• My new NAS

    March 27, 2011 / No Comments

    SynologyI’m a huge fan of NAS drives. For those not so geeky people, a NAS is a networked attached storage device. It’s basically a hard drive attached to your network that any computer can access. Some are just basic drives, and others add a lot of other features.

    I use to have two NAS drives on my network. I had an old one that I bought probably eight years ago. It was a cheapy that was basically just a drive that I used to back all my computers up. It has since died. My other NAS was a FreeNAS server I built from an old P3 computer. FreeNAS is great open source NAS software, that adds a lot more features than my cheap one had. It supports almost any protocol a person would want. I backed up my Mom’s computer, and was able to access a lot of my files over FTP. I shared music on my network with the iTunes server, and dabbled around with other features. It was great.

    Once my cheapy NAS died I needed to upgrade the storage in my FreeNAS, and since it was an old computer with no SATA ports, instead of messing with a SATA card, I thought it was time to upgrade to a different NAS, so I bought a Synology NAS.

    I bought the DS211 which supports two drives, and am loving it so far. It it loaded with features that I am just starting to explore. I love that it has iOS apps. I can now stream my music, view my photos, or any of my files right from my phone or iPad. I know the Drobo is a popular backup device, but for the price and features, I think Synology has them beat.

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  • I finally got an iPhone in my hands

    March 24, 2011 / No Comments

    I FINALLY got an iPhone. It’s been a long four years, but I finally got one. I have probably complained far too much online about not being able to get one. With the lack of At&t service it just wasn’t available. I was all set to get an Android based phone, which are also pretty good, until Verizon got iPhones last month. Thankfully our contract was up this month, so I only had to wait a month.

    It almost wasn’t going to happen yesterday. During our checkout at the Verizon store their system went down. We did some more shopping in the mall, ate dinner, came back and it was still down. We sadly went home iPhoneless. When we got home, I basically sat on Twitter until I heard when their system came back up. Thankfully it came up around 8:15, so we had 45 minutes to get back to the store before they closed. So last night was spent syncing and getting it all set up.

    I’m a little bummed that I’m not going to get any experience playing around with Android, but I know the iPhone is the phone for me. I have an investment in apps, and pretty much live in iTunes. iTunes on OS X works great and isn’t the piece of crap that the windows version is.

    I love that I finally have a phone with no carrier branding, or apps on it. Unlike Android phone, I will get the newest iOS updates when they come out. I will always be able to be on the latest OS until my phone is not powerful enough to run it, and then it will be time for a new phone anyway. Since it’s probably the most popular phone, I also have a huge selection of accessories along with the biggest app store. The down side is the app store isn’t as open, but I can always jailbreak, and probably will eventually.

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  • My Mom’s lack of science knowledge baffles me

    March 21, 2011 / No Comments

    So this weekend I was at home and like usual my mom was glued to Fox News. Pretty much the only version on the news my Mom consumes is Fox’s version. She pretty much buys into all the scare tactics they use. She now believes that everybody in Japan will have cancer within a month. We were watching Fox News and they we talking to two supposed nuclear experts. They let the first guy talk all his doom and gloom worst case scenario stuff, then the other guy started talking more reality and common sense, and of course they had to cut him of for a commercial break. It’s that kind of journalism that drives me nuts, and everybody does it.

    I have been really interested in the science behind the nuclear disaster in Japan, and have read a ton about it. It’s scary and could be bad, but if handled properly the short term higher levels of radiation are harmless.

    In the past I have tried to explain to my Mom the difference between ionizing and non-ionizing radiation. Non-ionizing radiation has yet to be found harmful. It doesn’t carry enough energy to affect atoms. That is why there is slim to none chance that cell phones cause cancer. My Mom still believes that we are all going to get brain cancer and she hates the fact that I keep my phone in my pocket. Of course nuclear radiation is ionizing, but people can handle low levels of it just fine without increased cancer risk.

    When it was discovered that spinach and milk in Japan had nuclear materials in them her fears escaladed even more. I told her it was great that they discovered that so they can keep an eye on it so it doesn’t get worse, but the amounts they found probably are harmless. I think I read if they drank the contaminated milk for a year it would be the equivalent of a CT scan, and eating the spinach would be 1/5th of a CT scan. I tried to explain to her that there is background radiation all around us and some of her food probably has radioactive elements in them. That was before I knew about bananas, so I was right.

    Then she said “Nuclear radiation is much worse. It’s not like the radiation the Sun puts out.”

    I then did a mental facepalm. I didn’t feel like breaking the news to her that the Sun is basically a giant nuclear reactor. My Mom is smart, she has her masters degree, but her lack of science knowledge is baffling.

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