Old Stuff Scrounging around as I move all my storage – Liz’s Birthday last year, and John’s.

Home NAS I got my NAS installed last night. NAS == Network Attached Storage in case you weren’t aware. I used the Promise ConnectStor naked NAS chassis, with 2 Western Digital 120GB Drives. I used a Raid 1 configuration, the default. So for under $1000, I have 120GB of fully redundant storage. I don’t need big whopping disk drives on my pcs anymore – not that the cost per pc is a big deal, but i am tired of forgetting what file is where. And I am tired of moving files from PC to PC when I upgrade. And of course I never backup so this gives me some improved reliability.

Coins I’m getting hooked on ebay again. Not buying so much, as just watching the action. I purchased some SLC Olympic coinage from the US Mint, and now I am watching all the Olympic Coin auctions on ebay. Lots of fun.

I used to collect coins as a kid and I still have the 76 Olympic Silver Dollar I bought up in Parry Sound that year. I guess I am kind of restarting my Olympic coin collection.

March Madness

Go Bucks! Good luck in the opening round today!

HBR Article

Good article on corporate social responsibility in the HBR this month. Unfortunately the web site won’t let you read it, you have to buy it or buy a copy of the mag. Worth reading tho.

Tubing

Liz’s whole school went tubing for the day yesterday – check out the photos courtesy of one of her teachers.

MP3 Receivers

My friends Sam and Brad are playing around with the SliMP3 receiver. Ripping all their CDs to a server in their house and then streaming the songs out to this receiver elsewhere in the house. A bleeding edge thing to do now, but the way we are all headed.

Broadband to the home

We are thinking about some business opportunities in the home networking space. I’d love to hear from you all about your needs and problems. Some questions I have:

- Do you have a cablemodem or dsl connection to the internet now? Are you thinking of getting one? - Do you have multiple PCs in your house that you want to connect up to the cablemodem or dsl connection? How are you going to do that? - Are you worried about security of your PCs once you put them on this cablemodem or dsl connection? What are you willing to spend to prevent virus attacks each month? Do you spend money today on virus checking software, or a virus checking service, or on a firewall? - Are you worried about your family’s use of the internet? What will you spend to filter out objectionable content for your kids? Do you spend anything today on this? - Are you worried about backup of all the files on your PCs? Would you pay for a service to backup your files over your cablemodem or dsl connection so that they were safely stored up on the network? Do you spend money today on backup software or a backup service? - Do you share photos today with your extended family? Why or why not? What is preventing you?

Thanks!

Gaming PCs.

I am getting ready to start spec’ing out and building my next PC. I am starting to collect inspiration – the alienware site has some cool machines but I fear I want more.

Tech Junkie also seems like a great source of inspiration. Quit a few articles on overclocking the GeForce 4.

CD Sharing Software

One great use for a cheap NAS that Rich has been talking about creating is to create a virtual CD Jukebox. I wonder how well this software works.

Update – a better list of potential software up on download.com when you search for virtual cd. Virtualdrive seems like an interesting commercial software option.

Salmon

One of my pet environmental peeves. We live here in the great Pacific Northwest, we have access to wonderful wild salmon stock for our tables. Wild salmon is an incredibly good food for you nutritionally, high in omega-3 acids.

Sadly tho we are seeing the widescale introduction of atlantic salmon farming here in the northwest. There is little good about this in my mind. Farmed atlantic salmon are not as nutrionally good for you due to the feedstock they consume; they are dyed pink so that they look attractive; they escape from their pens and compete with the local wild stock; they attract sea lions and seals which are then killed by farmers to protect their fish stock.

Farm raised salmon is cheaper for restaurants than wild salmon, so we are slowly seeing it creep into menus, even here in the Pacific Northwest. The restaurants are not particularly upfront about it – you have to ask very precise questions to make sure you are consuming wild troll-caught Pacific salmon, and not farmed Atlantic salmon.

Blogskins.

This is a great toy if you have a blog. Shows the power of the web services model.

Some current tech topics

My buddy Rich has a lot of great info up on his weblog about a variety of topics. Recently he and I have been captivated with low cost storage systems. He’s figured out the way to build a really low cost 120GB file server for your network, including full mirroring for disaster recovery purposes. Very cool, I will probably build one of these. With something like this on your home network, you don’t need to worry about buying big hard disks on your PCs in the future.

Another thing coming to your home network is wireless networking. This site is a great source of news and tech tips.

We’ve also noticed in compusa and other computer stores recently that routers and wireless routers for the home are flying off the shelves. For instance look at the top sellers at Amazon in this category right now. Everyone who has a dsl or cable modem connection is wiring up their house to get all their PCs on that connection – and wireless is often the way to go.

We’re excited about this. With all this networking getting deployed, there is the opportunity to provide the solutions and apps on top of this infrastructure that consumers really want. For instance, why is it so hard for me to share pictures with the rest of you? Why don’t new pictures that I take just show up on your home network for viewing?

More Idealabs

More press on the lawsuit we are a part of – MSNBC, internet.com, NY Times.

Fun

Try this out. http://www.wright.edu/~doelker.2/whatswrong.swf. if the link doesn’t work, try searching on google for “whatswrong.swf” to find a working version.

Ha.