Recently in Stuff Category

Back in 2005, I started recording a podcast with a few friends and ever since I have been a regular podcast listener. This past year in particular I listed to a lot of podcasts. I spend a lot of time working in the yard or on the house and the whole time I have my headphones on with my iPod. These are generally 30 minutes to 3 hour blocks of time so I look for nice, long conversations and I find these podcasts are a great way to stay informed and let my brain roam.

All these podcasts can be found in the iTunes store.

Video Games

My favorite, for fun topic, is video games. My picks in this area have changed over the past few years as Computer Game World went out of business and the 1Up Show lost its talent.

Weekend Confirmed - I didnt realize how much I missed Garnett Lee until I started to listen to this show. I love the three regulars and look forward to this podcast each week. The music and the tailgate are a nice addition.

Giant Bomb - My favorite podcast in 2010. I like the guys. I like San Francisco. We seem about the same age. They crack me up and continue to entertain me with their random comments. I could do without the Nintendo releases though.

Gamer's with Jobs - The title made it seem like it would be a hit but I dont resonate with any of the cast. Worth a listen if you have already heard the first two shows and want to hear more about games.

News

NPR Planet Money - This was the first non-video game podcast I listened to. Its still informative but I've cooled on it since the financial meltdown faded into history.

Economist - I love to hear about America from non-Americans and the Economist delivers. They have many different "shows" but I enjoy them all.

KCRW to the point - My favorite radio talk show, period. A great host who gets the best guests and then have an intelligent conversation about everything. I dont get it on the radio anymore so I am glad to hear it in a podcast.

Misc

Backstory with the American History guys - Every time I hear one of these podcasts I am amazed with how little I know about actual history. Love it!

Sound Opinions - I just started to listen to this show. Its the first discussion I have ever heard about music and once I heard one, I wondered why I had never looked for it before. Got me to start buying music again.

HBR Ideacast - Not frequent but some interesting topics.

I had been hearing about this Stieg Larsson book for a while now. Angela happened to get it from the library so I started to read it...

And I could not put it down! What a pleasant surprise.

An interesting story, likable characters, an easy to read style (even translated) but this book stands out for me in two ways.

One, it is the first murder mystery I have read where no one wants the police involved, ever. Now that network television has just become a vehicle for delivering cop shows and commercials, it was kind of odd to read about solving crimes without involving the police.

The plot events call into question the whole idea of justice. As American's we are so (at least now) obsessed with the government delivering justice, being the ultimate arbiter of justice, this was an interesting concept. Particularly because it was free of the 2nd-Amendment "the gob'ment's gonna git us!" paranoia of the TEA party ilk. No shoot outs, no car chases, just cold blooded murder and normal people trying to figure out what happened.

The other piece that stood out for me was a small one but it really resonated with me because it just never gets talked about here. World War 2 and the complex relationship Europe had with Hitler. After a devastating economic depression, Hitler and the Nazi party promised a future of prosperity and pride. Hitler's militarism created jobs for people working towards a common goal and there was an environment of mixed excitement, pride and fear throughout the region.

Pride and excitement? America has white-washed history into this simplistic evil vs good parable that is nothing like the reality of Fascism in the 1930's. We have also glossed over the fear and risk people took then when faced with a simple question: Can I save my child from the Nazi's? In a culture that spends most of its brain power deciding what cell phone to get, this kind of life and death choice is chilling.

If the USA has forgotten about the dangers of power, I was glad to read that at least European's still remember. (A lesson lost on most of the USA when Bush declared war on Iraq a decade ago.)

The only reservation I would have for the book is that it is very real. Murder and torture and abuse - today. And all of it against women. Another important topic that continues to happen because we are too uncomfortable to talk about it.

Great book.

I was looking for new sci-fi authors and Amazon recommended Charles Stross. Never heard of him before but now I am glad I did. They must have some crazy drugs in England because this book blew my mind.

Singularity Sky is in the category of "super far out in the future science fiction" and it delivered. I have no idea how accurate the content was but I was sufficiently convinced and impressed with the author's breadth of biology, astronomy, physics, engineering, political theory and creativity. I didnt try to understand too much though; just sat there and enjoyed the ride.

The main characters are likable and amenable to sequels. Except for the heavy political theory, the story was an easy read that reminded me of Tad Williams' Otherland series where anything you can imagine could happen. And does.

Not my favorite book perhaps but I am glad I read it and I will be looking for more books by Mr. Stross.

As frustrating as it is when something on your computer does not work, its a little rush when something actually does work.

Years ago I bought a Logitech MX900 mouse with bluetooth for use with my mac. Logitech never supported it with drivers for the mac so there were various 3rd party apps that made it work. Eventually I gave up and put in the shelf.

A few years (and a few Macs) later, I was getting tired of my corded Mighty mouse. I was never able to sell the MX900 so I thought I would give it another try.

I am happy to say that the Mac's bluetooth control panel in Leopard discovered the mouse right away and it... just... worked. As a wireless bluetooth device.

At least mostly. The mouse works but it is not detected in the Mouse/Keyboard panel nor does it show as a bluetooth Mouse.

Since it does not install itself as a mouse, it doesnt really work as a mouse should. The main buttons and the mouse wheel plus the two buttons the Mighty mouse supported work and are re-mappable (as long as I have the Mighty mouse plugged in). Not perfect since there are some other buttons on the MX900 I would like to use (HOME and END are nice as is FORWARD and BACK) but I will take what I can get!

No thanks to Logitech.

I have a recent copy of the Logitech Control Center and it does not recognize the mouse as a bluetooth device OR when I plugged the base in via USB. Logitech, you are useless. You dont even support your own products!!

What is the most important part of any computer?

