A while back I wrote about issues I had with my home server, but now I have to say I am really satisfied with it and right now I’m sitting on cloud nine. So what is so good about my home server now? Well it’s a bunch of features that I love about it.

Recorded TV: With Windows Home Server Power Pack 2 (wow, what a mouthful), a feature was added that integrates with Windows Media Center. It allows you to playback your recorded TV from your Home Server on your Windows Media Center! It’s pretty sweet. This means I can have massive amount of storage on my WHS and just keep a respectable HD on my client machine. If I want to record a lot more, I just add a new drive to the home server and away it goes. Awesome stuff!

Computer Backups: This is probably my favorite feature. I don’t think I’ve ever backed up my PC, but since I bought my new PC I decided to enable the backup option. It’s all wired over a giga lan so I thought why not. What I didn’t realize was that I was going to need the feature so fast. A few days ago my Raid 0 array failed and could not be restored. Big fright, but 30 minutes later, my machine is cleanly formatted and restored in working order as if I switched on the machine from midnight the night before! I can’t believe how good this was.

Online Backups: Why do you need online backups when you have a home server?! Well first of all why not? You can’t have enough backups. First of all I use my home server as storage not as a backup device. The home server does have support for backup of data over multiple drives so that if one drive fails your data can be restored, but what happens if both you drives fail, or your house burglarized, or there is a fire? Gone in a puff of smoke! It doesn’t matter how many local backups you have, you can always loose the data. So I’ve signed up with Amazon’s S3 service for online storage and with the HP EX 48x series you can integrate Amazon S3 directly with the unit. Unfortunately I only have the HP EX 47x which doesn’t have this sweet feature. So until HP release the update later this fall, I found another solution. That solution is Jungle Disk for Home Server and right now it’s free of charge.

Source Control: So I love source control. It’s needed if you are a developer of any description. It also doesn’t have to be very difficult to setup and manage. I wrote a while back about how to setup Perforce on your home server. Perforce is good, very good, but I decided to change to the more friendly subversion. The great thing about SVN is that there are so many solutions out there, though nothing that directly integrates into your home server client… yet. So I installed VisualSVN Server Manager from VisualSVN and then installed AnhkSVN for Visual Studio. Perfect and so simple!

So there you go, 4 awesome reasons why to own a home server. I am so thankful for Microsoft to develop such awesome software and to HP for making a really sweet rig. If you don’t own one, I suggest you head out and get one asap!

One thing I love about Zune is that for $15 a month you get all the music in the world (almost). The great thing about that is you get to hear music you wouldn’t even think of buying. I got to say Lamb of God is pretty good.

So here I am loving my Kindle reading some great books and Gamefly ships me out Fallout 3. I don’t have time to play Fallout 3 right now. Is this game going to consume all my free time?

At what felt like an eternity my wife is finally able to move to the states! Less than a month away the two of us will be back together.

Hopefully it will have stopped snowing by then unlike today.

So since I purchased the Amazon Kindle, I’ve been reading non stop. The funny thing is even with the Sony Reader I didn’t read so much. So is this just me trying to justify the extra cost I had to fork out, or is that I am actually enjoying reading? To be honest I’m really enjoying the books.

One of the best features of the Kindle is the book store, the second you finish one book you can jump right in and start reading the next one. Along with that, the prices are pretty reasonable for the most content. Anything less than a year old you are likely looking at $10, but all else is around the $7 to $5 mark.

Another nice feature of the Kindle is the news papers. You can pick up the Seattle Times or the Irish Times every day. In fairness I’ve only picked up a couple, I still relay on the web for my news, but at weekends some of the opinion columns are a good read. That and reading a bit of home is also nice.

I guess another reason I’m loving reading at the moment has to come down to the fact the books are pretty good. I have to thank Julien for introducing me to Peter F. Hamilton. I’ve been getting a uber geek urge for some good sci fi and trawling through Netflix I think I’ve pretty much seen every half decent sci fi movie ever made. So reading sci fi books has opened up a whole new avenue for me.

