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I finally got some photos of my recent workspace and submitted to figure.fm for the Otacool 3 Workspace. Here is what I submitted.

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Been meaning to sort out the storage on my iMac for a while now. My iMac comes with only a 320GB hard drive. At first I thought that was plenty of room. But with a camera that takes photos at 15M pixels, and a whole bunch of podcast videos I have been downloading from iTunes, I was running low with hard drive space on my iMac. I tried to keep files on the Windows Home Server but even with a GBit network, the added latency does not feel as good as accessing files on the local hard drive. Hence some new hardware is justified :)

The iMac has 1 x FireWire 800, 1 x FireWire 400, and 3 x USB 2.0 connections. Obviously speed is important here and FireWire 800 is the default choice. Been looking around on the market for something that also provides some fault tolerance. Was considering Drobo ($350 just for the box and no hard drives) but cannot really come up with the money for it. So finally settled with a somewhat cheaper solution: a WD My Book Studio Edition II with 2 TB storage ($280).

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You would think that after I got the Acer easyStore Home Server, my files are at least safe.  Well, they are from a hardware point of view, but not from stupidity point of view.

Yesterday, I realized I lost a lot of files: 7 years worth of photos.  The Acer easyStore Home Server did not fail me.  I did.  So here is what happened. Continue reading

These are some older deboxing pictures of my iMac.  If you ask what is it like getting a refurbished product from the Apple Online Store, I would say I was pleasantly surprised.  Why?  The products I got are:

1. Well packaged.
2. Clean and they look new, you often wonder if it was mistaken as a refurbished product.
3. Shipped directly from Apple and always arrive earlier than the projected arrival date. Continue reading

Since I got an iMac at home, I have the pleasure of using it with an otherwise Windows only home network.  I used to run only Windows machines because Mac has always been a bit too pricy for me.  But with Windows Vista being a bit of a disappointment and Windows XP was getting to be a bit outdated, late last year I found some courage to switch over to the Apple platform. Continue reading