Month: August 2017

The eli4d Gazette – Issue 035

Tech Pick

I came across an interesting article covering a comparison of PHP frameworks. The comments at the bottom of the article are also quite interesting, to say the least.

Personally, I’ve chosen Laravel as my go-to framework. I’m learning it by applying it to a personal project. It is well covered through excellent documentation, great video tutorials, and a good book. I’ve written about Laravel on my blog quite frequently.

Media Pick

This is tangentially related to media through the MP3 format.

Recently I bought a Love & Logic audio book (great approach for new and experienced parents). My main listening program is the Overcast podcast player. It has great fast playback options. The audio book I got had 10 small MP3 files and the Overcast site allows for individual uploads of files which is a pain. So I figured it would be easier to merge all of these MP3 files into one large MP3 file that I could upload into Overcast.

I tried two approaches that didn’t work: Toast Titanium and using the ‘cat’ command. Looking around further I came across a StackOverflow thread that mentioned the ‘cat’ approach and a utility that did work. The utility was: MP3Cat.

It’s a Go program that works on Mac, Windows, and Linux. It works as follows on the command line:

./mp3cat -o merged.mp3 file1.mp3 file2.mp3 file3.mp3

It works amazingly well, and I highly^100 recommend it.

Drobo Blues (part 3)

On my fourth return I was finally able to exchange the Drobo 5N for a Drobo 5D. The three 5N units that I tried never worked on my network and Drobo support were unable to help me. The 5D is a massive external hard disk with lots of redundancy, so it needs to be connected to a computer. It is also simpler than the 5N and far from being a NAS.

What I’ve learned (and this, of course, is my extremely narrow experience/opinion):

  1. Drobo support is great (for the 5D unit I got extra Drobo Care for free). They tried to help me, but there’s not much they could do with consistently bad Drobo 5N hardware.
  2. I can never trust Drobo’s NAS systems (apparently the “Drobo Difference” does not apply to me). Maybe my case is a complete fluke, but the brand new unit I bought and two additional units did not work whatsoever on my network. If/when I get around to another NAS purchase attempt, I will try out Synology and/or Qnap.

Thoughts? Feedback? Let me know: @eli4d on Twitter