Ever wondered all the little details of your online persona, well this site gives it to you. A nifty site that presents all the little details of the machine your working on, you can export it as a CSV or PDF and use it as you see fit. It also tells you how much information websites can figure out from you just venturing on to them.

Link: SupportDetails

The time has come to commence with the best two games that were created for PC. The build up has been long, for so many years we have been hearing on and off that Diablo III and StarCraft II will be coming out. Now the moment has come, they anounced that both games are available for PreOrder through Amazon. The moment I saw that it was available I went ahead and got the Special Edition Star Craft 2 which has the Original game and Expansion as well as the full art book, the book itself makes it worth it. Now I just have to wait patiently to get my hands on this game which will result in long hours of gaming. Amazing RTS with StarCraft 2, then developing my character with Diablo III. I’m honestly excited!

Link: Amazon Diablo 3
Link: Amazon StarCraft 2 Special Edition

There is a hero among us, the world is coming back to normal with full posts on Google Reader. On my last Google Shrinkage Post I was getting annoyed that most of my usual feeds were shrunk down to small summaries and a small pictures. Then from one of the of readers left a comment which solved most of the problems, these were for sites run by Gawker media and they have an alternate feed to see the full posts in your RSS Feeds and everything is back to normal.

Yousef

Hey man, as soon as they started doing this some of the blogs posted “VIP” feed URLs. Just remove the current feed and add these feed URLs for each one and you can see the whole thing:

Kotaku:
http://kotaku.com/vip.xml

Gizmodo:
http://gizmodo.com/vip.xml

Basically any of the gawker feeds if you put the site then /vip.xml you’ll get the full feed.

Hope it helps!

This Worked For:

• Gizmodo
• io9
• Kotaku
• LifeHacker

Thanks Yousef

This is as geeky as it gets for nerdy ideas, they have taken the alphabet and presented in visual form which relates to sci-fi or comics. Some of these ideas are pretty cool, some risque and the favorites being H and O. It takes a creative mind to put something likes this together, some are better then the others but still lots of fun.

Link: GeekTyrant

I thought this would be a more difficult process then I expected. I currently have my iTunes library on my PC and I wanted it to move it to my Netgear ReadyNAS 1100 on the network. The ReadyNAS 1100 is a very solid high performance Network Area Storage unit, it has redundancy and been running for over a year and half now. I wanted have the library in a secure place with full redundancy accessible from any piece of hardware.

I thought it would very difficult to do but turns out its simpler then I thought, luckily Apple have thought about this issue and Home Sharing wasn’t going to work. Following the steps below you can move your library to any location and maintain all your playlists, playcounts, statistics, music, tv, movies, music videos and applications.

First Step:

• Click Edit and go to “Preferences” then click the “Advanced” Tab
• Where it says “iTunes Media folder location” click “Change” on the right and click any location, in my case I chose the NASBunker1100
• Then Click “OK”

Second Step:

• Click “File”
• Click “Library” from the menu
• Click “Organize” from the submenu
• Then Check “Consolidate” and hit OK
• Then let your system copy over all the Music, TV Shows, Movies, and Details to the new location. This could range from 30 minutes to hours depending on the mount of data you have.

This whole process took me less then 10 minutes and the copying took a few hours but I just left the machine. It worked smoothly without any disruptions, I was playing my music and music videos fine, and the data on the main PC is still intact so if anything is miss you can just copy it over without any issues.

I’m not a fan of consumer laptops from Dell or HP, but I do like their business lines. They are heavy duty laptops which can take a beating while performing flawlessly. Now they have came out with the Latitude 13, which is part of the business line but had some of the design cues from the Dell Adamo which looked good but wasn’t successful. In this case this machine is thin and perfect size but packs a punch.

Specs:

• Intel Core 2 Duo 1.3 GHz
• Windows 7 Pro 32 Bit or XP Professional Downgrade
• 13.3″ Widescreen HD LCD with anti-glare (1366×768)
• Camera 1.3MP
• 4GB DDR3 1066
• SSD or HD
• External Optical Drive
• Intel WiFi Link 5100 a/g/n
• Blue Tooth

Link: Dell

I have been using this Sync tool for over two years now, Sync Toy is a tool developed by Microsoft just for fun. Its not really supported by them but they have made decent improvements with it. Been using it since version 1.4, to 2.0, and now 2.1 which is a huge leap forward in comparison. A lot of features have been added and bugs have been fixed. The best tool I have found to sync drives or folders with lots of files and subfolders inside of it with little issue and lots of customization is Sync Toy. I needed it to Sync the different folders between the WHS Hazmat Server and the WHS Hazard Server. One will balance the other in file storage which won’t require any need for file duplication. It now supports 32 bit and 64 bit operating systems, works locally on a machine and across networks.

