I’ve just updated my GEEK! post that included the driver for the PEAK 100417AGPK dual TV tuner. This being because I’ve found the driver disk and have uploaded the official driver for consumer use!
If you need a copy of the driver yourself, please see this post. Leave a comment and let us know how you got on!
(Alternatively, if you know what you’re doing and would just like the download – click here)
After using ISPConfig for around a month now, I’ve more or less got to grips with it – and I’m no longer a cPanel addict!
Nonetheless, finding a backup solution for ISPConfig has been difficult to say the least. ISPConfig’s built-in backup is pretty poor and hasn’t really been any use when several of my websites are dependent on a decent spare copy!
I managed to find this script – and this has worked well, however there were a couple of bugs and it also wasn’t particularly user friendly – so I’ve updated it and uploaded my own copy for you to use!
It should be more or less all set up and ready to go, but you will need to do the following before you use it:
Download here (ZIP)
Version 1.0
If you’ve been keeping up with tech news over the last few months, you’ll remember the Thai floods that wreaked havoc for hard drive production last year. The floods did a lot of damage to major hard drive brands as their factories in Thailand were badly damaged.
Ever since the floods, hard drive prices have skyrocketed. It seems you can’t get a 1TB hard drive for much short of £100 any more, and for anything smaller prices aren’t much cheaper!
Analysts are now saying they expect high prices to continue through 2012 as recovery slowly starts to take place. iSuppli is predicting that supply will be back to normal levels towards the end of 2012, but until then prices will remain reasonably high.
What’s annoying is that, when I look on Amazon, it seems to be cheaper to buy an external hard drive and rip the drive out of it than too buy an internal drive on it’s own. What sense is there in that?!
If you’ve been following my tweets lately, you’ll know that I recently moved GEEK! to a brand new VPS server. I did this for many reasons – but primarily because I felt that I was ready to move on from shared hosting and onto something where I’ll learn a little more about how webservers work. GEEK!’s been running well over three years now – and I’ve been through many web hosting providers during that time. I was beginning to get tired of hoping other people on shared servers wouldn’t jeopardize your uptime stats – there always seemed to be some kind of resource hog!
Nonetheless, I went on the hunt for a cheap-ish yet good quality VPS provider (I might have stayed with my old provider HostParcel as, in fairness, they were pretty good – but sadly they don’t offer VPS services) and was pointed to South West Broadband. They seem to be pretty new in VPS services, but I was interested in their good value and seemingly honest services.
So I signed up to their lowest price package to see what was what. For £8 a month, I was given a VPS with 256MB RAM (although I’m told this will soon become 512MB), 10GB storage, 300GB bandwidth and a Linux flavour of my choice (I was recommended to Debian). Pretty neat, I thought – and very good value nonetheless! They also offer a 12 month prepayment discount – giving you 12 months for the price of 10, if you’re happy to commit.
And to be totally honest, so far I’m really impressed. The customer support is superb – better than I’ve ever seen in a hosting provider. You get access to online support via Skype or a ticketing system – as well as an emergency telephone number which isn’t premium rate (this is something I really like to see).
The server they assigned me seems to work very well. You get full SSH access (which you’d expect) and you are allowed access to all the controls and commands that you’ll ever need. Response times from the server are incredible – from my college in Oxford I can get a response from the server just outside London in just 4ms – pretty darn good!
As for value for money – I’ve never seen such value. I’d always considered VPS services very expensive – but £8 a month is hardly expensive for the system you get.
So really I haven’t got many (if any) complaints. For decent value, high performance VPS servers with decent customer support, I couldn’t think of anywhere else to recommend you!
Oh, by the way – SWB aren’t actually offering their VPS packages on their website yet. However, if you contact them via twitter they seem to be happy to sort you out with a package. They also offer a decent range of shared and reseller packages, so if a VPS isn’t your thing, they’re bound to have something that is.
If you’re under the age of 18 and have been wondering why Google+ isn’t available to you – it’s because Google insisted they wanted to implement specific privacy features before it went live to minors.
Now, it’s been done – and anyone 13 years of age or older can open an account. Google say that specific privacy rules will be preset until you’re 18, but at least Google might finally get the audience I feel they should be targeting!