Archive for the ‘Hardware’ Category

The Noontec Gigalink N5 is a NAS media that has a few nice features – including DLNA, BitTorrent, a web interface and BYO hard drive. The problem is that it doesn’t really work very well. The 30mm fan is noisy and isn’t variable based on case temperature, sometimes it doesn’t turn off, UPNP doesn’t work, [...]

Wednesday, May 9th, 2012 at 23:01 4 comments

As part of the Heads of Agreement that Telstra has signed with NBNCo, Telstra is being paid $11 billion taxpayer dollars. This amount is effectively the sum value of each and every customer they migrate off copper. As John Stanhope (Telstra CFO) states: So as the customer is switched off and goes across to (NBNCo) [...]

Thursday, December 30th, 2010 at 17:30 0 comments

Do you want to see what an iPad user sees when they look at your website? Well there is a simple way to check it out without buying an iPad on either Windows or Mac: Download and install Safari (if you don’t already  have it) Edit -> Preferences (or Safari -> Preferences on a Mac) [...]

Friday, August 6th, 2010 at 09:02 4 comments

Setting up your Windows Mobile 6.5 phone for Google Apps should be simple, there are some clear instructions located here. However I have found that on some HTC Windows based phones the account creation process does not go so smoothly. After a bit of hunting around I found someone who had a fix for me. [...]

Monday, August 2nd, 2010 at 20:25 0 comments

It appears that I have suffered the curse of Nvidia again, this time on my brand new work unibody Macbook Pro 13in. Under Windows Vista and 7 the Nvidia Geforce 9400M graphics card can only send a 640×480 resolution signal to projectors through the official Apple Mini DisplayPort to VGA adaptor. It appears that I [...]

Tuesday, October 20th, 2009 at 21:53 3 comments

If you are seeing this post then you have reached the new server for my blog. I moved to Crucial Paradigm as I found their Windows VPS servers to provide good HDD limits and low Australian pings. Please let me know if you experience any improvement in speed or accessibility. This is all part of [...]

Saturday, January 31st, 2009 at 11:37 0 comments

I have mentioned Pipe Networks before, more specifically their “Project Runway” surviving a near death credit crunch experience. There have been two interesting developments since that time. The first is that Pipe have put up a blog tracking the progress of the cable installation. You can view it at pipeinternational.com. As with their DC3 data [...]

Monday, January 19th, 2009 at 13:21 0 comments

Cloud Computing should be understood as an evolutionary rather than revolutionary approach to delivering software. I think the rPath video below is the best explanation I have seen of Cloud Computing. It represents this evolutionary process without getting bogged down in the technical jargon, it even uses a car metaphor (which everyone loves).

Tuesday, January 6th, 2009 at 17:38 0 comments

Blackberry make good phones, regardless of whether you use them for email or not. Like everyone I am trying to cut costs at the moment, and one of those costs was my Blackberry plan. Optus charge a minimum of $24.95 extra a month for a Blackberry “bolt-on” ($29.95 without a 24 month contract), and on [...]

Wednesday, December 31st, 2008 at 11:33 53 comments

We recently purchased a Netgear ReadyNAS unit (formerly made by Infrant Technologies). It is a nice compact little unit, 1RU with 4 hard drives across the front. It runs an onboard Debian install with some custom software to support X-RAID, the front panel buttons and a nice web interface. We have run into some issues lately in [...]

Tuesday, May 27th, 2008 at 14:07 1 comment