Looking at my desk I noticed I had 4 mice all together. I wrote before about how I wish they still made trackballs, so a couple months back I went out and bought the Logitech Trackman from Best Buy. Sure it doesn’t have a forward and back button, sure it has a cable, and definitely it annoys people who come to my office, but I think it’s great!

If you’ve never tried one before you should head out and buy one.

So my Amazon Kindle showed up yesterday and to be honest I was like a kid at Christmas. As some of you know I used to own the Sony Reader PRS-500. Now the Sony Reader is a pretty good device for reading books, but I found the selection and price of the books on the Sony Reader eBook store were just too expensive.

A few weeks ago Amazon announced their new device, though it was rumored for some time. I made the decision to sell my Sony Reader and put my order in for the Kindle. Now when the first Kindle device first came out, they ran out of stock in 8 hours, so I went ahead and preordered this device. At the same time I put my Sony Reader up on eBay.

Now I love eBay since I moved to the states. Over here eBay just feels more secure, so I didn’t have a problem with selling the device. After a little mess up with the changes to the eBay buy it now option the device sold in 5 minutes! I can’t believe it, just 5 minutes! Wow, it was just a little less that what it costs new, so I couldn’t believe how fast it went and for how much I got for it.

Preordered Amazon Kindle 2, check; sold Sony eBook, check. Now a waiting game that felt like it lasted just too long and was concluded yesterday.

So I’m not going to do an unboxing, but if you want to learn a lot more about the Kindle I suggest you head over to Engadget.com.

1400 jobs gone today, 3600 to go over the next 18 months. Everyone uncertain and all signs show it’s likely to be more than just those numbers.

I survived this long, so here’s to another day!

Something that that always amazes me about Washington is the weather. In Scotland it rains all the time, not so heavy, but just constantly. Ireland was just miserable, rained, soggy, just enough sun to get your excited and the rain again.

In Washington it’s so much different. The rain here is really heavy. So bad you can’t see 10 yards in front of you. The snow here comes hard and fast, though I heard this is a once in a 10 year snow, but it does snow unlike Scotland where the last time I saw snow I think I was 6. The summer here when I moved was lovely and hot, we’re talking over 30 celsius.

Then there is the fog. In Ireland and Scotland you get fog. You get it once in a while, a couple times a year, but not regular. Here you get it a lot. At least twice a month if not more. It also isn’t only in the mornings, it can last days. It’s thick and slow, so hard to see anywhere.

The last two evenings it’s been foggy and you can really see where movies and books can get their inspiration from. I always thought the fog that you see roll in while people were at sea or when that fog comes in during a horror movie were all special effects, but it happens and happens a lot.

Just thank god there are no monsters, lol.

Well that didn’t take long. After 4 days or so with the Korg nanoKEYS I took them back and picked up the M-Audio Axiom 49 keyboard.

This keyboard is massive, almost 3 foot long, but the keys are so much nicer than the nanoKEYS. I guess if I knew how to use a keyboard like this the nanoKEYS would be ok to have, but as somebody who is learning I really needed something with some extra key travel.

So I’m learning via youtube, which is really bad, but it’s free. I guess I’ll try youtube a bit longer until I know the basics and have a little practice under me then I’ll go look for a tutor. The problem I have is that I just bash buttons and it sounds like complete garbage (rubbish for my friends back home).

Choosing a hobby is always a problem. They usually cost lots of money and to have several on the go is expensive and time consuming.

For instance, I love computers, I will invest considerable time and money into them, and likely they will always come first in my list of what to spend my savings on. You know I have to have a fast laptop, I have to have a nice screen. It’s not that it has to be the best of the best, but I do appreciate the good stuff and I use it to it’s full potential.

Now I like cars also, but cars are expensive. I could buy a 350z and add new filters, brakes, suspension, but all that is even more expensive than my computers interest. So it’s likely never going to happen. Over here in the states it’s easy enough to get a lease on a new car for a couple years. Far cheaper than owning, well cheaper if you like to change cars every few years. So for me, the idea of buying an oldish sports car and doing it up compared to leasing a new one is not going to happen.

