Having picked up an absolute bargain version of the latest offering from Western Digital’s MyBook range, the MyBook World Edition – a network attached storage version of the ever popular MyBook external hard disc drives, I thought I would offer up a quick review.
It is an excellent piece of kit, I have the 1TB version (2x 500GB drives) in white. It took less than two minutes to set up once I had thrown the MioNet software out the window and just plugged it directly into my switch on the house network. It is a tidy bit of kit, all the wires tuck away nicely and it comes with all the cables you would need – a power cable, a 1m Cat.5e cable and a USB connector to connect further external units to this one. My Windows network picked it up straight away and my linux machine recognises it (as you would expect).
It is a brilliant piece of kit and I would recommend it to anyone that wants any extra network storage!
I have spent most of my day finally getting to grips with some of the finer points of my website. I have been getting under the bonnet of cPanel and some of the advanced features that entails. I finally think I have worked everything out and now know enough about the workings of it all that I shouldn’t need to pester Kieran every five minutes!
Learning how things work brings such an enormous sense of satisfaction that I genuinely cannot understand people’s attitude of well if it works it works and if it doesn’t it doesn’t. I think that people who think like that are missing out on so much of life and its wonders. It is one of the main points I will take away from my university experience – we are expected to have that desire, that need to understand what we do and why we do it and how that impacts on our lives.
I think today’s experience has led me to want to carry on learning about web development and how I can go about improving this site and maybe making more.
Having not had home Internet that has worked with any kind of stability it was quite a shock to get home today and find that everything seems to be working normally again.
Check out the difficulties we have been facing here.
I lent Liz my house keys on Friday as I was travelling back to Kirkham that evening to attend a Christening on the Saturday and Liz wanted to stay and play at George’s birthday Otley Run. I forgot to ask for them back on Sunday when I took her home and, Liz being Liz, she forgot she had them. So, I am pretty much stuck in the house because I can’t lock up or get back in!
This is very much a double edged sword. It is boring being stuck in, especially as we have a joiner in replacing our doors which means I can’t do too much wandering or watch tv as it is too loud. I also miss a lecture or two, though that isn’t too important as it is last week of term so there isn’t much exciting happeneing in them. The upside is that I have achieved an awful lot of coding in the time I have been in. I am now totally up-to-date in all my coding and even managed to forge ahead slighlty with next term’s coursework. At this rate I will have nothing top do over the holidays!
Last night my hard drive failed. The second hard drive in six months to roll over. Well technically this is the same drive that rolled over last time, so really I should have expected it. The first time round the Windows installation was affected by a damagaed disk surface – or so I thought, but after a re-install and a few weeks of messing about I managed to recover the disk. This time it is a total failure, so a new hard drive is currently winging its way from Ebuyer (many thanks to my sponsor, Liz 
).
Unfortunately, the hard drive that failed was my windows install drive and I don’t want to install windows on my second hard drive. So until the new disk arrives I am stuck using my linux box for everything. Now I like linux – it is easy to use and definitely the most intuitive system I have come across (I use Ubuntu 7.04 (for desktop) at the moment) but it does have several drawbacks. First the chess game AI is far too difficult. I am a good chess player and struggle to beat the computer on Easy and Medium. The other fault is its incompatibility with modern games. It is a bind to install them and then it’s a lottery as to whether they will even run. This wouldn’t normally be a problem for me as I tend to only use my linux machine for programming and other work related things. However, in the current situation it is annoying – especially as our internet keeps going down!
Anyway, my new disk should be here today so hopefully I will be back up and running by tonight.
Well, again – apologies for the length of time between posts. I really have no excuse this time apart from laziness and the fact I have had about a million things on my mind recently.
I wish I could write about whats been going on in my world on here, but I feel that the details and in fact the vaguaries of it all are not suitable for public dissemination as yet. As soon as I think the world at large has the need to know, I will share everything.
A few things I can update on are CompSoc, A-Soc, my new tech set up (work in progress) and a few bits of gossip and general gubbins.
Firstly, CompSoc – well things have been relatively quiet recently as we have been focussing on the administrative side of things. Something we found necessary following our President’s (Sam Oakley) house getting broken into and all their laptops getting stolen, including all the data on our members. Note for future reference: do not store all your important data on one system, always have a copy or back up on a different system. We are starting to fill up the calendar with events now (if you are really interested then check out the events listings on the web page). I am glad I got involved in CompSoc, the committee are a joy to work with in the main and I really enjoy the technical side of things too.
