Monthly Archives: June 2014

DSM 5.0-4493 update 2 on Synology 411slim

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A while back I was suggesting to avoid the upgrade to DSM 5.
Unfortunately I did already take this step some time ago and now I have to live with it and try to make the best possible with the 411Slim

Earlier today, after a complete backup of the critical data (300GB) to an external USB drive, I’ve made the upgrade to the latest release.
It took, as is usually the case with the “update” releases, two rounds of firmware upgrade: one to the base version (5.0-4493) and one to the “update 2” version.
The process worked smoothly and without hiccups and now the speed seems slightly improved, but still far from the 4.3 performance.

I keep my finger crossed hoping that future releases will give me back the old performance and that I’ll find no nasty surprises in this new release.

Why We Get Fat by Gary Taubes

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I love food.
A lot.
Really.

It is too bad that this usually goes together with consequences: extra weight and all the rest that then, in most cases, follows.

According to the author this is not necessarily always the case.
He explains in the book that it is more about quality of the food rather than about quantity: insulin production is the pivotal factor in storing energy as fat.

To support his point he shows several cases of populations with high fat ingestion that are not fat and that start to become fat once they start to use the “western diet”, groups of people with limited amount of available daily calories that become obese anyway, experiments with mice in laboratories.
His conclusion is that the foods that drive up the insulin production are the ones that will increase the fat buildup in a person.

On the basis of his findings the author suggests a diet that goes in the opposite direction of the ones promoted by the national health advisory councils in the western world: skip cereals (even unrefined), vegetables with high amid content and sugar while getting all the desired proteins, non-caloric vegetables and fat.

Sooner or later I’ll give a try at this shift of eating habits: most of the food I like better already falls in the categories he suggests hence I should be keep up with the change at least for a while.

My first (long) trip in the far east

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I recently came back home after spending 20 days on a business trip that touched Bangkok, Beijing, Seoul and Tokyo.

The limited time available and the need to carry over my business objectives severely limited my ability to fully appreciate the different cities.
I only had some time during the week ends (when I was not using them to move from one country to the other) and after the office time.

Walking around in Bangkok and Beijing was very easy.
Thanks to the availability of the city maps for my Nokia phone I never had issues to find specific places and the public transportation (boat, skytrain and tuctuc in Bangkok, subway in Beijing) was very affordable and not difficult at all to use for a foreign person.

Moving around in Seoul and Tokyo was more problematic, mainly because of the lack of offline maps on the phone (I had both a Symbian Belle and WindowsPhone8 devices).
I hoped to use an online service, but it turned out that the prepaid sim card available in Korea work only for local people or foreigners with a permanent or long stay visa.
Having no offline nor online map led to a limit in the freedom of walking around in Seoul and this got worse in Tokyo as the rain season had just started when I arrived thus making random searches for places very inconvenient.

Language was a barrier in many cases because only a small percentage of the people was able to communicate in english: this is not uncommon in Italy either; it is not a specific issue of the far east.
Yet communication somehow happened: pointing at items and using google translator (when there was some wi-fi coverage) helped a lot.

Even with all the limits of not being a full-time turist it was a very interesting and exciting experience and I would be happy to be able to get in that area again in the future.