Aloha! Welcome to the newly reborn Chunderblog!
Not exactly reborn, but perhaps rejuvenated? In its early days, the Chunderblog began as a means to update our friends and family about happenings in the Chunder household. However, the WordPress software became almost too much to run and nearly unusable on my little home server. Updates became increasingly erratic, then stopped.
I finally upgraded the server system to something with a little more oomph. The QNAP TS-253Pro is not much larger than its predecessor, about the size of a few DVD’s on the shelf, but is quite capable and still has very low power consumption. It only draws 0.74 W when asleep, 10 W when on, and 16 W when running full tilt. My old fan-less model (which cleverly used the entire aluminum chassis as a heat sink, but tended to run pretty hot when you challenged it) drew 5w when on and 13 W in operation. In comparison, a laptop will use 30-90 W in operation and a desktop up to 175-300 W! Serving files is so much faster, almost 10 mb/sec! Video is hardware-transcoded, and has a direct HDMI output to the TV so we don’t have to power on the PS3 just to watch videos. The Squeezebox music server is fast (used to take 15 mins for a database scan, now completes in a little over 1 min) and the CPU barely flinches when transcoding audio. It can run Linux Mint and Windows in a virtual machine. The list goes on and on.
I’m in geek heaven.
With a “real” processor on-board, WordPress now flies along again and the bottlenecks that prevented me from composing and finalizing posts are now gone. As a result, you might receive updates from entries that were drafted 2 or even 3 years ago, as I bring them online. Apparently, I have 29 unfinished drafts that have been sitting in various states of completion, but usually because simple picture handling used to grind my server to a halt. Likewise my motivation. Hopefully, this will help me fulfill my annual new year’s resolution (annual because I vow to do the same thing year after year) — to do a better job of keeping in touch with friends and family. Wish me luck!
In the meantime, feel free to browse around. Register on the site if you want to leave comments. Or to correct my grammar. The photos and videos have been scaled to web-resolution. If there is a particular file that you’d like at full resolution, just let me know.
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