Tweet of the day

 Posted on April 7, 2009  |  Erik

Merlin Mann in form today with the following comment:

‘Organizing’ your email is like alphabetizing your recycling.

In our current state of ubiquitous search, he’s right on the money. Now I guess I should get around to going through the 1200 messages I have in the “To File” mailbox…

Building a better NAS for use with Macs, part 3 Getting started

 Posted on March 17, 2009  |  Erik

Well there’s nothing much more to say regarding the hardware which was pretty well detailed in the [first article](/groups/infrageeks/weblog/540bc/Building_a_better_NAS_(for_use_with_Macs__part_1_-_Introduction.html) of the series. Setting up the box presented a few different choices, like which operating system/distribution was the most appropriate to my needs. Basically the choices boiled down to:- Solaris 10 OpenSolaris Nexenta Nexenta was taken off the list rapidly since the free version is limited in the amount of capacity you can use, and I didn’t really see much value add for my use since I’ll be doing most of the management from the command line and the ZFS commands are incredibly easy to learn and use that the web interface seems almost silly. [Read More]

eBook find

 Posted on March 2, 2009  |  Erik

This was an unexpected and very welcome find. Webscriptions, associated with the Speculative Fiction publisher Baen Books offers eBooks the way it should be done. Reasonable prices, a wide variety of formats for different platforms, and DRM free! Other nice touches are that your purchase history is maintained on the site and you can redownload already purchased books in any format so if you change devices or technologies, you have a way to maintain your collection. [Read More]

Building a better NAS (for use with Macs, part 1 - Introduction

 Posted on February 26, 2009  |  Erik

I’ve been playing around with various flavors of Solaris, OpenSolaris and the Solaris Community Express Edition for a while now in a professional capacity, trying to see exactly how to position the new ZFS and storage management options for use in large virtualization environments. From Enterprise to Home The other aspect I’ve been looking at is how this kind of technology can be effectively used in today’s digital home where the volume of digital media is growing constantly. [Read More]

eBook Pricing Incoherency

 Posted on December 23, 2008  |  Erik

I think that I’ve made it clear that I absolutely love using the iPhone as an eBook reader. Stanza remains my reader of choice, especially given that I can load it up via the desktop application from just about any source containing textual content. However, the range of freely available books is limited to books that are out of copyright (via Feedbooks, Project Gutenberg and similar initiatives) and I’d like to be able to buy current or in copyright books to add to the list. [Read More]

10.5.6 OK Here

 Posted on December 19, 2008  |  Erik

There seems to be a lot of news concerning problems with the installation of OS X 10.5.6 going on. From what I gather it seems to be an issue with a partial download, or a partial copy that made it out onto the Akamai caching servers. I’m a little disappointed that there isn’t a checksum done on software update downloads before the installation kicks off (for some reason I though there was, since I’ve had other downloads that notified me that the download appeared corrupted). [Read More]

Google doesn't pay their share?

 Posted on December 17, 2008  |  Erik

Whoo boy - that was an interesting read. The pseudo study done by NetCompetition.org makes no sense whatsoever. The Methodolody Summary: > The research study’s methodology and assumptions are straight-forward, open, transparent, and catalogued in detail in the appendix so other researchers can replicate the findings; test their own assumptions or data sets; and improve the estimates started with this first-ever study. We welcome suggestions and improvements to enhance the quality and accuracy of this research study’s estimates in subsequent updates. [Read More]

No more Apple at MacWorld

 Posted on December 17, 2008  |  Erik

That news certainly loosed a firestorm of commentary in the blogosphere, mostly negative. However, I have to think that all things considered this is more just a sign of the changing times. The age of the tradeshow is fading away. Don’t forget that we’re also in the context of a rapidly changing economy along with travel costs going through the roof (despite the recent price drop in crude oil). It’s also worth remembering that MacWorld is not an Apple operation. [Read More]

Useful iPhone tips from TapTapTap

 Posted on December 11, 2008  |  Erik

A beautifully produced list of 10 useful tips for using your iPhone. I would guess that most people are aware of at least half of them, but not necessarily the same ones.

Definitely worth the visit and something that should also be on the Apple site.

iPhone "Get More Episodes"

 Posted on December 10, 2008  |  Erik

Is it just me or was this feature rushed through without a whole lot of thought on Apple’s part? I understand the need to keep code duplication to a minimum and for a clear distinction of tasks and responsibilities between iPhone applications, but the current “Get More Episodes” feature is not at all what I wanted/expected. Expected behaviour When I heard that this was coming in the 2.2 firmware release I was looking forward to it. [Read More]