Gadget Wisdom - Lifestyle

Early this morning, famous podcasting personality Leo Laporte, Head TWIT over at the TWIT Network, posted on his Leoville blog a post titled Buzz Kill. Laporte had switched his microblogging over to the underappreciated Google Buzz, which he used to update Twitter. However, he discovered today, August 22nd, that none of his Buzz posts had been public since August 8th. As he puts it,

“Maybe I did something wrong to my Google settings. Maybe I flipped some obscure switch. I am completely willing to take the blame here. But I am also taking away a hugely important lesson. No one noticed. Not even me. …But I feel like I’ve woken up to a bad social media dream in terms of the content I’ve put in others’ hands. It’s been lost, and apparently no one was even paying attention to it in the first place. I should have been posting it here all along. Had I been doing so I’d have something to show for it. A record of my life for the last few years at the very least. But I ignored my blog and ran off with the sexy, shiny microblogs.”

You can read the full text at his blog here, but it does emphasize the thought processes we’ve been exploring as we learn about the federated social web. We have had some conversations with Evan Prodromou of Statusnet, among other people, as we try to understand this, and he was kind enough to send along some recommended reading since the last time we blogged about this.

We should own our own brand, and build its value at a site controlled by us. If you have an email address at a domain you control, you may have someone hosting it, but you can move it whenever you like. You have control. If you have your identity, and our email addresses and social media are part of the identity we build online, then the content is in your hands. Social media becomes a means of distribution, rather than a destination.

That is where the federated social web concept comes in. In a federated system, there are distinct entities that control parts of the system, but those parts are connected with agreed-upon rules to make a pleasing and usable whole. The World Wide Web is such a system. Email is such a system.

Statusnet instances aren’t for everyone, admittedly. Ours hasn’t attracted as many connections as Twitter, but gives us access to a different crowd. But what about blogging? Let’s take Gadget Wisdom.

1. We write a blog entry.
2. Our RSS feed updates. We use Feedburner to assist with that, but that isn’t required.
3. We tweet the post to our Twitter account and dent it to our statusnet instance, so people know what we’re talking about. We still own the conversation.
4. Our site draws in anyone talking about our tweet as comments on the post, thus bringing the discussion back to the blog.

Everything comes back to us. We are integrating social media into our site, not going out and relying on it exclusively. It is part of the reason that we don’t participate in Facebook but we do in Twitter. Twitter and similar microblogging paradigms works as a news delivery system, and can even be an alternative for RSS. Facebook has its status updates as well, but it is part of a bigger system that sees to tie everything together. We prefer to do that ourselves.

In case you didn’t get what we are saying…microblogging, social media, and sites such as Twitter, Jaiku, Friendfeed, Plurk, Pownce, Google Buzz, etc should be a content delivery and enrichment system, not a content creation system. Now, we disagree with Leo that they are “an immense waste of time.” We just believe that he should change his approach to social media. Let’s all bring our identities under our control.

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SIPDroid is a free VOIP client for Android that uses the standard SIP protocol. The VOIP calls will go over the data connection, be it 3G or Wi-Fi, and thus not affect your minute count.

According to their FAQ, it “uses G.711 A-law to transmit voice which needs about 80 kBit/s in each direction. This corresponds to a total of 1.2 MB per minute. A video call needs approximately twice as much. When optionally enabled for all calls Sipdroid uses GSM codec to compress to about 30 kBit/s in each direction resulting in a total of 0.5 MB per minute.”

You can use a + in a phone number in order to indicate to the Android device to use the secondary as opposed to the primary choice. You can set either the phone or SIPDroid to be the primary method of dialing. Emergency calls will always go out over the phone line.

SIPDroid prefers you set up a free or paid account at PBXes. This allows you to have all the advantages of a PBX and is already set up for connecting calls anonymously to Skype and GTalk. You can, if you use them, set a feature that will, if the data reception is bad enough, transfer the call to the phone’s cell number. You need to set up a gateway to the traditional telephone network(PSTN) from the PBX for this to work, however.

For services like dialing onto the regular phone network, you do have to pay money. But not to SIPDroid. To a VOIP provider(more on that at some point). PBXes also offers a paid account with additional features, such as a better voice codec and support for more lines.

If you don’t want to go out on the traditional telephone network, you can use the five extensions offered in the free version to talk to other people logged in(only 2 simultaneous conversations at a time, however).

