Matthew Davidson | Lexington KY

linux systems administrator | tropical fish | music enthusiast

Matthew Davidson | Lexington KY - linux systems administrator | tropical fish | music enthusiast

Update Amphiprion Ocellaris Clownfish

Amphiprion Ocellaris Clownfish

It’s been a while since posting about our little Amphiprion Ocellaris clownfish addition Nemo and thought I’d post an update.

Nemo follows Nicole around the tank and never wanders far from her side. Both settle down for the night in the same part of the tank and seem to be really happy.

As I mentioned before Nicole’s “attitude” really seemed down and we were actually worried we might lose her, but her attitude has improved dramatically and both are eating well and now both come and eat from my fingers.

I posted this video. Let me know what you think?

For my next article I’ll provide details about the tank size, water parameters, corals, lighting and filtration.

To Learn more about Amphiprion Ocellaris clownfish visit ocellarisclownfish.com.

Mikrogeophagus ramirezi – German Blue Ram

Mikrogeophagus ramirezi – German Blue Ram

Been a while since I have posted but several weeks ago we made a trip to Cincinnati Ohio to visit Monfort Aquarium.

While there I spotted some German Blue Ram cichlids that were always a favorite of mine. While taking in all of the outstanding stock at Monfort Aquarium I learned that the German Blue Rams were bred and raised in the shop. So at that point I was sold and they netted me out a really nice pair.

German Blue Ram cichlids are found in the savannas of Columbia and Venezuela in slow flowing water that tends to be on the warm side. I have always kept my temperature in the low 80-82 F and a pH as low as 5.

Check them out and let me know what you think?

To learn more about German Blue Ram cichlids head over to wikipedia and check out their page.

Adding Amphiprion Ocellaris with an Existing Amphiprion Ocellaris

Amphiprion Ocellaris

Adding Amphiprion Ocellaris to a Tank with an Existing Amphiprion Ocellaris

For our reef tank we bought Amphiprion Ocellaris clownfish pair that we bought 14 – 16 months ago. The fish were wild caught which was my first mistake, but they were nice size and seemed to be doing well in the dealer’s tank. In a short amount of time I discovered that one of the clownfish was not eating, and we tried various things to get him going, but never had any success. We tried live food, fresh seafood, to all the frozen and flakes to no avail and he soon wasted away.

Due to other commitments I have never been a fan of keeping fish in my reef tank. It just makes tank maintenance so much easier but when you have kids they want to see Nemo, and why would you have a reef tank if you were not going to keep Nemo?

So for all this times, are remaining clownfish, now named Nicole has had the tank to herself. She swims around, eats, and has become very personable. But lately Nicole has seemed a little listless, and the water parameters are good, the corals are thriving, and she continues to eat, but she just does not seem to be the fun fish she had been. This got me to thinking that since she was wild caught that being alone in this tank and without the stimulation of other fish might be the problem, but what to do.

Scouring the Internet for information on adding another Ocellaris turns up all sorts of advice from adding another to not adding another.

What I seemed to discover was that the key was to get another Ocellaris but it has to be as young, and as small as possible, and fortunately for the hobbyist aqua cultured Ocellaris are available and can be found really small.

We found Nemo 2 swimming with ten other Nemo’s in our dealer’s tank, at the right price and we picked out the smallest one.

We also picked up a tablespoon of live brine shrimp to put into the tank at the time of release to keep Nicole from focusing on Nemo.

We left Nemo in the bag and floated him so Nicole could see him for a while and they seemed to be checking each other out, and after acclimating the temperature, pH, and salinity in Nemo’s bag we added the shrimp to the tank. While Nicole started pursuing the shrimp we took Nemo from the bag and placed him into his new home.

They seem to hit it off with Nemo following Nicole around and trying to eat the live brine shrimp as they blew about the tank.

We kept tabs on them throughout the evening and it seems Nemo is tagging along with Nicole who already seems to be reenergized.

So as of today the addition of the smaller Amphiprion Ocellaris seems to have worked, but we will have to see what happens over the next couple of weeks.

I still have some questions about this situation that seem to be impossible to answer.

Does the larger Amphiprion Ocellaris, in our case Nicole, just not care about the new Amphiprion Ocellaris (Nemo) because he is so small? Nemo is maybe ¾ of an inch where Nicole is close to 3”.

Is Nicole a female? Because she was alone without other Clownfish is Nicole a female? If she is not is Nemo big enough for her to begin the process of turning into a female?

More information on keeping Amphiprion Ocellaris:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Clownfish
http://www.aquaticcommunity.com/clownfish/ocellaris.php

Tropical Fish that have spawned for me: South American

Tropical fish spawns with successful rearing of fry.

South American Cichlids:

Small list of tropical fish that have spawned for me in my aquariums. These lists are from memory and may not include all of the fish that have spawned for me, but the tropical fish listed were bred with great success and provided a lot of fun and a lot of learning.

  • Apistogramma agassizii
  • Apistogramma baenschi
  • Apistogramma cacatuoides
  • Mikrogeophagus ramirezi
  • Pterophyllum scalare
  • Symphysodon spp.

Notes on a few of the Tropical Fish:

Symphysodon (Discus Fish):

These tropical fish took so much money, time, and energy but were very rewarding. My only success were with Wattley Turquoise, Red turks, and Pigeon types like Tangerines. I might one day revisit Symphysodon, but I will only work with the “wild” caught types.

For those who are unfamiliar with Symphysodon (Discus Fish):

Discus (Symphysodon spp.) are a genus of three species of cichlid freshwater fish native to the Amazon River basin. Discus are popular as aquarium fish and their aquaculture in several countries in Asia is a major industry. I suggest starting with a lot of reading and avoiding fish bought from large retailers. Due to Symphysodon (Discus Fish) popularity in the hobby you should be able to find a local breeder, or a breeder online that can supply you with quality fish.

