@ricedg
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Yes it’s Truecaller. We don’t reject unknown numbers. White list numbers go straight through, black list get told to politely eff off. For the rest, genuine callers will say their name when asked by the machine, it then rings the phone, plays back what they said and you press 1 to answer or hang up. I’ve found most people are now quite used to them, especially doctors etc.
Cold callers give up at this point and hang up (so the phone never rings) but automated message just drone on and get recorded, so you then reject the call by hanging up. There are other options to black or white list them.
It acts as an answer machine if you don’t answer within X rings. The machine has a nice red lit button when there’s a message waiting and you just press it to play. Left to delete and right to keep. Easy. I’m sure there are options to do this remotely but we don’t use them.
Best £100 I ever spent.
The latest I heard was an automated message saying it was from your ISP and you were going to be disconnected.
My call blocker stops it ringing the phone, I picked this up from the recording it makes when asking the callers name for you to vet.
Amazon still sell the 300mbps TL-WR802N for £25 and an Ac750 version for £30 http://tinyurl.com/yctqwuuo
It was a snore fest.
Some of these chipsets have been around for many years. 2.4Ghz 802.11N is still good enough for most people and businesses.
Good question. If you have a look at the CPUs the likes of Synology use for full on media servers like the DS216 Play, then it’s nothing fancy. The DS216 Play uses a 1.5Ghz dual core ARM but with a transcoding engine. It’s predecessor the DS214 Play had a dual core with HTT (4 threads) Intel Atom CE5335 but again that has a transcoding engine.
There is a Plex article thats says for each single 1080P transcode you need 2000 passmarks. Your 5350 scores 2597 so if it’s struggling we clearly need more. That rules out the SoC Pentium / Celerons so you need to look at the socketed processors.
The cheapest £30 Celeron G3930 is 3097 so not a huge step up. A £40 G4400 is 3597. I’ve used loads of these in office type PCs and they fly along. For £80 you can get the G4620 which uses HTT to deal with 4 threads. That has a passmark of 5263.
EDIT Plex TV article says minimum of an i3. What I don’t know is how old that article is as a modern i3-7100 is easily on a par with the previous generation i5.
Reading further, if you have an active Plex Pass subscription for the Plex Media Server account it can use hardware accelerated transcoding. As the G4400 has Intel Quick Sync Video I personally would be willing to take a punt on it but the G4620 would be the safe choice.
Problem is with a basic kabylake mobo and 8gB DDR4 that’s going to cost >£200.
Technically if it has a fan it will make a “noise” so totally silent isn’t possible unless it has a huge heatsink. However have had some PSUs that are so quiet that for all intents I’d call them silent.
I recently bought an Aerocool Integrator 500W £35 on Amazon and that was very good in all respects.
I’ve used loads of Corsair VS 450 £32 and I would put them in the same category but there are some moans in reviews saying the opposite.
BE QUIET! have a 400W at £40
Yep, he was trying it on at that price. Half of that is more like it, plus the London tax.
Wood burners really pump the heat out, but you need to get the draw right. You can get a fan for the top of them too and the ones I’ve seen do the job they say they will – heat the room up quicker.
Bob, it sounds to me that the problem is with the PC. It wouldn’t surprise me if there were updates waiting to be installed.
One Drive and it’s kind can be useful for a number of things.
- Spread the copies of files onto multiple machines – a sort of backup.
- Access documents from anywhere you can get on a browser with an internet connection, and these days edit them too.
- Share files with others (but this can be quite crude).
If you can make them work for you they a good solution.
I found that none of them quite did what I wanted, plus they insist you be a member of their club and accept their ideas on workflow and applications. You also have to accept their idea of security (probably OK) and backup (usually none).
I decided to go down the Synology route as it gives me that control. It has a number of apps so you can tailor the sort of personal “Cloud” (I hate that word) you want as well as taking advantage of the public offerings and integrating them into your world. QNAP would allow you to do the same, but SOHO products like Western Digital My Cloud or Seagate Personal Cloud are just too lacking and aren’t much cheaper.
There are also some big advantages using “grown up” applications and the best for me is versioning. Any document in my PCs Cloud Station folder is synchronised with the NAS and it keeps a database of the last 32 versions of the files (as well as a recycle bin). My daily backup does the same for the other files on the system. For both de-duplication keeps the storage requirements down to a minimum. You just can’t do that with public cloud services.
TBH I only use Photo Station because it’s there. I can get Google Photos to do the same job, but if I got run over by a bus tomorrow the family photo’s wouldn’t go with me ?
Richard, it appears on the left between Quick Access and This PC.
Drezha, it’s Cloud Sync you need to be looking at. It talks to all the major Cloud services.
In Google Photos you need to make sure that in Settings: Google Drive – “Show Google Drive photos & videos in your Photos library” is turned on.
On the Synology I have a folder called Photo Sync and in Cloud Sync I have that synchronised with /Google Photos. It’s a one way sync so only changes made in Google Photos are reflected on the Synology. I’ve also set it to not delete any photos in Photo Sync even if they are deleted in Google Photos.
Cloud Sync keeps a database of what’s been synchronised so even when I move the photos into the Photo Station App and delete them from the Photo Sync folder they are not re-synchronised. Neither are they deleted from Google Photos.
All this means is that the Synology only gets new photos from Google Photos and doesn’t affect Google Photos in any way.
You can do this trick with Dropbox folders too.
The problem I have with One Drive is it’s synchronized with a folder on your PC and I don’t want that for massive media files. I want to park those somewhere and look or listen to them from there. That’s why I ended up with the Synology.
