The online home of Toby Wilkinson

Category Archives: Work

Improving on backing up with rsync

Recently my backups have been in rather a state of flux. Following the restoration of a site that I’d had cron religiously back up daily with rsync, I realised that I was accumulating rather a lot of cruft in my backups – old versions of CMS systems were present, temporary versions of images uploaded that […]

Solving a VirtualBox server rebooting with Debian Wheezy

Debian Wheezy recently made it to being released as the current Stable version. With a new version of Debian, I thought it time to update my Intel Atom based server. This runs two Virtual servers, allowing me the advantages of a good network setup without the associated power consumption, noise and space requirements of using […]

T962 / T962A Reflow Oven Controller

Recently I’ve been working on a collaborative project with my friend Ed. His electronic work has been held back by a range of disappointing soldering results from his reflow oven. Having been supplied with a T962 oven for a project, he immediately found it frustrating to work with – Boards were inconsistently soldered and a lot of manual work was needed to […]

HOWTO – High current USB charging ports.

Having been playing with a Raspberry Pi recently I’ve written some logging software and left it powered to collect a decent amount of data. However it’s become quite a nuisance having a slightly-too-short network cable strung across to my desk, plus, let’s face it, my desk has enough clutter on it! As I have a small server on 24/7, […]

Have we reached a plateau in computers?

Yesterday I went to London, a regrettably rare occurrence these days but all the more special as I took the High Speed train for the first time. I was enjoying wafting through the countryside at hitherto unknown speeds. Out of curiosity I took out my phone and checked the speed on my GPS. We seemed to […]

Replacing the fan in a Zalman cooler

I recently upgraded the CPU cooler in my main desktop from the standard one included by Intel to a Zalman CNPS9700 LED. While I was impressed with the build quality and cooling capacity, I was disapointed that the included fan controller was manual, not only adding cables and controls inside my computer, but leaving it […]

HOWTO: Using Intel’s RST with Linux.

I recently updated my main system to a new Intel Sandybridge based setup which included a Asus P8Z68-V motherboard, as you may have seen. One of the features of the Intel Z68 chipset upon which this motherboard is based is Rapid Storage Technology (RST) which aims to use a Solid State Drive to cache the files your […]

Build Blog – Two high-end cases go head to head.

I recently had a bit of a shuffle round of computer parts, which meant that among other things, I put a brand new Sandy-Bridge processor in my computer used for video editing and PCB layout work, and shuffled my older, Core2 based, system into my general office computer. Of interest, though was the fact that […]

Are big changes coming?

I’ve recently been reading more and more analysts clamoring to find new hyperbole about the way new and coming technology will change the face of the Internet and computing. Web enabled TVs, smartphones and tablet computers are all being heralded as being on the cusp of revolutionizing the way we interact with computers and information. […]

New Website under development

Well it’s finally happening. After some years of my personal website reading simply “More to come soon” I’ve decided that I really ought to put a bit more information about myself on the web. I’m hoping that this new website will be useful to those of you who know me personally as it should enable […]