I have gone through a lot with my Windows Home Server and most of all my media is installed on that machine. It has turned out to be the easiest and simplest back up solution I have with huge expansion capability. My Original Bunker Server is maxed out at 11 TB, and I have used 97% of the capacity available with duplication switched on. It has been working perfectly and for very long periods without being switched off. Microsoft has built an excellent product with Windows Home Server and I hope they keep developing it.
This is the second iteration of my Windows Home Server, I am building a new machine with at least 23TB starting, and easily going more with the new Western Digital 2 TB Drives. Thanks to the Addonics Port Multipliers this is achievable with the Back Planes and a SATA Array which is connected by eSATA through the motherboard. I will be cannibalizing Bunker Server once I start transferring files over to the Hazmat Server, mostly all the Addonics parts and hard drives. I will be listing all the parts for this install once we begin with it, and it will be a monster of a machine.
Recently with the GulfRun event and working on a few things there we spent about a week in Bahrain. I had my mobile on roaming while I was there, I tried to keep calls to minimum to keep costs down. We even used walkie talkies when we are walking around on the track or close by because we are usually just locating each other. And as usually Zain charges an arm and a leg even though its the same company in Bahrain, whats funny is that Gulf countries with Zain get a better deal then what we do in Kuwait until recently with the free incoming calls which should have been done a long time ago. During the time we were there we had a choice between Zain and Batelco for network choices even though you get charge the same for international roaming. Whenever I’m on Zain network I always get a busy tone calling any number so I switched to Batelco and my calls & texts went through perfectly every time which is very odd, so whenever you go to Bahrain choose the Batelco network because its the same thing that happened to all other people who were roaming.
Link: Flickr
I still say MTC instead of ZAIN all the time, and I think for the past two months a lot of people have been having major issues with MTC/ZAIN. Some major overhaul or major failure is going on and I don’t even have a clue about it.
Network Upgrade/Disruption: I have been roaming with my MTC/ZAIN phone for the past couple of weeks and before that for a few weeks, and its in areas in Europe which have really good signal. For some reason a lot of my phone calls can’t go through and if they do go through they disconnect easily. But when I use the Vodafone chip the line goes through without a hitch and connects very easily and quality of the line is good. I know that some network upgrades are being performed but at the same time network performance has deteriorated dramatically.
Pricing Ridiculousness: I was happy for the first time in decades that MTC/ZAIN sends me a text message for disconnection. Usually when I travel I never use my line outside of the Gulf, and keep it to a minimum but due to the situation I have had to keep it on. MTC has no criteria for price caps and they don’t look at the history of the customer, I have been paying high bills for the past few years yet whenever it goes over a certain amount they always disconnect when I’m abroad but this time they let me know 5 days ahead that they will disconnect so I managed to get it paid. I never use my credit card/check card because they can draw huge sums and not notify you. I’m not the first or last person that will face this problem but MTC/ZAIN over charges for all roaming charges, you might not have used it much but they will charge you more then you did sometimes so its important to find out how much you are really using it and the minutes they are charging you. Keeping an eye on the bill is very important.
Disconnections: I don’t think I can drive from any location in Kuwait to other without getting the conversation disconnected. To the point if I drive to the gas station and back I know that it will disconnect. Its getting to the point that if a phone conversation doesn’t disconnect then something must be wrong, and even paying this much they can’t seem to keep a stable network.
Network Busy: Whenever I’m calling from outside of Kuwait to Kuwait, I get this Network Busy Tone which drives me nuts, and it happens very consistently. I just think that the MTC Roaming service is pretty bad and I have switched to multiple networks and still no hope in the matter.
I think a lot of people are frustrated with MTC/ZAIN at this point because of the lack of service. There have been a improvements but over the past couple of months it has been a downhill. Hopefully it will improve at some point because its getting ridiculous.
Â
Â
It seems Nvidia are coming out with their new gaming Graphics Cards, the GTX-200 and they really do pump out some power. I haven’t seen any pricing yet, but from the benchmarks, they are quiet impressive.
The 260 has 192 stream processors and 896MB of memory, while the 280 has 240 stream processors and 1GB of memory.
Link: Kotaku
Now this is good news, two of my favorite game developers of all time are going to merge. I’m not sure of the technical details of the merger or the exact value, all I keep thinking about is the quality of games they will be able to come up with because these two game companies have been consistent over the years. I wonder what they are going to come up with next, I’m really waiting for StarCraft II.
- Interstate 76
- Mech Warrior Series
- Call of Duty series
- Spider-Man series
- Guitar Hero series
- Star Trek
- Star Wars
- Warcraft
- World of Warcraft
- StarCraft
- Diablo
Valleywag has been scooping up dirt on the Silicon Valley for a little while now, and they seem to have a very good idea of the worst IT jobs in that area. They can be monotonous jobs with low paying wages, no where to go, and each person would be burnt out mentally before completing one year at the job, not including the bad working environments which resemble caves in the basements.
I’m not much of a boat person, but I do like being in the water. This boat can be considered a speed demon on the water, the XSR48 Speedboat from XSMG, its a 48-foot boat packing a 2000 bhp two bi-turbo diesel engines, making it a very fast machine with a stablization and propulsion system meant to handle this insane amount of power. No price has been specified but I know this has to be pricy when its out. And the interior is just as mondern and nice as the exterior with all the bells and whistles of modern technology.
Link: XSMG
Now this is a very interesting sight, this developed from an idea in the Industrial age around the 1800s. Where they wanted to make an undersea telescope of some sort from London to New York. And now in this modern age, an artist took this interpretation and made it true with modern technology, but instead of a tunnel, it is connected through fiber optic cabling with a screen to see the other side, it is real time and you can see people walking by or looking into it. The piece itself is a work of art and the technical idea is very fun.
Link: TheTelectroscope
Dell bought out Alienware in 2006 but nothing really changed with the Dell line up or the Alienware line up. Dell XPS gaming line was somewhat in direct competition with Alienware desktop PCs over the past two years, but now Dell has cut their Dell XPS gaming line up, it will continue as a high end line but they will dedicate for the first time the Dell R&D to work with Alienware to make better machines. The result of this work will most probably be showing up next year, it will be interesting for sure.
Link: Crave
Now this is an interesting college project, and it had to be from Germany. This person decided that he wanted to let the outside world know of his music tastes. So he has come up with the the perfect solution, a back pack system which has two speakers and integrated amp where you can easily share your tunes with people. If they like your taste in music is just another subject.
Link: Joonas