Pretty much anything computer related except for Apple Computers, which has its own category. I run a custom desktop computer with Windows XP for video gaming and anything requiring a lot of power, and an Acer Aspire One netbook that I take with me for work. I also sometimes talk about PC news.
Since the last post way back in May, my computer hasn’t changed much. Back then I added the Razer Mamba mouse and Megaloden Headset.
The mamba has been amazing, like spectacularly good for a wireless mouse. Its only problem is battery life. I’ll often leave it on and leave for a 4 day trip at work and come back to find it dead. It’s not a huge deal since it can easily become a wired mouse by plugging it in. My only real disappointment is that as soon as I bought it they came out with a new mamba, all stealth-apple style. I don’t think the new one is vastly different though, it has some fancy lights. I will try to resist the temptation to buy another one.
The Megaloden headset is alright. It’s bulky and takes up a lot of room in my suitcase when I took it to DasLAN. I don’t like the fabric ear covers, compared to my Bose Triports, but the Bose has no microphone. The mic is alright when I’m at home in a quiet environment, but was almost worthless in the noisy environment of Quakecon. I’ll probably keep them because the market for them is pretty small.
My only big PC news is that, after 9 years, I’ve finally bought a new case for my computer. Since high school, I’ve rocked an old school Lian-Li PC-60 or something. I have pretty high standards for my computers, it turns out. I wanted a silver case to go along with the Apple Cinema Displays which narrowed me down to about 5% of the total case market. Go ahead and try to buy a nice looking silver case, I dare you. You can’t do it anymore. Your computer these days must be black, which is funny because in the past nothing was beige and you could never find any black. We kinda went past the goal of customization and ended up back where we started. Anyways, I considered buying a dead Apple PowerMac G5 and gutting and modding it to make a PC from it. Not only extremely troublesome, it would limit me to one DVD drive and wouldn’t be very upgradable.
The bar by which I’ve always measured PC cases has been the Maximum PC “Dream Machine” for 2002. The case is a Cooler Master ATC-110, which went out of production soon after. I’ve occasionally searched for one, usually to never find one, or find one in bad condition. However, I recently came across one on ebay in basically flawless condition and so I pulled the trigger and bought it. I’m pretty excited to get it. It’s almost a full tower, so it’ll be larger than my current computer, but it doesn’t actually go to LAN Parties anymore. I have my Macbook Pro for that now, so I don’t have to worry about traveling with it much. I like the way the door covers the drives, and I have plenty of USB ports on my keyboard and monitors so I don’t need them on the case. Hopefully I can put up some images when I get the computer built. It’ll be fun to rebuild the computer, I never get to do that anymore it seems.
I considered buying an i7 setup to make it like a whole new computer, but the Core 2 Duo is still fine. Maybe next year for Quakecon (or whatever we end up doing).
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# Roots of the synchronization
root = /Users/username/Whatever/
root = ssh://username@192.168.X.XXX//mnt/Disk/PathTo/Wherever/
# Paths to synchronize
#path = current
#path = common
#path = .netscape/bookmarks.html
ignore = Name {._*,.DS_Store,Thumbs.db}
I don’t have any real substance to talk about at the moment, so here are some new house pictures of the computer room. The gray wall paint is awesome and we have shelves and curtains up now.