The first folder I needed to Sync was my Anime folder which is 2.49 TeraBytes of media, this is to be done across the network. Testing the file transfer it would transfer between 78 MB/s to 86 MB/s between both the machines so I start the transfer earlier in the evening for it end the next afternoon. Overall its the perfect free tool from Microsoft for all Syncing purposes, two-way sync, or one-way sync and lots of other combinations available.

Link: Microsoft Download

There are a lot of access points out on the market, and I have tried quite a few, been through 2 Netgear, 2 Linksys, 1 Belkin, and 3 D-Link. Out of all them I would avoid Belkin, probably the worst out of all the products, was horrible out of the box, worse support and I would avoid all their products period. Linksys are good but not what it used to be, I still prefer the older models then the new consumer models. Netgear is nice when its working but after a while it would hang, I would have to plug it and unplug it, and one of them just stopped working. Overall the best solid products with little nonsense and high features are D-Link products.

Models

• D-Link DAP 1160
• D-Link 2100 AP
• D-Link 7100 AP

What I like out of them is full security features, MAC Filter, DHCP control, simple setup, and reasonably priced.

This is one of the most complex Windows Home Server systems that we have built yet, and it drove us nuts. We started this project out in June of 2009 and didn’t finish it until March of 2010. We have reinstalled this system probably 4 times to have a clean install, its sensitive to install any Windows Home Server Ad-Ins once its working. We wanted the ultimate WHS Storage with the large capacity all in one unit, it would take a certain hardware setup to achieve this and thats what we aimed for. We suffered set backs, my system at one point just had a black screen, we switched out the motherboard, and nothing, we switched graphics cards, still nothing, changed the ram, and at the end it turned out to be a faulty power supply. Luckily my friend and myself were building the same system together so we just kept on testing as we went along, we got busy towards the end of 2009 but this was one difficult machine to get fully stable. I slowly kept gathering more and more 2 TB Hard Drives, we started off with 10 x 2 TB Drives and I just kept ordering a few when I saw a deal for them. Now that the system is operational it fantastic, we are doing some stress testing, its looking good with transfer speeds of 78 to 90 MB/s over the network which is the fast I have seen.

HW Configuration:

• Norco 4220 Case
• ASUS P3S WS
• Intel Quad Core Q8200 2.33 Ghz
• OCZ Vertex 120 GB SSD (Main HD)
• G Skill 4 GB
• 2 x Sata SAS Controllers (To Control 20 HDs)
• ATI Radeon 7500

With the Sata SAS controllers we could use the extremely effecient and powerful SF8087 connectors to connect to each one of those back planes. Each back plane held 5 drives with 4 back planes for a total of 20 drives. Overall I installed 17 out of the 20 drives with e Western Digital 2 TB Drives to get it up to 30 + TB, and I have a little bit more room to go, I think I can get it to 36 TB with the last few drives. Going overboard with the storage is understatement in my case, but it has been a long and arduous trip with this machine but with a clean install and the right setup its very solid.

Now with Windows Home Server running on Windows Server 2003 it has taken a lot of steps forward Power Pack 3 and all the patches. Now I have two WHS servers running, one is extremely solid and this new one, planning on running one as back up to the other so I have two complete back solutions for the other. Now I’m just waiting for Windows to release Vail which Windows Home Server built on Windows Server 2008 which is a huge step forward. When that is out I’m going to just format and reinstall one of the systems and test it out.

To fix this issue we had t reinstall Windows Home Server from scratch and check which hard drives had issues. So we did a clean install which takes a little under an hour, then installing all the updates on the WHS Server as including Power Pack 2 and Power Pack 3. The whole process took about 2 hours and then another hour to test the hard drives using one Add-In called SMART which shoes you which hard drive might have bad sectors and might be failing. If a hard drive has more then 10 bad sectors, send it in to be RMAed and luckily Western Digital has a very good RMA process for all their hard drives. Out of a large number of drives only two were need to be sent back to be replaced. I have learned from numerous installs and hardware configurations that having a clean updated install without any Add-Ins will have the smoothest operating Windows Home Server, any of the faults that I have received after a clean install was always due to an Add-In, so I did without it and it was the solution as the P80 install is what caused many of the issues.

Side Note:
Windows 7 is fantastic, lots of preloaded drivers for lots of items, and I have installed some odd hard ware which works perfectly. The whole install of a machine took no more then 7 minutes to get everything working smoothly with a complex machine, and Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit was up and running.