruiz about handing over the Debian Jr. project, I can stop worrying about the leadership task and just have fun with it. I can always count on Miriam for recommendations for games in Debian my kids may enjoy, as she has a passion for finding good games to package for Debian, and in particular, games for children. Over the past few weeks we ve had some fun with her picks. At the same time, I always have Debian Jr. in mind. How can we ensure kids can have the most fun with this? How do we equip their guides to help them? What we ve done with each new piece of software is to find a quiet time when one or more of the children can start playing with it on their own while we watch, offering such guidance as they need, but for the most part just letting them loose with it. Each wrinkle of the brow, each impetuous thump of the mouse, every illuminated grin and exclamation of delight is noted. We try to see what frustrates or pleases our kids and discuss it both with them and the Debian maintainers and upstream developers. This is an excercise we ve managed to pull off without being overly intrusive and the results have been well worth the effort. Using a few of Miriam s picks we tried this week, we were able to draw their play into the free software development process. Here s a brief summary of those sessions: Platinum Arts Sandbox puts into children s hands the ability to role play in a 3D world and edit that world using simplified controls. The expressions on the faces of our kids as they played were priceless: both the ups and the downs. I wanted to capture this on video and share it. After having established a rapport with upstream, we took a 20 minute clip of one of our play sessions and gave a copy to them to use to help further their work. Here is the edited result. They were very pleased to have that kind of feedback and found the video valuable for determining where the software still needed improvement and to notice which aspects particularly pleased the children. I happen to know that Hex-a-hop is one of Miriam s personal favourites. We have a household full of puzzle-lovers so this puzzle game was an instant hit. While on irc on #debian-jr with Miriam we relayed in real-time some of the reactions as they played this and a handful of her other picks. This gave her some confirmation of areas she knew needed work as well as inspiration for upcoming releases of these packages. During this play session, which also included StegaVorto, kartofel, Anagramarama, Funny Boat and Vodovod, my youngest girl, age 7, plunked down on the couch next to me as her 10-year-old sister played. Then she started to notice I was typing what people in the livingroom were saying and doing on irc. She took a mild affront to me copying her own words and actions, so I decided it would be better to let her participate so she would feel included. At this point, I started playing secretary for her, typing what she dictated to me while she read the responses from the display. Later, I just handed her the keyboard so she could type and read the responses on her own. She was still at it long past bedtime and it was with some reluctance that she finally gave up the keyboard. We all had a lot of fun and look forward to doing this again. We are particularly careful with privacy, taking care to share pictures, videos, and other personal details only so far as we believe it does not put our children at risk. Also, we need to ensure we observe in a way that is welcome and doesn t interfere with their enjoyment. But with a little bit of prudence and a practiced eye and ear for what increases or diminishes enjoyment of the software, we can involve our children directly in the free software development process. I commend to anyone who has the privilege to share free software with children to use this method to communicate with maintainers and developers, increasing your own enjoyment of the software in the process and that of children and their guides everywhere.

FOSDEM is a place where free and open source software really means open source software and the F in FOSDEM is a token gesture to the free software movement if you believe FOSDEM organiser Philip Paeps. If that s so, I m amazed they can claim to promote the awareness of free software with a straight face. I m not going to FOSDEM again because there are better value-for-money events around now, but I do understand the motives of the various anti-Novell campaigners. The Boycott Novell site linked to my explanation of Boycotts a few years back. I really don t agree that A conference just is not complete without corporate schwag and presence. Presence? I don t really enjoy being jumped by salesmen. Schwag? There was one long-term useful item in my last conference pack, that was from an association and I would probably have bought a slightly better one if I hadn t been given it. So, I really don t understsand why FOSDEM are annoying people in part because they like branded cheap junk. I suspect most of it ends up in the bins before long. I mean, who needs a non-obvious bottle-opener? I have one on the waiters friend, another with a nice handle, one on my penknife, one on my wife s penknife and even one on the can opener s handle. There are probably a few more in my home and bottles aren t even so hard to open without a special tool anyway! Anyway, if you re going, I hope you have a safe journey. Maybe you could mention Glyn Moody s summary of the FOSDEM controversy to some people there. Call me when you re organising a trip to something like a drupalcon, wordcamp or LUGRadio Live.