Read more about these Tropical Fish at wikipedia.

Apistogramma:

This is a genus of fish from all over South America that might number over 100 species of fish. These tropical fish are fun to spawn and a lot can be learned about cichlid behavior without all of the problems that come with other cichlids. Another interesting thing about some of these cichlids is the different ratios of males and females when the fish are kept in different water parameters.

Apistogramma’s are not seen that often in Lexington KY fish shops, and when they are, they are usually mistreated by being lumped in with other cichlids. A few trips to pet shops around Lexington and I have seen them housed with everything from Angel Fish to African cichlids. If these shops would hire people that cared more about the stock they would house these fish with the smaller tetras where they would really stand out.

Learn more about Apistogramma here.

I will write on the others when time allows.

Check Hard Disk Drives with Smart Control (smartctl and smartd)

Check Hard Disk Drives with S.M.A.R.T.

Where S.M.A.R.T. came from:

S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology) is designed by IBM.  SMART was created to monitor the disk status by using various methods and devices (sensors) and a single ATA hard disk may have up to 30 such measured values, which are called attributes. S.M.A.R.T. consists of the tools smartctl and smartd.

S.M.A.R.T. is included on nearly all hard drives in use today and through the use of the smartctl command can be used to check the health of hard drives in your system.

It is through these tools that modern operating systems are able to show you the  temperature and total power on time for hard disk drives.

Unfortunately S.M.A.R.T. is not a standard and for IDE and SATA drives some manufacturers use different attributes. This is not true for SCSI drives where the failure prediction attributes are standard.

S.M.A.R.T. attribute contains the following fields; Identifier, Data, Threshold, Value, Worst, and Status Flags. The current status of a hard drive are constantly measured.

So run a set of SMART tests before your drive ends up like this:

Destroyed Hard Drives

Destroyed Hard Drives by thejoshmeister

Basics of S.M.A.R.T. (smartctl) use:

#smartctl -a /dev/sda (different systems use different identifications)

Print all SMART information for drive /dev/sda

#smartctl -t long /dev/sda

Begin an extended self-test of drive /dev/sda. You can issue this command on a running system. The results can be seen in the self-test log visible with the ‘-l selftest’ option after it has completed.

Find the smartmontools (smartctl and smartd) for Linux and Windows here.

On my old blog I wrote, copied and pasted detailed information on the smartctl command.

Another in depth article including issues problems with smartctl can be found here.

Running Plymouth Boot Splash on Fedora Linux

Running Plymouth Boot Splash on Fedora Linux

How to set-up and change Plymouth boot splash animations.

The Plymouth boot splash is an application which runs early during the boot process that provides a graphical animation and entertainment while the operating system loads.

On my personal set-up I have not noticed a decrease in boot times running Plymouth boot splash animations and it is much more pleasant, and wows your non Linux friends, than watching the usual messages fly by, but if you think something is wrong with the boot process, then press escape to see the messages.

Plymouth requires both Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) and kernel-based mode-setting (KMS) to run properly, and I find that on Fedora the commands listed below will take care of getting you started.

So let’s dive in and verify Plymouth is installed or get it installed.

Fedora users can login as root on the command line list installed themes.

#plymouth-set-default-theme –list

  • charge
  • details
  • fade-in
  • hot-dog (Fedora 17 default)
  • solar
  • spinfinity
  • spinner
  • text

If this comes up empty or not found run the next command as root.

#yum install plymouth\*

You can find more Plymouth themes by searching in the package manager. In KDE open the Apper utility and search for Plymouth.

Now from the command line as root we  can choose our theme.

#plymouth-set-default-theme solar (solar is from Fedora 14 and it is my favorite.)

Now to finish. Again as root run the following command.

#/usr/libexec/plymouth/plymouth-update-initrd (this step can take a few minutes.)

Reboot! On the restart you will see the animation that you chose.

To learn more about Plymouth:

Read the Plymouth documentation on freedesktop.org.

Plymouth’s page on Launchpad.

Plymouth at the fedoraproject.org.

Lexmark lays off how many in Lexington?

Lexmark to lay off 500+ in Lexington Kentucky.

To be honest I worked at Lexmark for a short while and I also live in Lexington Kentucky, and for the most part it was a positive experience, but the news coming out from Lexmark has not been very good.

Aug. 29–Lexmark, one of the leading manufacturers in Lexington, announced Tuesday that it was closing its faltering inkjet division and would lay off more than 550 workers in Central Kentucky.

Read more at Bloomberg.

And to be honest I’m not sure how Lexmark can pull out of the current funk it finds itself, but I’m wishing the best to my former colleagues at Lexmark.

 

Buddy Guy ‘Living Proof’ Review

Not much of a review but a thought that just occurred to me. I just noticed since adding this “album” to my collection and uploading to Google Play that I keep going back and listening to this over and over.

Buddy Guy’s vocals and guitar playing really shine on this set.

To read some real reviews head over to The Chicago Tribune’s Turn it up: Album review: Buddy Guy, ‘Living Proof’ review or to Victory Music’s Buddy Guy: 74 Years Young review.

Lexmark 4Q Earnings Down 21%; Restructuring Unveiled

The Lexington, Ky.-based company has been phasing out its consumer business in favor of higher-performance laser printers and inkjet printers for businesses. It has also sought to offer more electronic-document management software and capture contracts to outsource clients’ printing needs in entirety, as its industry grapples with the reduced relevance of printing in the digital age.

Lexmark also unveiled restructuring plans Tuesday that it said will save $15 million this year and $28 million a year beginning in 2013. It said the restructuring will increase its focus on higher usage business platforms.

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