Since we didn’t want to pay any money for a test, we opted to sign up for a free number with IPKall. They offer dial-in only numbers in the 206, 253, 360, and 425 area codes that will auto-forward to a SIP account you designate. We had some issues as we tried routing a call from them to PBXes and then to a phone on a wi-fi connection logged into the PBXes server. A few times it didn’t seem to connect, and when it did, there was some lag. But it was free and when it worked, it was clear. We also experimented with SIPGate, which offers a free dial-in phone number as well.

We could see a lot of potential uses for this technology. VoIp is nothing new. We’ve played with it before. But, think of the possibilities. A little private network your phone can always be connected to that will alow you to communicate airtime free? Let’s go a step further. We know of someone who lived on a college campus with good wi-fi coverage and considered having an iPod Touch and Skype or such instead of a phone.

As public wi-fi and open wi-fi becomes more available, and with fewer people calling and more people using data…we could imagine a future where people opt for a data only connection and the occasional SIP call. The possibilities are endless.

And we’ll have more on playing with SIP later.

It has come to our attention that people might be confused about the category based subscription. If you are subscribed to all posts on Gadget Wisdom, the feed is www.gadgetwisdom.com/feed and will display as Gadget Wisdom.

If you subscribed to one of the sections, ie Android.gadgetwisdom.com, you will only get Android themed posts. If this is your intention, please continue to subscribe in this manner. Otherwise, please change over. For convenience, ever page now shows an All Posts subscription option.

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Last time, we discussed some of the things we’d learned about Status.net and the OStatus standard. Now, our understanding is far from perfect, but we keep trying to learn more. This is some of our attempt to summarize it.

So, here we are once again looking at how other services play with Status.net. We’ve covered the fact that Twitter doesn’t. Although, since Twitter has an API, a bridge has been created that imports the tweets into your timeline as notices. There is a Facebook bridge as well, but we have yet to test it, as we aren’t Facebook users.

But many sites do support standards that Status.net can use. A service has to be PuSh enabled. OStatus is reliant on the fact that most sites noawadays put out an Atom or RSS feed. The problem is real-time notification. That is where PubSubHubbub(PuSh) comes in. It is a simple extension to RSS and Atom feeds for real-time subscriptions. Basically, the feed declares a URL for the Hub server. Now, instead of the subscriber server/reader repeatedly polling the site to look for updates, it can register with the hub to be notified of updates.

That is how OStatus is built. Each site builds a feed of updates and uses PuSh subscriptions to send relevant updates to other sites, and each site is responsible for pushing those updates to the correct user. The rest of OStatus is also built on top of Atom feeds, including extensions to describe social activities like replies, following, user profile information, etc. As their wiki describes it: “the real beauty of it is that at this point we[OStatus] already have something useful, without anything StatusNet-specific. In fact you can already subscribe to someone’s public Google Buzz feed as an OStatus remote user, and they haven’t done anything special for us!”

So, there is one example. You don’t need to be on Google Buzz. If Google Buzz supports PuSh and OStatus, you can subscribe to their feed. Let’s go a step further:

• WordPress – All the blogs on WordPress.com have PuSh enabled. If you run a WordPress blog elsewhere, you can set up your site as a Hub using a plugin like PushPress. If you are using Feedburner with Pingshot enabled, PuSh is already enabled and no plugin is needed. Sound useful? Why not subscribe to this blog, which is PuSh enabled, by entering the URL into the Remote Subscription option on your identi.ca/status.net account?
• Tumblr – We tried the test-tumblr that the Status.net wiki used and that was recognized, but a random Tumblr site would not work.
• Google Buzz – As mentioned above…we tried a few accounts and it does work. It is, of course, one-way.
• Posterous – It would allow us to subscribe to a random posterous account we picked.

Status.net is working on some workarounds for additional integrations, but any established site can become PuSh enabled and thus support subscriptions in status.net. With a little extra work supporting the standard, they can support activity streams, replies, and other user events without any change in the user experience, except opening it up to interaction with any other site that supports those standards.

Imagine this a few months/years down the road if people support it. It would be like Email. Anyone can self-host or sign up for a social media account on whatever server they want, but anyone on any other server can communicate with them.

We’re in on the ground floor. We’re on our status.net which imports Twitter and lets us subscribe to any PuSh enabled site. And since we run it, we don’t have to worry about the service being discontinued or falling out of favor, because the next service is likely to be…if not immediately compatible, eventually bridged.

