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April 30, 2007
Gateway FPD2485W 24-inch Widescreen HD-LCD Flat-Panel Display
Gateway FPD2485W 24-inch Widescreen
Tis the season for upgrades. I figured it was time to retire my 21" CRT's and update the resolution of my LCD monitors. My first update was a widescreen HD capable monitor/LCD for my bedroom. With DVD's mostly in widescreen format these days and the multitude of connection options, this monitor made perfect sense for my bedroom.
So far it looks pretty slick, You can see more pics in the gallery.
Future plans include another 24" widescreen for use on my development station in the computer room (hercules) along with 1 or more 20" 4:3 monitors rotated in portrait mode. (The gallery shows my brief experiment).
Circuit had almost the lowest price on this. (J&R is about 5$ lower now). However, with circuit city I was able to drive over, pick it up and also save $10 on the speaker bar. Not too shabby...
It was a bit funny though while working out the sale with the sales person.
He had to double check the pricing, to get permission.
Afterwards he kept insisting I purchase an extended warrenty.
He even went as far as suggesting to break the monitor near the end of the warrenty period to get some money back to put towards a new monitor.
My response... "but that would be dishonest".
He was really unahppy that I would not go for the extra $200.
I figure if the unit dies in a year, I'll just put that $200 towards a new monitor.
My other monitors have lasted a long time.
I think these days, I'll just refrain from the extended warrenty, I'v enever been able to really use them and it only inflates my price. About the only place I think I'll use it is on a large screen HDTV which may be happening this year.
Posted by Me at 11:00 PM | Comments (0)
April 24, 2007
Move over Kuros, Here comes Gollum. The Infrant ReadyNas
Over the past few months I've found the need for space (not speed, just space). With all the video ripping I've been doing for my travels, I've realized the storage requirements are astronomical. I had 2 kuro boxes online for backups, along with the Rhapsody N35 in NDAS mode (all with 320 gb drives). Last month I put another kuro box online and I was going onto the fourth when I realized, there's gotta be a better way. So many boxes pullin' juice, so many network ports. So went my quest for a kuro box replacement.
I had high hopes for the new Kuro box coming out. It was to sport 2 SATA ports which meant I could do mirroring. As cool as the kuro's are, I've always been ansi about not having a hot copy of the hard drive. I always new I would outgrow them. The new Kuro proved that I would not be as happy because it still sported only 1 internal drive. Although there are 2 Sata ports, one is not accessible unless you pull of the front panel. Wtf? it has PCIe and a SATA port, but behind the panel!.
Over the past few weeks I've been considering upgrades in many aspects. It's that time of the year. Still I did not want all my eggs in one basket. I like having my music and video off my herculean workstation. This way I can upgrade him as needed yet still function without him.
There have been 3 choices over the past few weeks.
1. Infrannt ReadyNas NV+
2. Thecus 5200
3. A small ITX server running unRaid from lime-technology
Frankly, I was leaning towards the Thecus or the unRaid server, however I wanted something polished, reliable and low in power usage.
The unRaid server is perfect for what I need, however, It's running a customized slackware. (slopware) kernel. requires specialized hardware and questions to the developer went unanswered. It's now at version 4, but I'm still not sure it's ready for prime time. On the positive side, it has one of the best methods of making your JBOD volumes raid and reliable. Instead of striping across multiple disks, each disks is it's own volume and entitiy. The only requirement is that your largest disk is your parity disk. If that is so, the others can be of ANY size. This raid mechanism also sports the ability to survive multiple disk failures. One disk failure and your raid survives, limps along and can be rebuilt. 2 Disk failures and the failed disks are lost, but the remaining disks are still intact because they each have thier own filesystem. I've learned early on how bad a double disk failure can affect you with software raid 5. None the less, software raid 5 is much more polished these days. As much as I want to do this mechanism, I think the power will be come an issue. Still, I may try my hand at it using vmware on hercules or my itx machine.
I also considered the Thecus. The reports say this performs the best, but it's "rough around the edges". on newegg there was reports of corruption too. This was enough to scare me away... Still, The thecus might be nice as a JBOD server or perhaps rolling my own unRaid md driver.
In the end I settled on the Infrant readynas NV. For 600 bucks I purchased a diskless version. I also purchased 3 750 gb disks. let me tell you this lil guy is small and really good on power. With 2 disks in raid 1 the unit pulls about 50 watts while spinning. When the drives spin down it was pulling 22 watts. This jumps up as you add drives. For 3 drives the power is 30 watts and 60 respectively. The X-raid is a really interesting feature too. it always you to eXpand the Raid array by adding disks on an as needed basis. I started off with two. This morning I added the third, which took 4 hours to initialize. This eve, I rebooted and it automatically eXpanded The volume across the other disk to a whapping 1.3Terrabytes. When I add the 4th it will be just a bit under 2tb.
Another neat feature is you can expand the array over time by swapping each of the 4 disks (one each day). Day one, swap 750 for a terrabyte drive, day 2 and so on and so forth until wala, 3 terrabytes are available. Not too shabby.
The web management interface is quite polished too.
According to tomshardware, the thecus is the top performer, However the readyNas is no slouch either. It's great at serving files, yet slow as molassis at serving the admin pages. We'll see how this performs over time. I'm sure eventually I'll grow into the Thecus also probably using it as a scratch and jbod backup server
Then again I may just use unRaid for that. We shall see.
Now to install my new 1GB switch that supports jumbo frames and I'll be all set.
Pics are in the gallery (available by clicking the picture).
Posted by Me at 09:00 PM | Comments (0)
April 05, 2007
Archos AV 704 Wifi First Looks
I got one. It was just too cool not to snap up.
With all the features, screen size and the really tough time I'm having ripping dvd's for timeshifting, this just made sense.
With the Cinema plugin, I can view MPG2 files and/or VOB files from DVD without the whole out of sync audio/video due to the copy protection.
Hey, I am actually renting them. I just want to timeshift them. ;-)
So many features to talk about.
First and foremost this thing feels like a lil brick with it's aluminum housing.
It feels solid and very well built.
The WiFi is a bit sluggish, but it works well enough.
I can populate files by samba access and copying them to the archos, or by setting the wifi into file server mode and pushing them from my other boxes.
How cool is that.
The embedded web browser is slick too.
But most important, video looks great.
Audio is good enough. In comparson, the audio in the cowon a2 is better. I think the jetaudio and effects possible truly make that my favorite audio player.
Yet this is good enough for audio, and excellent for video. (although the cowon is no slouch there).
More to come later, I just wanted to get some pics up for y'all to drool over. ;-)
http://www.cotrone.com/rob/gallery/archos704wifi
Posted by Me at 11:59 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 02, 2007
Archos AV 704 WIFI
I found out the other day, my co-worker has an Archos AV-700.
Not that I'm mr. Archos fan, but I heard from another co-worker, it has a large 7" screen.
This intrigued me so much I went over to check it out.
My co-worker Jose demoed the unit (as we always show of our technology toys).
It's a very cool (and large) unit. What intrigued me even more was that it's a special version provided by Dish networks that interfaces with the PVR.
It allows you to download the movies onto the PMP via USB.
Jose said it takes about 5 minutes to download an hour's worth of video.
It was quite cool seeing the dresden files playing on this PMP.
I looked further into it and discovered archos came out with a later rev called the 704 WIFI.
This baby sports a higher res "touch" screen, 80GB and WIFI. How cool is that.
I want one!
http://www.archos.com/products/video/archos_704wifi/index.html?country=global&lang=en
Posted by Me at 09:00 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack