Arik Yavilevich 
Those who followed my previous posts know that I am using a storage server called FreeNAS in a VMware virtualization environment. There are several benefits of why one would use a storage server rather than just a trivial storage solution. Two of such major benefits are snapshots and replication. In this article I will discuss … Read more
I am in the process of setting up a home storage server that will rely heavily on over-provisioning. You can read more about my previous VMware – FreeNAS – ZFS experiences in other articles. In this article I will conduct several experiments showing how available disk space fluctuates at various layers in the system. This … Read more
SoundWire is a nifty little app that lets you listen to sound that normally comes out of your Windows (or Linux) PC on an Android device. The main use of this for me is as “wireless headphones” for listening to YouTube or movies that the PC can play without really purchasing actual wireless headphones. The … Read more
Being very enthusiastic about Virtual and Augmented Reality, I have been following up with what has been happening in the industry. Those of you who are excited about VR and AR as I am should follow up with the below resources. Blogs In the textual category, we have two recommended sites that are specific to … Read more
If you have followed my previous article titled IO Performance Benchmarking 101, you know that I am a big fan of using CrystalDiskMark for measuring disk IO throughput. CrystalDiskMark is a wonderful tool, but being a GUI application it is unsuitable for using in an automated environment or when you need to test several disks … Read more
My main tech project in the last few month has been an all-in-one home lab. The lab is a high-end PC running a hypervisor, which hosts VMs and provides a flexible infrastructure for experiments. One of the main components of such a setup is a storage VM that provides storage to other VMs, while giving … Read more
Introduction VMware is a serious platform for enterprise-scale virtualization. VMware also offers a free ESXi hypervisor and plenty of individuals choose to use that for various small setups, such as home labs or home infrastructure. VMware maintains a list of hardware devices, which are compatible with the hypervisor. VMware products also implement many features and … Read more
Being an avid user of the Delicious bookmarking service for over 10 years, I have collected a significant amount (over 5K) of tagged bookmarks. Lately I have been doing some cleanups on this data-set. Being a big believer in automation, this repetitive task brought me to try the Delicious API. A few node.js scripts later … Read more
A year ago I had an unfortunate accident, in which I dropped a barely used 2TB WD Green drive. It fell from about 30cm height onto a hard surface, creating a noticeable dent on the outside. It stopped working on the spot, making unusual sounds and cycling down instead of operating normally. On the one … Read more
I have spent the last year programming almost exclusively in javascript using the node.js framework. Previously, my client side code was written in javascript (of course) and the server side code in C#. Having different languages and frameworks on both ends required more “plumbing” in the form of code that connects the two parts together. … Read more