I’ve spent the last week or so playing with Cacti (after telling myself to do so for quite some time), and one of the goals was to get real graphing of data on my Airport Extreme (Dual-Band, A1301, March 2009). The issue is, there is very little information online as to SNMP mappings on this base station. What interface is the WAN, which are the wireless, etc. After some trial and error (and help of iEyeNet) I have figured that information out.
Ecomposter
Ecomposter w/ Spider Base
The box consisted of 16 panels, about 200 rivets, several dozen linking pieces, and random other stuff. All told, it took me about 2 hours to put together. While it wasn’t hard, it is a bit time consuming, and really bugs the hand (putting the rivets in is really hard on the thumbs). I got the the point when joining the two halves together that I was just using a hammer to pound the rivets in rather than pushing it in.
You’ll need a hammer, 8oz is what I used (also a rubber mallet is highly suggested), a phillips screwdriver (electric if you have it, mainly for the base), and if you have them, a couple metric sockets (I think a 8mm and 10mm, if I recall… also for the base). And for the love of god, have a thimble, or a padded glove… just to protect your thumbs.
As for what the directions say, vs what you should do. They’re pretty much the same, though I found it easier to put two panels together, then all the other panels together in sets of two, then two sets of two together to make a quarter sphere, then put two of those together to make a half. Doing it one panel at a time was just a pain around the 3/4 of a half point… it was flopping all around.
The base actually took a while to put together all in itself, but if you have an electric screwdriver (like the PS20) I’d highly recommend using it. It’s a lot of screws (36 to hold the legs together, and another 24 for the rollers, so 60 in total).
I got it situated in the yard after finishing building it, and it does indeed look like a tiny Death Star. Right now, with not much in it (some yard debris, coffee grounds, and a few other things), it’s pretty easy to turn, but reviews online seem to indicate once it’s near full it becomes almost impossible to turn. So, we’ll have to see. Also, I have no idea how long it’ll take to make compost, or how the compost will turn out. So, I’ll revisit this review once I have something to report.
At the very least, it’s the coolest composter you’ll ever see. How it performs will more than likely impact that score. Will come back in the next few months and report.
[xrr rating=4.5/5]
SPSS 19 Deployment for Mac
This last week the University finally got a site license for SPSS. This is a huge deal since I’ve had to run SPSS on a Terminal Server the past several years and have people connect to that with Remote Desktop to run SPSS.
With the site license came the ability to both do individual installs, which are tied to a specific machine, and the ability to use a Network License. For doing individual installs, I’d recommend the silent install option, which fellow Mac Admin Patrick Gallagher has detailed instructions on how to do here.
I really really didn’t want to go to each machine and do the install (even though the silent install didn’t require that), and I’d eventually like to put it on our image… so the network license sounded very promising. The idea being, you point the install at a license server, and as long as it can get the okay to run, it doesn’t care what machine it’s on.