Hacker's ramblings

This is a weird one. Beginning of this year Qnap made a choice to EOL my NAS-box. I posted about that at the time. Well, that happens. Its just that my current box works for me and all, I don't necessarily need a new one.

Without announcing anything, I got a firmware upgrade for it! Actually, I got two. Initially I assumed to be hallucinating or something. On a 2nd time I had to confirm my original blog post, that EOL really did happen.

Today on their EOL-page (or Product Support Status) https://www.qnap.com/en/product/eol.php they state:

Model: TS-419U II
Hardware Repair or Replacement: Full
OS and Firmware Updates and Maintenance: 2017-12 (QTS 4.3.3)
Technical Support and Security Updates: 2020-12

What the ... happened? Now they're announcing (or NOT announcing, informing) to provide full support until end of year 2020. Well, maybe I should go purchase a new one anyway.

The summer here in Finland has been extremely warm. Given that, I've mostly not been inside doing computer-things, but outside doing outdoorsy things. Here we get couple good months per year, if we're lucky, so I decided to enjoy them fully.

Besides SUPping around the Lake Saimaa, I got a DJI Phantom 3 quadcopter to test out. At the time of writing, I already returned the loaner.

The thing looks like this, when the controller has my iPad attached to it:

Here is some sample footage:

YouTube link: https://youtu.be/w-ISgv08ad0

Just getting the thing flying is pretty easy, but controlling it in a sensible fashion so that the 4K-camera would actually capture a beautiful video is very hard. The above video is a first run and it has tons of camera operator mistakes in it. Some of my un-published videos I did do 3-4 runs to get it right. Still, flying the thing was tons of fun.