In the meantime, check out supporting PuSh on your site. Next time, we hope to have more to say about WebFinger…or how to tie your identity to a website.

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• So You Want to Take Control of Your MicroBlogging (lifestyle.gadgetwisdom.com)

If you haven’t heard of Twitter, you may have been living under a rock for the last few years. If you aren’t quite sure what it is, then you are not alone. People who have Twitter accounts aren’t quite sure what to do with them, and some people will disagree on the point of Twitter.

Twitter is the most popular example of microblogging, although Facebook, extremely popular, is mostly such a service. Twitter limits updates…or tweets to 140 characters. This limit has made URL shorteners popular. There are advantages to the brevity of microblogging, and inserting URL allows you to elaborate elsewhere. We use it not only to interact with those who share interests, but as a real-time substitute for RSS. RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, is the standard for subscribing to blogs.

So, although some have agreed with us, it is important we don’t miss important information. Many Twitter clients only go back so far. And your Tweets are held closely by Twitter itself. Twitter can cancel your account at any time…they don’t need a reason. While you can appeal it, they owe you nothing. You aren’t paying for the service.

As Backupify, a service that backs up cloud services to its site for you, and provides them in downloadable form, stated, “Imagine if your phone company behaved in a similar fashion, disconnecting your phone number(s) because it didn’t care for the phone conversations you were having. Of course, that could never happen — and not (just) because of government regulation. You pay for your phone service, so the phone company has a certain financial incentive to care for your business. Facebook, Twitter, and most web apps are free. Zero dollars buys you zero service level guarantees. Never forget that you have access to Twitter and Facebook only so long as it is convenient and beneficial to them.”

Now, we do have an account with them, but we chose a different route. Being open-source enthusiasts, we looked for an open-source solution. We came up with StatusNet. It is a microblogging server written in PHP that implements the OStatus standard. OStatus is an open standard that allows people on different social networks to follow each other. It supports PUSH notification.

Diaspora, if it gets off the ground, is a proposal to replace Facebook with an open distributed platform. Anyone could run the software, thus allowing them to control their user data locally. Their local software would interact with other people’s to form a decentralized social network. It would thus work like an email address. Anyone could host your email…but you could choose to contract with someone to do so, and thus ensure a greater responsibility on the part of the provider, or choose a free option. The idea sounds great, and we wish them luck…

Unfortunately, without interoperability with existing services, it will likely occupy the same space as Identi.ca, the most popular and the original Status.net service. There are a lot of people happily on Identi.ca, but it is not a mainstream product.

We already had an Identi.ca account, but now we are running our own Status.net server. And Status.net supports a Twitter Bridge. It allows you to automatically send your notices to Twitter, send local “@” replies to Twitter, subscribe to your Twitter friends on the service, and import your Friends Timeline. The last is not enabled for Identi.ca, but allows you to import your friend’s tweets into your timeline. So, the Status.net server imports the Twitter data, which means that you have it on a server controlled by you.

Now, running your own server somewhere may be a bit too much for you. So Status.net offers single user instances, as well as private community instances. It is extensible with plugins. So any functionality you want could be built on top of it, or interact with.

Using the open standards it supports out of the box, you can subscribe to people from your status.net account who are on Google Buzz, Tumblr, Posterous, WordPress.com, Livejournal…etc.  140 characters isn’t required. You can set your instance to support 140 characters(Twitter Standard), or more or less than that.

Interoperability will hopefully lead to longevity. Even famous Twitter account ShitMyDadSays, has migrated to a Status.net instance. Having accounts on every single service can be confusing. If you can have an account on one service…and link to people on other services, isn’t that better?

We tried to ask a few questions of the founder of Status.net, in regards to how people were using the Twitter integration specifically, but the question was a bit open-ended, and thus we did not quite get all the answers we’re still looking for. Either way, it’s fun to play with.

More on this to come. In the meantime, any questions?

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Recently, several members of the Wisdom family got themselves Android(TM) based phones. We all dived wholeheartedly into the application phone lifestyle. The term smartphone isn’t quite accurate, and the primary advantage of these types of phone are all the possibilities inherent in being able to run applications to do almost anything with them.