I promised in my last tech post that this entry would continue, and hopefully conclude, my journey towards the perfect Network Attached Storage (NAS) system. The primary reason I want to use one is to stream TV Shows and Movies to my Samsung 40” LCD TV in my Living Room by means of my AppleTV. It also serves as a backup location for my important files, and is now capable of performing server related tasks that were previously handled by the AppleTV. This is my 4th attempt at a NAS solution for the Spitfire Network, the most expensive, the most capable, and finally…the most likely to survive. For a quick NAS summary:
| Eclipse (Gaming PC) | Too loud, power intensive, resource hog no redundancy |  |
| Apple Extreme Wireless Station + USB HDD | Ran drive continuously leading to failure no redundancy |  |
| Linksys NAS 200 | Ridiculously Poor Performance, Noisy |  |
| Atom / FreeNAS | Best of all worlds but expensive, large footprint |  |
I tried all the cheap alternatives to buckling down and forking over the cash for a decent NAS / Server but in the end the only lesson is one we should all be familiar with already - You get what you pay for. In trying to be cheap, all I got in return was lost data (Apple Base Station) and unusable performance (Linksys + hosting files on my gaming pc). Not that a FreeNAS solution has to be expensive however. These days many people have a spare PC in their garage or something. All it needs to be given new life as a FreeNAS server is:
x86 Processor
128 MB ram
32 MB disk space
Network card
The catch is that your hardware has to be supported by FreeBSD, but I’d be willing to bet that if it’s anything similar to a commercial computer, you are all set. I looked into the option of buying a cheap, used PC for under $100 on craigslist but in the end I decided to build a new PC specifically for a few reasons:
1. I knew exactly what hardware it would have, with warranties.
2. By using an Atom chipset it has power consumption comparable to a netbook, which is preferable to a power hungry P4
3. The Atom D510MO chipset is fanless, making the entire computer almost silent
4. Gigabit Ethernet (up from 10/100 on the linksys nas)
I bought a nice looking glossy black case from Newegg, which was running a pretty nice deal on it as long as I signed up for spam, and sold the Linksys NAS for $5 profit. I had the disk drives already from the linksys raid setup, so in the end I just had to buy the case, atom board/cpu combo, and 1 GB of RAM for it. Not too much cost to expand its use greatly, but if you were starting from scratch it might be a big investment. So give it a try with your old garage PC first. I paired the computer with a 23” Samsung 2333HD Display, which is kind of a misnomer. The actual NAS is capable of displaying a typical Unix/bsd console, but it’s really meant to run in a corner or a closet without a keyboard or monitor hooked up. In fact, there is no GUI display included. The monitor is really displaying video from my macbook pro, which makes the computer give the appearance of a hackintosh. It’s also a nice 1080p HDTV. The actual Atom computer runs without being plugged into the monitor, unless I’m debugging something.
So I spent all this money getting decent hardware, at least the software was free! You’ll need to decide between a “full install” or “embedded” install. The full install is like a typical OS installed onto your disk. The embedded install is copied to a USB Flash Drive which is then booted off of, and it runs FreeNAS in a virtual disk created out of RAM. The full install is easier to customize, but the embedded install is blistering fast and allows your hard drives to spin down when idle. I went with the embedded because it’s very important to me for the idle disks to spin down. This saves wear and tear, heat (remember it’s fanless), and power ($). You can’t repartition the boot drive, so I had to add another flash drive to run my custom server apps like rssdler and python. Running these apps off the main data HDDs would prevent them from spinning down (they’d never be idle). Flash drives are cheap SSDs and it works great for NAS purposes.
After the initial console setup, you can unplug the monitor and control the system via a web interface on any other computer on the network. This makes it very easy to choose services, set them up, add disks and shares… You really don’t have to be a pro to get it to work reliable and consistently. I followed a tutorial, added my two hard drives as a redundant software RAID 1 array[Edit 11/30/10: This has changed, see: FreeNAS Update: Rsync and Unison], and added windows and apple file sharing in less than 20 minutes. Performance was a ten-fold increase over my Linksys NAS, averaging about 40MB/s transfers which I’m guessing is limited by gigabit ethernet. But don’t take my word for it, here’s some fancy looking pictures:
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My Atom server blows away any of my previous NAS attempts, and I’m finally happy and able to not worry anymore about my hard disks crashing and taking all my stuff with them like the great hard drive crashes of 2003. It’s far quieter and faster than the Linksys NAS, and I can run apps like rssdler off the server alone. This means the AppleTV, which is already slow, doesn’t have to use its few resources on downloading for me anymore. It uses waay less power than my gaming pc did when it stayed on to serve files, and adds the redundancy of two drives, protecting against hardware failure. The loss of one hard drive wouldn’t make me lose any data. The web interface is easy to use, and since it’s a mini-atx form factor, it’s got plenty of room for additional hard drive space so I can expand it over time. The Linksys and many other NAS devices only support a maximum of two disks. And did I mention how quiet it is?
