• 29Jul 09

  Getting organized.

  Part of my own volition, part out of necessity.

  I've been waffling for a long time about buying a home server or making a home server - my girlfriend and I each have our own computers and the process of backing each of them up is a painstaking process as I run back and forth with an external hard drive and complete the process every couple of weeks or so. I could automate it, but that requires spending money. Then again, I have had failed hard drives before and the prospect of losing import files, photos, and videos is not pleasant. Especially with a kid on the way and the **bleep**-ton of photos that will come from that.

  I'm also on a budget, which means no more reckless spending. So I bought a simple little D-link DNS-323, which is basically a dinky processor and OS crammed in a metal box that fits two hard drives. It acts as a network drive (or drives), a print server, and will stream media to both the PS3 and Xbox 360 and iTunes on both our computers.

  It's kind of neat, although I quickly realized that while my router is competent when it comes to sharing the internet, it only does 100mbps networking - no 1000mbps gigabit. So the hard drive peaks at about 12MB/s for writing data...which means my initial 400GB backup took a LONG time. Almost as long as the 10 hour cloning of my old hard drive.

  During all of that, though, I quickly realized how disorganized all my computer files are. They date back to the mid-90s and are piled in folders that at the time seemed to make sense. Only now I have gigabyte upon gigabyte of random files dumped in random locations and the slow, slow process of digging through them all and figuring out where they belong is driving me insane. It's like what I do at work part of the time, since we also have files from previous employees and directors dating back to the 80s and there were no systems of electronic organization.

  Of course, once I do organize them I have to figure out a system of keeping it up to date or I'll just have to drive myself nuts again in a year's time. I also want to set up scheduled, automatic backups now, which is part of the reason I bought this little NAS. No more running around with a hard drive doing it by hand!

  • Posted Jul 29, 2009 11:35 pm PT
  • Category: General
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• 3Jun 09

  New PC (for the price of a PS3)

  Well, the price of my PS3 - $500CDN latelast summer when I was running around trying to score a Metal Gear Solid bundle.

  It's interesting to see the price of technology fall, as the last computer I built back in 2001 cost me about $1700CDN, which is similar in price to the laptop I bought three or four years ago. Now, for $500 I can put together something that's not spectacular, but surprisingly competent, and more than capable of playing current (and future) games, most of them at my monitor's native resolution.

  Oh yeah, remember the monitor I bought the other month? It's now become a shared monitor as my girlfriend's old computer moves on to her sister and we start sharing this new one and my old laptop. Naturally, I want to use this computer more as it's better for gaming, even if the screen resolution is a slight drop (from 1920x1200 on my laptop to 1920x1080 on the SX2210).

  So what did $500 buy me?

  -AMD X2 7750 Black (haven't overclocked yet, if I will I doubt I'll bring it up to 3Ghz)
  -Middling Gigabyte motherboard sans Crossfire, because two videocards is nuts
  -4GB DDR2
  -512MBSapphire Radeon4830
  -1TB Western Digital drive
  -Samsung DVD burner
  -Antec Sonata III case

  I stuck the 64bit release candidate of Windows 7 on there to cut costs for now(plus, it's awesome), and the entire thing is plenty fast enough to run every game I own at the monitor's native resolution with details cranked. I have no complaints.

  

  My only real gripe is that it looks like a $500 PC inside - although I'm not about to buy a fancy CPU cooler and fan to create the illusion of something more.

  

  

  • Posted Jun 3, 2009 2:04 pm PT
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• 3May 09

  [Too Many] April Pick-ups

  I normally don't buy much stuff - however, a weird combination of events led to just that this past April. Only one of them was unexpected.

  First off, a video camera. I wanted something cheap, something that would do full HD, and something that would take decent stills in a pinch. The Sanyo FH1 fit perfectly, with it only real flaw being a lack of optical stabilization. I also learned in the process that 'Full HD' is marketing speak for 'Not So Full HD,' or 1080i. The FH1 is one of the few cameras that does 1080p at 60fps. Of course, that also means the end files are huge and do not play back smoothly on any device other than the camera itself, or until I get a really fast computer. They look great hooked up to my TV via HDMI, though.

  

  The unexpected one was a monitor, as my girlfriend's monitor died and (coincidentally) Dell was having a one day sale on their new SX2210 monitor. So I bought it.

  Now I want one. It's 21.5", 1920x1080, and I really want to try my PS3 on it.

  

  (it's off because her default desktop is a pink flower and I don't want to post that in my blog)

  The last couple of bits are related:

  

  I'm not sure I'm sold on my console layout, but I don't have much more room to stick any of them without buying a rack to go beside my TV stand or stacking them in front of my TV, which isn't going to happen. And yes, that's still my HD-DVD player at the bottom, holding everything else up.

  I also bought a few games for it, since the ones the previous owner had were all VC titles. No More Heroes isn't open yet as I heard one of my friends found me a copy before I did, and I think it's used...so I can't return that one. It also sucks, as I have this one staring at me and I don't have the other copy yet, so it's taking a lot of willpower to not tear open the plastic.

  

  So far I've played Mario the most, and it's awesome. It was worth the wait to pick up a Wii, I think.

  Oh yeah, I also bought a few packs of this:

  

  The cheapest (well, almost) and tastiest part of my purchases, by far.

  • Posted May 3, 2009 12:12 am PT
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