I have been downloading some movies recently and a lot of anime. And now I’m just remembering all the shows and movies that I haven’t downloaded them and adding them to the list, the best part is finding the good old school movies. I don’t know why I have the sudden urge to watch all the Harry Potter movies at one go, but that would require a lot of time.

Movies

• Made of Honor 720p
• Jerry Maguire 720p
• Secret 720p
• Blade Runner Final Cut 1080p
• You Don’t Mess With The Zohan
• Speed Race
• The Happening
• Columbus Day 2008 720p
• Hancock

TV

• Birds of Prey (Complete)
• Long Way Round (Complete)
• Fifth Gear
• Gossip Girl (S2E01)
• Burn Notice
• Prison Break (S4E1/2)

Anime:

• Requiem from the Darkness
• Vandread First and Second Stage

My network consolidation steps have failed as I post about this earlier. My main problem was that I have multiple machines and multiple storage machines, so for the longest time I  had a lot of items spread out in different locations.

I have two separate networks since I have two ISPs coming in and I want to combine there speeds which is possible with the right setup but it didn’t work out for me and I’m not up for testing all over again. I’m thinking about trying a piece of equipment later, but I don’t want to purchase a load balancer.

I tried something different this time around, I connected both network cables to the two ethernet ports on the back of my power house PC. Its an Nvidia motherboard with two ethernet ports and I wasn’t sure how it was going to be if I plugged them both in, but as soon as I did it accepted the second IP Address. At that point I was able to see both networks and so for the past week I have been shifting data to my Windows Home Server (Bunker-Server).

Data:

• TV Shows (Done)
• Anime (Done)
• Movie (Done)
• Photos (TBD)
• Music (TDB)
• Other Files (TBD)

But the drawback is that the transfer has to go through the main PC but luckly the main PC is powerful enough to handle the huge transfers while doing other tasks and I have delegated downloads to the two other PCs.

Some people tend to sit on their computer before sleeping or using it as soon as they wake up, I do both. I think I’m addicted to my machines, its a funny routine I go through before regular browsing. Every person has a routine, I tend to have mine, I check torrents being downloaded to the server, then checking my downloads and whats left to be downloaded. As soon as I’m done checking my emails, posts, and regular surfing, I start to organize my downloads. I extract multiple files, and start moving the extracted files to the server and during this period the resources of the PC are pretty much fully used. I leave the PC for about 1.5 hours to finish up all that I’m moving. Its very satisfying to get everything organized, feels like your day is productive and I like  to make sure my connection is fully utilized.

A couple of months back I had a chance to try the HP Mini-Note when it first came out and it had some really good features and excellent build quality. I tried the Vista one but I new that installing Windows XP would better then Vista.  After searching around I decided to purchase one from Ebay and got one for a good deal, 15% below the usual price and barely used so instead of paying $780 for the Vista model I got it for $680.

Specs:

• HP  Via C7
• 1.6 GHz
• 8.9 inch
• Windows Vista Ultimate/XP
• 2 GB Ram
• 120 GB HD

The first thing I did was to setup a dual boot since it came with Vista, I decided to keep it for some use but installed Windows XP Pro in another partition and it is by far a lot faster then Vista since I could make a direct comparison between them. It just feels lighter, and the battery lasts about 2 hours and 45 minutes which decent for something this small.

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From the other day I just kept on downloading more and more, thinking that I wanted to make sure I had the full list of items I wanted to watch. From yesterday evening I was facing a problem, for some reason my FTP wasn’t connecting correctly, I tried it from another connection and it seemed fine. I check the firewall settings, restarted both router and switch, checked the program, and again checked the other connection.

I even asked to restart the remote server, but it seems nothing could solve the issue. I was looking at the screen frantically trying to figure out why I can’t get to my media, what the hell could be wrong. After 24 hours it just took one person to look at my FTP log to notice that I no longer have any space on my hard drives, they are majorly full. I did some organization, moving some files over, and now I’m getting rid of all my torrent files on my local computer since all my downloads will be through the server, and keeping the ratios very happy.

Every once in awhile I go through a huge downloading phase and I am at one of them. Most of these files range from 4 GB to 8 BG, and some a little more. I like having all the movies I do enjoy in 1080p, they are very clear and crisp, there just isn’t anything to substitute high quality movies. Now there is the issue of bandwidth and having enough to get all the material you want at one go.

Movies:

• Never Back Down DVDSCR
• Casino Royal 1080p
• Jumper 1080p
• 10,000 BC 1080p
• Stealth 1080p
• Big Trouble in Little China
• Diary of the Dead 720p
• Sex And Death 101 720p
• Cassandras Dream 720p
• Drillbit Taylor 720p
• College Road Trip 720p
• Sky Captain And The World of Tomorrow 1080p
• Step Up 2 The Streets 1080p
• Casino Royale 1080p
• Get Smarts Bruce And Lloyd Out Of Control 720p

Anime:

• Soul Eater
• D.GrayMan 52-90

I can’t believe that it has taken this long, but at last the light at the end of the tunnel. A game which has addicted many to the PC gaming world, Diablo 3 is at last arriving. To build your class of warrior, destroy many monsters and to forge ahead more battles must be fought. Can’t wait to get my hands on this game.

Link: Kutako

Link: Blizzard

The annoying part of the iPhone and iPod Touch is having to use iTunes to make any changes on it. But this piece of software helps resolve a lot of these issues. Turns your iPhone/iPod Touch into an external HD so you can drag and drop files into it, music, video, documents, pictures, anything. It doesn’t require Jailbreak to work with your iPod Touch/iPhone.

Link: Lifehacker

After two months of trying I have to find a solution to the issues I’m facing at this point. I have to ISPs coming into two different networks, one servicing my day to day downloads, and surfing, the other network serves the gaming and more downloads.

The point of was to combine the network, set the parameters so that I can download, connect my server, and run a few other services that I wanted. After connecting the first ISP I was running into problems, I wasn’t able to connect to certain sites, I wasn’t sure what exactly was going on. I thought it was a DNS problem so I manually entered the DNS and that helped a bit but still running into issues. Even after plugging in the 2nd ISP I thought it would resolve itself, but that didn’t help either. After thorough testing, the ISPs weren’t the issue, it was the Netgear FVS336G Load Balancer.

I’m disappointed since even after updating the firmware, nonstop testing with both Cisco DSL Routers, I couldn’t figure out the problem with the Load Balancer. So at this point, it was a complete failure. Now I have to figure out a different solution, I was very happy with the features of the FVS336G and how user friendly it was with all the advanced features, so if I’m going to look for another hardware solution its not going to be on par for sure.

I am a fan of Western Digital Hard Drives, but a fan of their External Drives. I keep hearing stories of their failure, but even though I have had a 500 GB WD External with no issues. Now they have came out with the My Book Mirror.

My Book Mirror is a dual-drive unit with Raid 1 for redundancy or Raid 0 for performance. You can get the 1TB model for $290 or the 2TB model for $550. If you run them in Raid 1 mode then the storage space is halfed, not Raid 1 with 2TB worth of space. The only bad part is that is USB only, but a really good feature is that the drives are replacable and there are no fans on this unit because the hard drive has low power consumption and so requires little cooling.

This is a good solution for people looking Raid back up in their setup. Drive space keeps getting cheaper and cheaper.

Link: Crave