I suspect most people would say the CPU but I think that is just the result marketing dollars from Intel. The right answer is the monitor.

Think about how you actually interact with a computer. The four parts of a computer you interact with are the monitor, keyboard, sound and mouse. If you are like me, you stare at a computer monitor 10+ hours of a day.

While CPU's get a lot of media attention, the monitor really doesnt. In truth, I knew very little about monitors other than resolution and refresh speed and those are pretty minor features in LCD monitors.

Turning a bunch of numbers into an image is tough work and the quality of monitors varies considerably. In fact, the technology of monitors is pretty amazing.

I had a 21" widescreen monitor from Gateway (FPD2175W) for several years. I paid about $650 for it new. It was 1600x1050 and a great monitor for me.

But after getting a decent 24" full HD monitor at work, it was time for a change. Just think how productive I would be with a full 1900x1200 desktop?

A larger monitor would also mean I would need a faster PC to play games. More pixels means more power required for the same game performance. Which is a bonus because I was itching for a new PC anyway.

Thus began another intense research project for a new 24" monitor. It was hard to find scientific monitor reviews but one of the best sites I have seen is TFT Central, a European website. Based largely on the strength of this review at TFT Central, I ended up purchasing an HP LP2475w.

Backups. How I hate worrying about backups. Backing up your computer data is about as exciting as watching the San Antonio Spurs play basketball but if you dont do it, you will regret it eventually.

Part of me has been looking at totally remote solutions where all my data is on someone else's machines. Google Apps is a great solution for this and I may give dotMac another shot this year. Another part of me has been trying to centralize data at home so that instead of backing up a bunch of individual PC's, I just back up the server and access the data on it with our personal computers.

At home, we have tried all kinds of solutions for this personal computer/server/backups setup. Sadly none of them have really worked that well. We have two personal computers and a large library of music/photos/videos to backup as well as a mix of Windows XP and Mac OSX systems. It is a pain.

A few years ago, I built a file server running linux with a RAID 1 card and 2 drives but it was noisy and large. Then I tried to build a solution using Apple's Airport Extreme with a USB drive but it was too slow and did not provide any data protection without RAID drives.

In June of 2007, I tried another solution and we have been living with it for the past year. Instead of another file-server, I bought a tiny dedicated piece of hardware that is designed solely for providing storage on a network, also called Network Attached Storage (NAS).

The product is called the DNS-323 by D-Link. Basically it is a tiny enclosure that fits 2 SATA drives and a (loud) fan and includes a super low power, (limited) linux server. You insert two SATA drives of your choice, connect the box to your ethernet and use some simple web-based control software to configure it. It shows up on your network using SAMBA so it works with both Windows and Mac OS.

Costs from Newegg (June 2007)
Item	Cost
DLINK|DNS-323	$180
Seagate HD 320G|ST 7K 16M	$80x2= $160

For about $300, this device promised to be cheaper and a lot easier to use than a dedication server and more functional than the AirportExtreme+USB drive solution.

A NAS solution provides a central place to back up data and to share data. It also provides protection from hard drive crashes by using RAID 1 - two drives that are mirror copies of each other. It is low power, small and quiet. If your needs are simple, the DNS-323 is the perfect home file server solution.

Initial Impressions

It was tricky to configure from my Mac without using the Windows software but I muddled through. (And noticed that even the PC software does not work properly if you use something other than WORKGROUP as your workgroup.)

I was excited about the iTunes server, until I tried it. Although it was very easy to get set up and all our computers found it immediately, the server is limited. One, it does not allow the fancy album-art viewing mode that iTunes now supports. Two, it does not seem to allow playlists. The later issue a critical problem for us so I will not be using the iTunes server and instead have our local iTunes programs mount the drive for music.

Performance was acceptable but not amazing, especially with wireless.

A year later

At this point, the only thing we use the box for is a location to backup files to. It is basically a slow file server. I gave up on trying to use it as a printer server. I periodically try (and give up) on trying to use it as a media server with my HTPC (Windows XP) or PS3.

A regular problem is that the device falls off our Mac network. I dont know if this is a MacOS problem or a DNS-323 problem but it is a major pain. If the drive does not show up in the Finder, good luck. Eventually I figured out a way to find it with the "Connect To Sever" dialog and the totally cryptic command: "cifs://purplevision;keith@dlink-nas/". When it does connect, the drive name is fixed and unchangeable.

The DNS-323 is not an iTunes solution for our music. It is also not a solution for video. After buying a PS3, I began to desire the ability to store movies on a large drive and then watch them on the PS3.

I was particularly disappointed to find that the PS3-to-DNS-323 did not work at all even though both products call themselves "media servers". Although the PS3 could see the DNS-323, it could not access files on it at all because of DLNA errors. At that point, I tried to figure out what DLNA was and I was forced to test the waters of tech-stuff no normal human-being should have to. Using Google, I found a bootleg BIOS for the DNS-323 in Germany and I updated it. The situation improved but still is not a usable solution.

In the process of BIOS troubleshooting, I found a whole community of hackers that get the linux part of the little DNS-323 to do all kinds of things. Sadly this is beyond my abilities and way beyond my desire to spend time on it.

There is now a even newer official version of the BIOS from D-Link (1.05) but the big giant warnings from D-Link that updating my cause your drives to be unreadable has prevented me from trying it.

Closing

Although we have been using the DNS-323 for a year now, I have never been totally thrilled with it. It works but is limited in a number of ways. Recently I have been hearing about another product called Drobo which has me curious.

If you are looking for a simple file server with RAID1 protection from drive failures, I can recommend this product. Especially if you dont have the $bucks$ for the Drobo. If you want a real media server, as I do, then I would suggest more research.