A-Soc is not going amazingly well – if you read Chris Worfolk’s blog posts here and here then you get an idea on what’s the matter. Our London trip is going to plan at the moment – really got things sorted now, everything is booked and all we need now is to fill up the last few places and we are set. If any of you readers are interested in coming then it is £55 for members and £65 for non-members (membership fee is a fiver so do the math…) and that gets you transport and accommodation inclusive of breakfasts. Visit our web site for more information and to sign up.
I have just bought an old School of Computing PC and am preparing to set it up as a linux machine to run alongside my windows machine. I managed to get hold of it really cheaply and it came with monitor (17inch flat screen) and peripherals. I am currently using the monitor as part of a dual monitor system – see pics, along with my new Logitech G11 Keyboard. I am hoping to supplement this set up with a KVM switch so I can use monitor, keyboard and mouse with both boxes and also a new mouse.
Liz and I are going really strong too, in fact I think our relationship is starting to mature into soemthign really special. We have had our ups and downs – especially over the last fortnight or so – but we have emerged stronger and better prepared for a future than we were! All in all, I think we are destined for something special here – watch this space!
Well I am nearing the end of my Fresher’s week as part of the Department of Joint Honours Science. I think i will classify the week as a success. I have met some new people, i have attended all the appropriate lectures, labs and meetings and am now all set for the start proper of my new degree programme. I am particularly looking forward to my computing modules as I feel that these will be the testing yet enjoyable challenge that I require to thrive. I am enjoying getting into linux and exploring all the nooks and crannies within it. The induction programme being run by the SoC has been helpful if somewhat tedious as it focussed on writing a quick HTML file and learning some of the basics of the command line terminal – something I consider myself a fairly confident user of. I am by no means an expert – Kieran will shoot me down for saying anything remotely like that, but I can manage, run, create and delete files and directories etc and write fairly strict html as long as it’s not too flashy. It is the programming side of the course that I am most apprehensive about, but I feel that the challenge is something I need. Roll on Java!
CompSoc and A-Soc Fresher events are getting into full swing and I am really starting to get my teeth into the roles. I am looking forward to the next few weeks despite the fact that the workload is daunting to say the least.
Basically, I am running out of HDD space on my current computer. Now I have two options as far as I can see, I can just upgrade the HDDs in my current machine – currently a 160GB and a 300GB (both SATA 2) – to something larger, ideally 500GB +, or I can price up a new machine that will essentially be a file server, but not anything dedicated – ie I want it to have a number of large hard drives, but still be usable for applications etc.
Looking on ebuyer and a few other sites it is going to cost me about £400 to get a new computer, at least I think I will as I have never built a system from scratch before so I am not 100% sure what I need. The problem with just upgrading my current HDDs is the fact that both my current disks are full and I have no further slots to fill up. This leaves the problem of transferring data from one HDD to another and having to do OS reinstalls etc.
If anyone has any bright ideas on the matter let me know.
Just a quick post to say that we have working internet at home now, which means that I can post more and generally be more of an online nuisance to the world from now on!
The internet isn’t perfect, we are still having modem vs router issues and are currently running multiple DHCP servers and the port forwarding is a bit screwed but we can all get online and play WoW. Which is the important thing!
Bah!
Having had some serious issues with my PC recently I have had to format and reinstall my OS onto my computer. Now nothing works! I actually hate Dell, they send little or no driver cd’s out so I have had to trawl the web to get all the drivers I need, all except my onboard sound, my onboard video and my thrid party video/graphics card. Dell kindly told me today that they no longer supply drivers for the (now obselete) motherboard (P/N OJ8885) and that they can transfer me to their advanced software team for a nominal fee of £35!! I can buy a new motherboard for that!!
My big problem is that Dell don’t want their customers to do anything with their computers so they don’t actually label their components, so it has taken me over a week to find out the part number for the motherboard and I still cannot get the part number for the Dell installed (but definitely ATI Radeon) video card….grrrrrrrrrrrrrr!
Anyone any ideas?