We’ve always been fans of the open platform.  For all the wonderful things iPhones can do, there is still a lot of things that are restricted by Apple‘s management policy. In some cases, the Android is perfectly capable of doing those things, but no one has yet written an app for that. But in that regard, the Android will be catching up as its popularity increases. Or so we hope.

But there are adoption problems. A recent survey indicated that 73% of Android users are male. However looking at the numbers, as is sometimes the case in technology, all numbers show a larger percentage of male users. The Blackberry, which has widespread adoption, is not listed. Verizon’s big Android push this year has put the technology, which was previously niche, into the mainstream. Every provider is increasing its Android phone offerings. We’ll be interested to see how the demographics evolve in a year.

Sometime in the near future Android will offer a Flash plugin. And while we find Flash is less than ideal as a platform, its everywhere online. This will spur more Android adoption in the future.

To that end, to celebrate our newfound enjoyment of the Android platform, we’ll be introducing some Android posts here on Gadget Wisdom. Look out for them.

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As the third part, and for now, the final part, of our multipart series, Better Know a MythTV configuration, we profile the second of our MythTV frontends. This frontend is the older of the two, and is hooked into some home theater equipment for a more immersive experience.

Now, with all of these systems, bear in mind they’ve been designed, redesigned, expanded, etc. But we are, by no means wealthy over here. Some concessions have been made, and parts upgraded and replaced as financial and practical considerations demand it.

The current system was built when HDMI was still at the upper end of hobbyist grade. Now, many computer monitors and amplifiers include HDMI switching. This system was designed originally with component video in mind, at the cusp of our upgrade to HD programming. It is set up for expansion, and likely will be, piece by piece in the future.

As you can see, we’ve continued our modular Ikea furniture theme from the other setup. Originally we did have a more conventional audio rack here, but switched to these two separate pieces. The router, the Silicondust HDHomerun, and the modem are actually stored in the bottom of one of those cabinets, and the glass door hides a tape deck and could hide additional equipment. An IR remote control would actually work through that glass.

Both rooms where you see the frontend setup were designed as possible backend locations. The whole goal of a redesign we implemented over the last two years was to allow us to rearrange the equipment in a variety of ways depending on changing need. For example, we moved a file cart to the right of the setup to show the wire hookups for relocating the backend if needed.

The receiver is located on the right, and is an inexpensive Yamaha that incorporated all the features we wanted at the time. On top of the frontend you can see what looks like an old style radio. It is that and a record player. It adds to the character of the room, in our opinion.

Then we finally get to the frontend itself. The case seen is long since discontinued. The closest current model is the Antec Fusion NSK2480, which is a newer version of what we actually have. Like all of the others, this system also has an Asus motherboard.  There is another CrystalFontz 635 LCD panel in this system, this one in Green. We prefer the blue, which is why we got it for the second panel.

The processor is an AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 4200+, which was retired from the backend during a previous upgrade.  Both frontends have 2GB of RAM. RAM is fairly cheap nowadays anyway. The remote is an RF Snapstream Firefly.

The screen here is a 23″ Westinghouse LCD with DVI and Component inputs and a maximum resolution of 1600×1200, mounted on a swing arm. This is one of the pieces we are hoping to expand soon into a larger, higher resolution with HDMI inputs, which will certainly, if nothing else, allow a thinner cable down to the computer.

You can see under the monitor the Left, Right, and Center channel speakers, the right speaker nestled in between Tux the Linux Mascot and the Time Machine, which we recently bought on a whim. The configuration of the room, a long rectangle, is not 100% conducive to a home theater design. To the left of the image is a window, and thus the positioning of the monitor and speakers is the only way to make sure viewing isn’t on top of the monitor, and that optimal viewing and sound is accomplished from either the couch, placed on a long wall, or a chair placed in the center of the speakers.

The rear speakers are not pictured, but are placed in the traditional isosceles trapezoid configuration, oriented according to the limitations of the space, again planned to surround primarily a person seated in a chair in the middle of the room. Under the shelf that holds all the speakers pictured is a through-the-wall air conditioner, which is why the units that hold the equipment are not placed against it. As mentioned, some of the decisions were made due to the configuration of the room. If anyone thinks they might have a better idea, please suggest it, as we’ve yet to figure out a superior layout.

So, that is it for now. We certainly have expansion hopes for the future, including to migrate to a monitor with an HDMI input, and possibly the receiver as well. Someday we’d like to try an Atom-based frontend, for the size of it.