The only disadvantages I could think of was the additional cost for having an additional computer. If you have an old PC and could throw it in the closet or something, this disadvantage may not mean much for you. Also, the mini-atx form factor eats up some desk space for me, but I want to keep it close to my other computers. Again if you threw it in a closet you might not care. I’m decent enough with Linux/Unix/bsd commands that I didn’t have any trouble setting it up, but if you’re a windows lover then buying a commercial NAS might be up your alley.
So in summary, I am totally blown away by FreeNAS and all it’s capable of. I tried everything else, but sometimes when you need the job done right you just have to do it yourself. My next tech post will probably be about AT&T U-Verse, how it’s integrated into my new house, changed my network, and reacted to my experiments.
Check out the free software at: http://freenas.org/freenas
While I was in town for Aviation Day 2009, my dad wanted to go “netbook hunting”. He has seen my Aspire One D150 and since they are the greatest thing ever, we headed out to best buy in CF to look. My biggest concern was to find him something that would fit his needs more than a toy. He is still using my Dell L400 as his primary computer at home, which is getting old and slow. I tried to explain to him that computers themselves don’t really slow down, but he keeps trying to run newer versions of programs like AOL that eat up more and more of his little 128mb of ram.
Best Buy had a few notebooks and I was surprised to find a whole section devoted to netbooks, but their selection was not that great. I was able to show him some of the main differences in netbooks like screen size vs resolution, glossy vs matte, SSD vs HDD, etc but they still only had a few brands. I also tried to show him smaller full notebooks, and explained the sacrifices made by netbooks like the CD drive. I also showed him the low end macbook but he was pretty set on the netbooks, so we headed out to Micro Center in Lyndhurst.
I have to say I much prefer Micro Center to Best Buy, sorry Will. They have a better selection and the salespeople aren’t quite as obnoxiously pushy, although they are still hovering around. Micro Center did have everything BB had and more, from a $150 Eee PC to a holy-shit Alienware mainframe replacement. He wanted portability to take it to a class at CSU, so the main things we looked at were battery life, screen size, and we stuck with HDD versions.
In the end we were left with two netbooks with 1024x600 10.1” screens, an MSI Wind and the Acer Aspire One D250 (the slightly bigger version of mine). In the end, the deciding factor was the keyboard. The Acer won out because the MSI keyboard had shrunk the comma, period, and forward slash keys, among others. Once I pointed that out, he noticed and didn’t like that. The computer is basically the same as mine, with the same CPU/RAM/HDD combo I have. His screen is a little bigger at 10.1” vs my 8.9”, but uses the same resolution. I found that while using his, I preferred the 10.1 screen to my own. I still like the small physical dimensions of mine though, for it to fit in my flight bag. He also had nice features like bluetooth, a 6-cell battery for 7 hours of use, and mouse buttons that are under the trackpad! A little jealous…yeah maybe.. I’d recommend it to anyone looking for a traveling laptop.
Since we were in the area, we took it up to CSU to make sure he could connect to the university wireless and get him set up with their provided antivirus. Getting on the network there was highly unusual, so I’m glad I could help him out there. And it was fun throwing the help desk off when we showed up to get the antivirus CD. They kept asking me for my ID when he was holding his, of course they assumed I was the student! Since they only provided the software by CD, we had to use a lab computer to copy it to a flashdrive. He seemed comfortable with the computer and I think it will work well for him.
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I am a professional pilot, tech enthusiast, and avid PC gamer. I post about all sorts of things, but you can click a category above to see what I like the most.
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@Trickedge yeah unfortunately magic getting more and more expensive these days... 8 days ago. |
