Yep, so what next?

No, that’s not NAP with a silent Q. It’s the Network Attached Storage box that I was investimagating awhile back. I forgot to mention that we did end up buying it! It’s a QNAP TS-201 with a Samsung Spinpoint 500Gb hard drive hanging onto all the data. I might put up a formal review at some stage, but so far, here are my experiences with it:

- Setup was dead simple. Turn it on, plug it in, format the drive using the web based interface, and start dumping files onto it! Easy peasy.

- Speed is not too bad. I haven’t done a proper speed test, but my I think it’s running at about 10-12Mb/sec on average, which is fair. Not brain-burningly fast, but quick enough for now.

- The iTunes server works a treat! Dump all your tracks into the QMultimedia folder (I created a subfolder called ‘Music’) and iTunes will find them all via your Shared music library. You do have to turn the iTunes server on first though, using the QNAP web interface.

Haven’t done much apart from that. I’ve set up the Twonkymedia server, but I don’t have a client to use with it! I tried to use Windoze Media Player 11, but apparently the only version of it that can talk to a media server is the Vista version. It’ll have to wait.

Anyhow, so far it’s all good. No problems, setup was a doddle and it’s pretty fast! Gets a thumbs up from me!

Hmm.. if all you do is read the last bit of that heading, it looks a bit off! However, what I’m getting at is, that this Saturday evening is filled with brain-mashing. I’m trying to write a research paper at the moment, and my sieve-like noggin does its best to offload all of the more useful facts and figures (faf’s) that would help me in my quest.

So, lacking in any better ideas, I decided tonight would be a good night to restuff my head with those same useful faf’s that I constantly forget.

Mind you, I personally consider it more than reasonable that I forget the nitty gritties of ’spectral coherence’, ‘autocorrelation’ and ‘wavelet decomposition’. Aren’t they just things you learn when doing your geeky uni course and then forget? Never to see again?

Apparently not…

Speaking of research, I submitted an abstract to present some of my work at a major conference in San Francisco. I’m still waiting to hear if it got accepted!

It’d be a nice excuse to go to the US mainland for the first time and be able to claim it all on tax

Night!

Shopping for computer hardware is tricky. As soon as you move beyond a basic level of comprehension, you become overloaded with concerns about futureproofing, feature/cost ratios and that sort of thing. It was much easier when all you cared about was how much it cost!

Right now, I’m shopping for a NAS: Network Attached Storage device. Basically, it’s a hard disk or disks in a little box that you can connect to the network, and use it as a shared hard drive that’s always available, no matter whose computer is switched on or off at the time.

So far, there are three serious contenders:

1.) Maxtor shared storage II 500Gb

2.) Buffalo Linkstation Pro 500Gb

3.) D-Link DNS 323 enclosure (can take two disks) and a 500Gb drive.

Each one has its definite pros and cons. They’re all pretty zippy (according to the reviews I’ve read) but each one has a definite something that the others don’t have, which I’d like to have!

- The Maxtor has an iTunes server, and allows USB connection of extra disks. However, it’s HD is built-in, meaning you can’t upgrade it later on.

- The Buffalo is a screamer, but has no media serving capabilities, and also doesn’t support swapping of disks later on.

- The D-Link comes with two empty drive bays, so it’s completely upgradable, *and* it has built-in media serving capability, but the USB port doesn’t allow adding extra disks that way, as it’s set up to recognise printers only. So far, this gets my vote because of the empty drive bay feature, but not being able to plug in our existing 500Gb USB disk is a major letdown. It’s a waste of existing gear!

Why can’t someone just make the perfect device?

Ooerr, I’ve been having a bit of a play with the themes available in the WordPress dashboard. This one is nice, don’tcha think? Let me know if it sucks… I never did claim to have a solid sense of style!

Ok, so apart from the fact that I’m now ‘mooning the world’, I’ve chosen my new WordPress theme because it provides a convenient tabbed interface for any pages I add, without filling up the side navbar with pages, sub-pages, sub-sub-pages.. you get the idea.

I’ve put up a page to document my frustrations and successes with Microsoft Access, the database application everyone loves to hate.

Check it out, mate