The monthly board meeting of SPI will take place on irc.oftc.net #spi tonight (Wed 21 Jan) at 20:00 UTC. Members may have seen that the meeting announcement is delayed because the secretary has been ill and it seems that none of the other board members has stepped in to take over. I think the only new associated project currently under discussion is waiting for a legal opinion, so your guess about the meeting contents is probably as good as mine. My guesses: there will probably be a treasurer s report; Martin Zobel-Helas has been filling in the gaps in the 2007-8 minutes, so there ll be two or three sets for approval; the secretary may report on website redevelopment progress; Privoxy might have taken up the offer of associated project status from the SPI December 2008 meeting; and there might be a report on Tux4Kids trademarks. Watch the comments below this article for a link to the summary when posted.

I thought that Koha: Users and Developers of Open Source (KUDOS) and Koha Libre Association (KohaLA) were both Koha Interest Groups, but Nicole s post about ALA Midwinter makes me think I ve got it wrong:

KUDOS (KOHA Users and Developers of Open Source) Meeting. NOTE: This is for users of Koha only. Libraries who are interested in Koha, but have not yet signed a contract with a support provider or implemented Koha on their own, should attend the Koha Interest Group Meeting see below.

So what s an interest group? Why would we want to keep current users and interested people apart? I think current users are our most honest advocates. How do other free software projects structure their community? I m familiar with LUGs and drupal groups, but haven t really got involved with much else yet. Do the names confuse you too?