I use Cloud Station to synchronize my business documents among my 3 devices (2 PCs and a laptop) and that currently stands at 2GB (3.4GB on the server as that includes it’s recycle bin and 31 stage versioning for each file). I can get to them through any browser or an Android app.
Video takes up 89GB and Photos 5GB. I have a one way Cloud Sync job set up to synchronize my Google Photos to a folder on the Synology. I then copy over those I want to keep into Photo Station Albums. I use the Photo Station Uploader on a PC to take pictures off the camera. It integrates with File Explorer so you can do this with right clicks. Again there are Android apps available for mobile viewing.
My Synology is also powerful enough to run two 3mpx IP camera as well if I wanted it to. It can run a lot more than that but you’d need to dedicate it to CCTV only (or get a more powerful one).
Everything is backed up to an external 2.5″ HDD with 30 day versioning. I get scheduled health diagnostics and any real time errors emailed to me and I choose to do the same with backup success / failure / abnormalities.
It’s cost me £325 for a DS216se 3TB RAID solution (including the backup HDD) but you could do it for £203 with a single 3TB DS115j
The big plus is it’s all properly backed up. You can even set up a weekly archive to the dirt cheap Amazon Glacier service if you want off site backup too. It cost me a couple of quid a month.
I like the tweet from Snowden:
“Businesses that make money by collecting and selling detailed records of private lives were once plainly described as “surveillance companies.” Their rebranding as “social media” is the most successful deception since the Department of War became the Department of Defense.”
I have a business 365 subscription myself but that’s for my business use (not personal) and includes email hosting. i.e. giffordsystems.co.uk email addresses are hosted on Microsoft servers.
For everyone else it’s hard to see the difference between Office 2016 and 365. On 2016 it steers you towards using One Drive to store your documents and log in with a Microsoft Account. Anyone can use the free online versions of Word and Excel with their One Drive. OK the free space is “only” 5GB but if any normal person has 5GB of documents I’ll eat my hat. What people have in bulk is Music, photos and Video and One Drive is not the best place to store that.
Even though I have a 365 subscription I don’t use One Drive (either business or personal). I store my documents in my own “Cloud” i.e. on my Synology NAS via Cloud Station Drive. Synology and Google look after my photos and whilst I normally stream music from the Cloud I have some esoteric stuff saved on the Synology, same with video, and I can stream from there if I want.
The only advantage I can see to personal 365 is rolling updates of major versions, but I don’t think that’s worth the cost.
The business 365 is an other thing entirely and depends on your business model. The collaboration tools can be very powerful but need an administrator. For me a trusted host for my email is worth it. For the cost of that I basically get free Office.
Loads of Office 2016 Pro under a fiver like this E-Bay
I’ve bought nothing but these for over a year now.
13″ for senior management only bub. All my years in Corporate IT that’s how it works.
In the early days (the 90s) when I was the Computer Manager for South Wales & South West and we were still making it up as we went along I used to try and fit kit to needs. As I was the budget holder as well as the (only) support person I had only myself to answer to. Until senior management went to meetings and saw what other senior managers were turning up with.
At first that was just the fact it was a laptop, then we had dial up (to get your email), colour printers, etc. Thankfully I’d moved into networking and servers when the Blackberry years started.
This is a “proper” server operating system so works on the idea of users and permissions – they make it very easy though! It’s pretty much all tick box stuff.
An example, when you create a new user you’ll be shown a list of the installed applications and those they have access to by default are ticked. You just tick any you want them to have access to that they don’t. The same applies to File Shares and similar things.
You install applications through Package Center and just click the Install button on the one(s) you want. It then becomes available available on the Main Menu (if you have permissions to use it). Icons can be dragged from the Main Menu to your own desktop.
“Top level” Shared Folders are created in Control Panel, everything else file wise is done in File Station.
Apps like Photo Station and Video Station will automatically create their own top level shared folder structures and user groups for you.
Just give me a shout if you have any questions. Don’t be afraid to have a go and make a mess of it. You can easily reset it all back to an out of the box state.
QNAP are an extremely good NAS manufacturer. The spec is a dual core Atom D425 1.8 GHz and 512mb of ram which will be fine to do what you want. 4 HDD slots is nice but you’ll not need them all. As long as you aren’t worried about continuity a single drive is fine. However many drives you have you will be backing up the data – won’t you? So add the cost of a USB drive to anything you buy.
The T439 Pro II is a 2009 model so if the HDD is of that vintage too I’d recommend replacing it.
As you probably know I favour Synology boxes. £155 buys you a Synology DS115j DiskStation 1-Bay NAS w/ 1x 2TB Seagate IronWolf Hard Drive from Broadbandbuyer Synology page here (Seagate IronWolf and WD Red are the specialist NAS HDDs with 3 year warranty).
Looking at the QNAP Photostation and the Synology Photo Station they go about their business in much the same way.
Here’s a link to a photo of Michelle and Harriet outside a cafe in Bruges from one of my albums on my Synology. This is openly shared to the public but you can do it via all sorts of social media or shared albums with specific permissions and / or passwords.
So would I but the QNAP? Probably not as for the same money I can buy new kit that will do the same job.
EDIT – Alan that’s a stock photo, it has 4 slots but only 1 drive.
It’s chucking it down. Not drifting like it did last time.
It’s supposed to continue all day.
Son is due to go back to Bath later. Trains still running but the local buses in Bath are operating on “main roads” only. The biggest problem is outside of the centre you have to go up massive hills and he will need to to get home. I suspect we will have a house guest tonight too.
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