Thursday 14 August 2014

What is this Orac of which I speak ?

I've blogged in the past about one of my home PCs, known as Orac, for reasons which will, I hope become, apparent.
Orac doesn't get enough use, partly because my life as a software rodeo star means that I'm on the road more than off, and partly because I normally end up doing most of what I want on my MacBook.

However, my New Year's Resolution ( dated 14 August 2014 ) is that I am going to do MUCH MUCH MORE with my various pieces of home PC equipment, including: -

  • Raspberry Pi
  • Apple Mac Mini
  • ~8 year old Thinkpad R50e
  • Humax PVR
  • Synology DS440 NAS
So, as I type, I'm upgrading Orac to the latest Ubuntu Trusty Tahr, and also backing up my MacBook to the Synology, via Ethernet of course.

Now what's the reason for this sudden (re)interest in my home technology ?

Well, partly, it's the fault of Stephen Tiberius Gibson Esq, who is the expert witness on the excellent SecurityNow podcast ( on iTunes ).

More to come .....

7 comments:

Carl Tyler said...

Well it's obviously the Orac like perspex computer on the left :D

Do you have a key for it too?

Dave Hay said...

Well, I have a USB Key, and it's (hopefully) not a BAD USB Key :-)

Carl Tyler said...

Come on, you need a real Orac key...

http://www.glenalec.net/DMCTO/samples/orac/keyClose.JPG

Dave Hay said...

I'm on it .... :-)

Dragon Cotterill said...

Oooooh. Humax. I have one of those too. Hope you've installed the customised firmware. Wouldn't be as useful without it.

Dave Hay said...

@Dragon - No, I'm still using the OOB firmware on the Hummy, haven't yet seen a really compelling reason to "crack" it :-)

Dragon Cotterill said...

The editing, the remote management, the automatic decrypting, the plugins you can write for it... the list is quite long and impressive. http://wiki.hummy.tv/wiki/Custom_Firmware_Overview

Visual Studio Code - Wow 🙀

Why did I not know that I can merely hit [cmd] [p]  to bring up a search box allowing me to search my project e.g. a repo cloned from GitHub...