Mostly for my backups needs, I planned a Mini-ITX based home server around the Chenbro ES34069 Mini-ITX case which features four hot-swap S-ATA bays. I wanted a low-consumption motherboard and CPU in there (not only because of the default 120W power supply) and since low-consumption mainboards with 4 S-ATA connectors are quite seldom I ve chosen the not so cheap VIA EPIA SN18000G mainboard with actively cooled 1.8 GHz VIA C7 processor and a maximum power consumption of less than 30W (including CPU). Waiting for delivery While the Chenbro ES34069 case I ordered at digitec only needed a few weeks to deliver, the VIA EPIA SN18000G mainboard from Brack took over eleven weeks to deliver, it finally has been delivered on Wednesday, 5th of November 2008. I initially ordered the VIA board for CHF 324, now it s at CHF 397 (without rebate even at CHF 439) because Brack seems to have had a lot of hassles to get some of them at all. Although they usually sell for the prices at the time they ship the hardware (market price), they sold it to me at their purchase price, so it became only about CHF 15 more expensive than when I ordered. And since the RAM price dropped by one third during those eleven weeks, the whole order became about CHF 25 cheaper, the order was CHF 10 cheaper overall than when ordered. :-) (Still waiting for the according voucher, though.) So I ve joined the two main components together, installed Debian Lenny on it, crammed four 400 GB Samsung S-ATA disks (formerly in a TheCus N4100) and the 160 GB 2.5 harddisk from my MicroClient JrSX (I never really used it in there, it always runs from CF card) into it, created a software RAID-5 and now fill it with music, games and backups. But not everything was as easy as it sounds above. Although Chenbro lists the VIA EPIA SN18000G as officially compatible mainboard for the ES34069, not everything really fitted as expected. So here s my review of this hardware combination. Chenbro ES34069 It s really awesome how much features you can stuff in such a small case. Of course it s not as small as a thin client case or the mCubed HFX micro case, but it s smaller than most book-size cases like the ASUS Pundits, just a little bit thicker. Inside the case (laying on its left side) there are two decks. The lower deck contains the 3.5 hot-swappable S-ATA harddisk bays, the internal part of the power supply and the two fans for cooling the interal power supply components and the disks. The upper deck has space for the mainboard, a 2.5 harddisk, a slim-line optical drive slot and all the front-panel stuff (card reader, LEDs, USB sockets). Both decks are divided in two section. The front section belongs to the case itself and the back section containing the mainboard mount points and the two fans can be easily unplugged after removing four screws and keeping an eye on the cables from the lower to the upper deck. That way the mainboard can be mounted very easily. So far a very convincing design. To mount the 2.5 harddisk in between the mainboard and the front panel, it s not really necessary, but convenient to remove the slim-line optical drive slot, since you then have better access to the harddisk s IDE socket. To remove the slot, you need to remove the front cover. That sounded easier than it actually was and I nearly broke of one its catches. :-/ Although all parts of the case seems to fitting very well together, the bays for the hot-swappable drives weren t perfect: The drive slots not always connected even if the latch iss already closed. This was definitely better with the TheCus N4100. Additionally the bays seem to be made for slightly larger disks, so mine had play and the screws pressed the it together and you need to take care that the screws don t cant. A big positive point of the case was that there were all necessary screws included and they were fitting. This was a bigger problem with the TheCus N4100, since many harddisks ship with their own screws, but those are seldom the needed flat-head ones. Even a P-ATA to slim-line optical drive adapter was included, so I don t need to buy one. (Would have costed CHF 42 at digitec.) VIA EPIA SN18000G While it s surely not the most performant board out there, I m quite satisfied with its performance. I installed BackupPC 3.1.0 as backup system on it and it works like a charm. It daily backs up up to 14 machines over ssh tunnels more to come) and is way more performant than expected. But I probably had very low expectations due to everyone arguing about the bad performance of the VIA C7. ;-) Not nice, but known is the problem that most (but not all) USB connectors on the SN mainboard have 2.00mm pitch while all the case s plugs have 2.54mm pitch. Apropriate adaptors are available from Mini-ITX.com. Thanks to Akim for this tip! Power consumption I hoped to get more details into this posting, e.g. measured power consumption, etc. But then I recently read in the c t magazine how inexact my watt meter (from Brennenstuhl) is, so its values would probably bring more confusion than help. Additionally I don t feel like powering down the server just for measurement. Feedback I got quite a few mails with hints to further Mini-ITX boards and TDP but also with questions about the case. I hope that this blog post asnwers some of the questions also for other readers. Thanks to all who replied to my initial blog post about my Chenbro/VIA based home server, either by mail, or comment, or both. :-) Further plans For deploying music to my other computers I tried both, mediatomb and gmediaserver but none really convinced me. Currently I just mount the media directory using the FUSE and ssh based sshfs. Not sure if I ll add NFS due to it s user base syncing hell. Further plans are an HTTP proxy with ad filtering and caching capabilities, it ll be Privoxy combined with either Squid or Polipo. Maybe even a Tor SOCKS proxy.

You may remember that I m quite a satellite TV fan, having installed it in 2004 and compiled a FAQ. Over the holidays, I replaced my 4-year-old Digiquest receiver (terrible website) with a FortecStar FS-4400 PVR from Maplin. I d love to build a MythTV but how am I ever going to build such a small, quiet receiver for anything like that price? The FS-4400 s decoder gives a dribblingly clear picture and (one firmware upgrade later) the recorder works flawlessly. I can even watch other channels on the same transponder while recording. It has a couple of small niggles (the file manager that appears every damn power-on, the pidgin English on-screen displays and it s too easy to activate the motor), but it seems pretty good value on the whole. Now I ve a dilemma. I put a 4Gb USB stick into it, just to see how I got on with the recording. I like it, but 4Gb is enough for only 2 or 3 hours and I don t want to get into swapping sticks around like video casettes. I still don t know what s where on half my tapes. I ve seen a few places report things like Solid State Drives Getting Ready to Take Over (by Jaymi Heimbuch) with much larger capacity just around the corner, but the best rate I found today is around 1 Gb/pound for SSDs up to about 32Gb, compared to nearly 10 Gb/pound for USB-powered hard disks from around 300Gb. On the flip side, SSDs are silent and I don t know how noisy or power-hungry the HDDs are. How would you play this? By the way, if you care about UK TV, BERR.gov.uk is consulting about reducing Sky s control of itv - what s to consult about? Sky s doing all they can through the courts to drag their feet, but we need to put the independent back into independent television! Tell them by Friday 23 January 2009, please.