Archive for January, 2009

Tranquil PC Limited BAREBONE SERVER.

Forget the Wind Nettop, this is the baby for me.  £360 including vat and delivery, the Tranquil PC barebones server provides you with 2G ram, 64 bit ready Intel Atom 330 (2×1.6GHz) Dual Core, 4 slots for Raid and 1 slot plain hot swap caddy, 1Gb lan, SiliconImage SiI3124 hardware raid, ~23dBA and only 29Watts power usage with a single drive.

Add Ubuntu server and it’s the perfect home NAS / web server / what ever you like.

I’m seriously considering this, along with a purchase of 2x 1Tb drives, to get me started. I’m happy to go with raid1 on those for now and add a couple more as I need more storage.

See the link above for more info….

I’ve had my g1 since xmas, santa was kind enough to bring me one. I love it. Ever since playing with the emulator in a two week of effort to submit an application for the competition, i have loved the os’s simplicity. It is a fantastic os, thought out and designed well from the outset. It is designed to be multi-lingual, multi-device and the choice to make it opensourced was inspired.
This is becoming more and more apparent everyday as we see android running on existing and new devices with comparitively little change and effort.
Eeepc, nokia tablets, and some great new devices at the latest tech shows mean that android is here to stay.

Android is going to be the iphone killer, i can guarantee that. The iphone took at least a year to get flash video playback and there is talk of an adobe port of flash to android being in progress. We wont even mention the lack of picture messaging or copy and paste….

So far the bit of android development i have done, in java which is a whole lot easier than c in my opinion has been fun. I just need to find more time to code or get a new job. Oh how i would love a job writing android apps….. somewhere hot with a good broadband connection…..

I currently have a thecus 2100 nas box with dual drives in raid 1 which is on 24/7 and is autobacked up to whenever my laptop or the wifes laptop is on.  It would be great to use this box as an SVN server, maybe a torrent server,etc but I really don’t want to connect it directly to the net / port forward, as I have no idea how secure the linux os that is installed on it really is.  Although firmware upgrades are available, they do not appear frequently enough to ensure that the box is secure and is not affected by the latest vulnarability.

A better solution would be to just run a pc, with unbuntu server etc on it, I can stick any services I see fit, apache, print server / svn etc. (thecus box uses the web server for the admin interface) but finding a small form factor, low power device that will take tw0 3.5″ sata drives is a challenge.

The MSI Wind Nettop might be it….. (Removing the XP crap first of course)

It supposedly supports 2x 3.5 sata drives, which is perfect and draws a measley 35 watts…..

The wonderful BBC have finally managed to bundle together a version of iplayer that allows you to download your TV for up to 30 days.  It’s still DRMed, using adobe flash and adobe air to give you the iplay application outside your browser.

Follow the link below, to the labs and click the button to enable the labs features.  Go to you favourite show, and click download.  You will be prompted to install Air etc, which takes a couple of minutes, but after that the download starts and the world is your mollusc.

BBC iPlayer – Labs.