Hopefully, you’ve gotten some ideas for systems of your own. What we’ve learned over the years is to build simply, but build room for expansion and redundancy. Any questions?

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• MythTV Rig: Part 1 – The Backend (gadgetwisdom.com)

As part of the first of our multipart series, Better Know a MythTV configuration, we profile our MythTV Backend.

Our MythTV backend has gone through a lot of changes over the years. The first iteration was in a yellow server case on wheels. We went through a period of overbuilding, and the yellow version of the case was $17, the other colors were all closer to $100. We probably have a picture of that iteration somewhere, and will post it if it is ever found.

The current iteration, pictured left, is an Antec Three Hundred Mid Tower Case. This model is rather unique in that the power supply is at the bottom of the case, as opposed to the top. It was the first tower we ever had with that configuration. As you can see in the picture, there is space for 2 120mm fans in the front, right in front of the hard drive bays, and there is a washable filter in front of them. The top has a 140mm fan. and the back another 120mm fan. We used the quietest fans we could, but it can be heard as a low hum in the room. There is room for a side exhaust fan, which was have not installed.

There have been several generations of interior boards since the beginning. The current is an Asus board. The thing runs 24 hours a day, so we opted for one which, according to reviews, had high quality capacitors and good build quality. The computer runs headless, so we opted for a board with an onboard graphics card. There was no need for a discrete one when it was never used.

The processor is an AMD Athlon 64 X2 5600+. At the time of purchase, it was the highest speed AMD processor we could get that used 65W of power. Everything else used 95W or above. For our next generation, we are considering going to a higher speed, but low power Intel processor, but we’ll see where the market is when we decide for replacement.

A powerful processor is not inherently necessary for a MythTV backend. If you have a video encoding device that does its own encoding with significant use of the CPU, you could run the thing off of a low-power processor. But if you want to transcode some of your files into a smaller format for long-term storage, it helps to have something that can handle the extra load.

The system has 8GB of RAM, which is overkill, but the RAM was relatively cheap, and easier to install than the processor. Then we get to the hard drives. There are two 500GB drives in a mirroring RAID. So, in the event of failure, the system can go on. Only a small amount of the space is needed for the operating system and the MythTV database. The rest stores important data, our music collection, and any long-term video files.

To store active uncompressed recordings, we are currently taking advantage of MythTV’s storage group function. It distributes the recordings between two Green drives. These drives spin at 5400RPM and are supposed to be more power efficient. One is a WD 1TB and the other a Samsung 1.5TB. Because of the design of MythTV’s storage groups, files can be moved between any of the directories named in the storage group without pausing the server.

This means if one of the drives shows pre-failure, which we recently had, we can move the files to the other drive and take one of them out of commission. We also ensured that the system has an ESATA connector, which would allow us to plug in an external drive and add it to the storage group to keep the system running if we need the extra space.

The computer has two optical drives, and this was originally planned to allow for having one drive used to burn a rewriteable DVD on a time schedule, which would be rotated manually out of the system and placed in backup. That never happened, and at some point in the future, one of them will be replaced by a blu-ray burner, to allow for larger optical backups.

Support for firewire channel changing is what convinced us to dive in fully into MythTV. Originally, the output of the cable box fed into a PVR-150 capture card. Then, firewire recording became more reliable, so the PVR-150 was mostly retired. Finally, when the cable company changed its software and both capture and channel changing became unreliable, we switched to the tried and true infrared channel changing and high-definition capture using the Hauppauge HD-PVR box.

As having only one cable box and HD-PVR would mean we couldn’t resolve any conflicts, we have a Silicondust HDHomerun hooked directly into the cable lines, tuning any unencrypted channels, which are mostly local and public access stations. And, in the event cable goes down entirely, we hooked a line to the old roof antenna, disused for over a decade, and hooked it into an inexpensive card that could tune Over-the-Air digital. Digital Broadcast is often higher quality than the same channel over the cable lines, due to compression, so if you are an HD purest, you probably want to try to supplement your cable with digital broadcast.

The backend, as referenced before, also downloads video programming via MiroBridge and integrates it into the recording menus. This may change as time passes. Speaking of software, our system runs a non-graphical installation of the latest edition of Fedora, currently 12. We periodically update the system after a new release of Fedora has been released long enough for us to feel comfortable upgrading.

