What Tech This Month?

No tech purchases last month mostly cause we had to buy a new oven [you should see the oven, its got a full computer to control cooking!] and eye glasses for the kid & wife.

So time to do some catching up this month as if you remember, I decided this year to buy a tech gadget or game every month. The primary cause being the lack of commitment or want of my wife to quite smoking & I figure if she can «literally» burn @€150/month - I might as well give myself something.

So I have a dilemma this month between the following:

• WiiFit: not sure it will do my diet any but I really like the concept and it looks like a good change of pace;
• Mario Kart Wii;
• A XiNCOM Twin WAN Router: I am looking at this to be able to aggregate/load-balance my two DSL links or I could do this with a cheap PC, 3 network cards and a good linux distro;
• Logitech Squeezebox Duet: The interest here is to be able to stream all my digital music as well as access Internet Radio (French stations bore us, they talk too much and play the same songs every 2 hours). In theory the Squeezebox would allow me to do this directly to my stereo without having to use the computer.

Tough call. I could always but the money aside this month and prepare a small wad of cash to be able to buy some of the possible new Apple products to arrive around WWDC or summer. What do you think?

myPoV: Assassin's Creed

Yesterday evening, I finally finished Assassin's Creed (AC)! Yeah it took me awhile since I got it back in Nov'07, well to be fair I only started playing it about 2 weeks ago (2 to 3 hours a day). I wanted to write up my point of view (PoV) on the game as it has had mixed reviews from the different gaming sites.

In all fairness, I find AC a good play... it's not madly challenging that is true [honestly, I play but I am not a pro] but the game plays really well and keeps you enthralled in the story; seriously I wanted to get through to know the outcome. I enjoyed the game as the difficulty slowly builds up as you progress through an interesting storyline... which I won't reveal for those how've not played. Here are some of the points I found good:

• Storyline is simple but does keep you intrigued & I really want to know what's next; Ubisoft AC2 please ;-)
  
• Graphics are amazing! I was really caught by the visual effects when climbing the minarets & some even gave me the chills
• Combat is good and can be challenging but it never gets impossible [like some certain FPS on hard modes]
  

This game even allowed me to complete almost all the Xbox360 achievements. I am missing 2! the 1st because I didn't know you need to talk to the assistant between each memory slot; the 2nd because my dexterity ain't that great (timed sequence of button pressing).

Follow me on FriendFeed

If you want to follow me on FriendFeed go to http://friendfeed.com/fvter and subscribe.

I have been using this service for a month or so now and I am actually quite satisfied with it. The primary reason is that it provides me with a quick a dirty daily report of all my friend's posting as well as mine. A succinct timeline of what has been going on online...

if you are not aware, FriendFeed brings together about 35 different web sources such as Flickr, blogs, music sites and many other of the social networking stuff.

Ulla's Puppies

My parents have a wired-hair dachshund dog, named Ulla, who gave birth to 6 little puppies last night. 3 males and 3 females, a full litter!

Congratulations Ulla and her parents... ;-)

Pictures here!

Finally Installed the QNAP TS209

Back in February, I bough a QNAP TS209 NAS for my home network while in Houston. Since I came back, I have not had time to sit down buy drives for it (I got 2 1TB Samsung drives for >€400) and install it. I bought the QNAP because it gave me the most options! Seriously, you would be surprised; from backup software to web server to database server to download station to torrent client!

Installation at least for me was quite simple and reminded me to a certain extent of hooking up a small server. This may be a bit of a challenge for everyday user! The drives are hot-pluggable and install on drive bay trays loaded via the front and then covered up with a nice face plate; both drive trays & face plate are held on with thumb screws. This is good in case you need to open the sucker and replace a drive.

The system automatically picks up a DHCP address if you have available but you still need to do the first configuration with desktop client which auto-locates available devices and allows you to set the IP address and other minimal settings. Configuration [selection of pics and screen shots here] then switches to a web browser based interface. The set-up was quite easy and for your average joe there is a wizard type system.

The drives are configurable in RAID or as a whole set. I decided to go for a continuous 2TB drive format instead of RAID to get the most of storage space. I will get an external HD to do backups to; yes, the system supports a plug and backup option via an external drive.

As for the different server options, for the moment, I have only configured:

• the DLNA (Digital Living Network Alliance) with the Twonkyserver so that I can now play videos and music from things like my xBox360;
• the iTunes server for access to all my digital music;
• file server which is accessible from either the windows machines or the MacOS X machines on my network & there is a web version as well
• media server for web sharing of pictures (this will be useful once I get a WiFi enabled digital picture frame)

The next steps will be to look into the web server options and backup options of which the first step will be to hook up to TimeMachine on the Mac.

The device is responding as I wanted, except for one or two important points of which the most important is the lack of a more intelligent BitTorrent client. The download station on the system is in fact quite simple. It is missing a number of things like an RSS reader or a monitor folder option. I now need to figure out a work around to be able to get the system to auto-download bittorrents! Might need to do some fancy scripting.

I posted some of my wish list on the qnap forum.