ToddKobus.com

I finally hooked up my third monitor….  Very nice!

So I ran out to Best Buy tonight to purchase three items:

• a PCIe gigabit ethernet card
• a SATA cable
• and a Music CD

Best Buy in Attleboro does not carry the ethernet card.  The music isles were such a mess and so disorganized that I decided to just grab the CD on Amazon.  But, the thing that got me angry enough to post this was the SATA cable.  I did not check the price before checking out and it didn’t hit me that I had been robbed until I left the store.  They charged $19.99 for the SATA cable (see receipt below).  This wasn’t a Monster Cable or a gold plated uber cable.  It is a generic store brand garbage Dynex cable.  Currently NewEgg.com has more than 20 different SATA cables for under two dollars.  I knew BestBuy charges an arm and a leg for accessories, but I was amazed that Best Buy had the stones to mark up the cable by 900%.  I have since purchased both the cable and the ethernet card from NewEgg.  I will return the cable tomorrow.

I have had Windows Home Server (WHS) installed for about four months now.  This is an amazing piece of software.  I can’t believe it hasn’t caught on with more people.  WHS handles all of my home networking needs.  It does daily backups of both my laptop and my wife’s laptop.  It stores all of our pictures and music on redundant storage.  It provides a free dynamic DNS service, so I can connect to my home network and establish a remote desktop connection to my home machine from anywhere.  It doubles as a media server accessible from both the XBox 360 and any computer in the house.  I understand each of these features may be available independently via open source options, but WHS makes everything simple, it works and it was inexpensive $90.  I admit the UI is ‘clunky’ and overall feels pieced together, but that’s because it is.  WHS is a stripped down version of Windows 2003 Server with a few WHS services running.  For more info see: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/windowshomeserver/default.mspx

For my configuration, I converted my old desktop to a WHS machine.  I have an old Dell with an AMD Dual Core something or other processor.  I added two new 1.5TB Seagate drives at ($129 a piece), added an extra couple GB of RAM (memory usage seldomly rises above 1GB) and I upgraded to a gigabit NIC and Router.  Then I threw the machine in the basement without a monitor or keyboard or anything and never have to touch it.  I can’t express enough how easy and powerful this thing is.  It solves numerous problems and does so for a reasonable cost.  All together it cost about $500 to get the whole system up and running.

I use the following WHS Add-Ins:

FirePlay – http://www.mediasmartserver.net/forums/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=3999

Disk Management – http://www.tentaclesoftware.com/WHSDiskManagement/

Advanced Admin Console – http://mswhs.com/2008/01/22/add-in-advanced-admin-console/

FileZilla FTP Server – http://computingondemand.com/?p=961

To those that remember the underground world of BBSes, there is a podcast available at HanselMinutes.com where Scott Hanselman interviews the founders of Mustang Software and explores the joys of personal computing in the early 90’s.  If you remember those days, you should definately check it out.

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Just last month, while juggling for my son, my wife asked me how or why I learned to juggle.  I explained that there was quite a bit of waiting around associated with running a BBS.  She had never heard of a BBS, nor had I ever disclosed the uber-geekdom associated my days as a SysOp within the Massachusetts BBS community.  She did not understand the excitement associated with waiting over 30 minutes for the latest version of Duke Nukem to download.  Or the fun associated with watching someone browsing around your site, then popping in to say hello.  At the height of it’s popularity, my BBS received over 100 calls a day. OK, maybe I’m the only one impressed, but it wasn’t bad for a highschool kid with a 14,400 modem installed on his fancy 486DX33 (that’s right… DX… math co-processor in full effect… ).

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I did a quick search for ANSI art to find an image for this post and was amazed to find a downloadable copy of TheDraw… 

Regards,
Todd Kobus,
SysOp DD BBS

Oh, thanks Kevin for that special copy of Win95…

Here is a list of some of the more obscure tools I install on my dev machine. Some of these are huge time-savers that I have come to depend heavily on.