We upgrade by making a backup, then moving all the data from the RAID to the recording drives, wiping the RAID drives, installing the new OS, and moving the data back. The whole process takes a few hours, and most of it is waiting for the installation or copy to complete. Most configuration is already setup and just needs to be restored.

Here’s a wider shot of the system. Last year, we redecorated the room in early Ikea. The backend, codenamed Freshpond, sits on a rolling file cabinet called a Mikael. There is a sound baffling like material under it to prevent scratching, which is a cut piece of Ikea drawer liner. One of these days we may switch to a desk blotter or such for aesthetic reasons. There are both pros and cons to having the system off the ground. Next to it, you can see a printer and one of the two MythTV frontends currently operating. Behind that glass door is the HD-PVR and the cable box.

More on the first frontend, seen in the picture, in Part 2.

Like many, we constantly think about refinements to the system to improve it. Sometimes this is new hardware, sometimes consolidating redundant systems, and sometimes software improvements. For example, in addition to the once hourly check for new internet video from the RSS feeds we monitor to import, a separate job also searches for audio podcasts we have told it to monitor and downloads them.

Ultimately, like any hobby, maintaining the system takes on a passion. But for those of you looking to build a system, it really doesn’t take that much day to day effort and the basic setup is simple. More advance concepts…well, you can always ask someone who has done it. Like us, for example. Comments welcome.

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• Bad Luck Comes in Threes – Detecting Hardware Failure (gadgetwisdom.com)

It would be very easy if we could blame Geektonic for this. After he featured a MythTV system, we agreed to offer him a profile of our primary MythTV setup. It seemed like a good time to dust the system both inside and out, in preparation for some fresh photos.

We have a dedicated MythTV backend which doubles as a file server. We exercise basic power saving functions on it, including CPU frequency scaling. We discovered some hardware problems during the cleaning process.

There was an odd grinding noise that gradually appeared. Originally, we attributed it to a cable hitting against one of the case fans, but there was no such cable. We used velcro cable ties to bundle our cables together just in case. The server scales the CPU to its normal specs only when it is under load. We’d been having crashes whenever we tried any video transcoding. Finally, we tied these two problems we thought unrelated together. The fan was failing, and could handle cooling, but not when the computer went full throttle, during which it gradually overheated till the built-in BIOS shutdown temperature is reached.

So we ran to the store the next day, bought a new CPU fan, and replaced ours. We’re always nervous about pulling off a long-running CPU fan, as the thermal paste used between the heatsink and the processor can tend to act, as the name paste implies, as a bond that could cause damage if you are not very careful in pulling it up. But there were no problems, and the CPU temperatures returned to normal.

Then, today, half a week later, we received notification of prefailure on one of the drives. As we speak, we’re moving data off of it. It will be removed, lashed to a different system, and a manufacturer low-level test mechanism used to check the drive. Either way, it is still under warranty and could be exchanged for replacement by the manufacturer.

It is said bad luck comes in threes, so we thought this was a perfect time to discuss how you can monitor and protect yourself from hardware failure. We’ll focus on these techniques for Linux users, but the idea applies to all systems.

• S.M.A.R.T.(Self Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Tool) -  A system built into every hard drive that monitors several variables to predict drive failure before it happens.
• Temperature/Fan – There are temperature and fan speed sensors in motherboards that permit monitoring of computers for overheating.

Here are, in our opinion, two very important things you need to enable if you are going to protect your computer. But should be enabled in the motherboard BIOS to start. If your BIOS has a shutdown temperature option, that if reached, will turn the computer off…enable it. Enable SMART reporting as well.

Smartmontools is available in all Linux distributions. Make sure it, or another SMART monitoring tool is enabled and configured to send you an alert if it detects anything. Smartmontools on one of our systems was configured to send an email to the root email account, which was local to the system, and rarely used. Make sure it is sent somewhere you will see it.

For temperature and fans, the standard is LM_Sensors, which may tae some tweaing. Check your estimated CPU temperature in BIOS, then boot and compare it to the one in lm_sensors. If they don’t match, you may need to tweak your settings. Make sure this also generates an alert when it reaches a threshold so you can take action.

We’re a bit mystified as to why features like this aren’t built into Windows, but many manufacturers do offer their own monitoring utilities you can install to monitor vitals. Either way, by setting up your computer early on monitor for these things, you can head off some catastrophic failure. Barring that…backup often.