Then there is photography. I tried this and found out I need to spend a lot of time and effort into it. I found myself photographing landscapes most of the time and I bought a good amateur D-SLR a few years back and have taken great pictures, but as time went on I found good quality consumer cameras will take just as good pictures. You really need to spend a lot of money to get the quality prints and a lot of money on good glass to get the shot to make it worth printing out in great quality. So while I don’t focus on D-SLR a lot anymore I do like to keep my eye out on a good composition and have a nice quality consumer pocket camera for that rare occasion.

Now it’s a new year and my brain travels at a million miles an hour and I found out that you can get relatively cheap music components for the PC by Korg. The products are part of a series called Korg Nano Series. In the series they have a controller, a keyboard and a set of pads.

Something else I released is that I am so used to buying stuff over the internet, I don’t even bother with local stores. I had ordered these online and they were going to be in stock next week and I went to bed last night. Then this morning I thought I would go see them in a local shop, go figure they had them all in stock there, so back on the internet, order canceled and down the the store and bought all three. Very happy, I love instant gratification.

So here I am sitting in front of my laptop with the three devices downloading all the software needed to make them work.

I’ll post some tunes when I get good… sometime in the next several years then!

Happy New Year all!!!

So this is the start to my first year in the USA. The last four months have been crazy. So much has changed and so much has happened, but what a hell of a start to everything.

My blogging has been boring and mundane in the past and going forward I’m going to put more interesting things here, mainly how my life is going over here and what I’m up to.

I do have to say though the fireworks in Edinburgh are far more impressive than than the ones in Seattle.

So Happy 2009 and I wish everyone to have a great year!

(Oh and the picture isn’t mine, I borrowed it from: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mrcrash/3155096835/)

I love using my email address as login for the vast majority of websites I access. Some sites use OpenID which allows you to use your existing login ID for another service to log into website without creating a custom account, that is pretty nice.

Now I decided to start hosting my pictures on Flickr instead of pbase.com. Why? Because pbase.com cost lots of money and Flickr does best for the majority of what I want to host. Now in saying that about money I am likely to signup to the Flickr paid account in the near future. It is a pretty decent service.

So I decided to write some more blog posts about my life in the States (hence the blog title Life on the Other Side). One of the things I wanted to do was to have my Flickr pictures displayed here. The great thing is that it’s real easy, but you have to edit for feckin ages before you get it right. For instance you can’t just add Flickr direct using the spaces tool. Ahh either way it’s added. If you want to know how, let me know.

Ahh well my little rant. Enjoy my pictures ;-) Remember to hit the play button!

I've decided to upgrade my HP EX470 home server. (The EX470 being the same as the EX475 other than the fact it only came with a single hard drive rather than two.) I'm not how ever going to upgrade it with more storage, I don't need that yet, rather that I am going to upgrade the CPU and the Memory.

Officially you are not able to upgrade anything other than the hard drives, but Home Server Hacks has some lovely details on how to upgrade the CPU and how to upgrade the Memory (just got to remember to update the virtual memory afterwards).

So they recommend to buy the AMD LE-1640 CPU. All find and great when you have great resources in the USA such as www.newegg.com. I however not only have to have this in Europe, but in Ireland or from a company that delivers to Ireland. Not easy and not great. There are a few companies out there, but some of the biggest are www.DABS.ie and www.Komplett.ie. There are of course a few others, but none had stock of the LE-1640. In fact neither did those two companies have the CPU in stock either.

After a big hassle I've finally been able to order LE-1640 CPU and the memory I need to make the upgrade. I'll post my results here. Should be fine, and lets see if there is much of a performance increase, not that you really need much anyway, but it's fairly cheap upgrades and it looks like that LE-1640 cpu won't be around forever.

At home I like to work on some C# code and the more proficient I get the more likely I am going to need some source control software to manage my updates and changes. As my programs get larger and more complex so does the risk of messing everything up, so I decided that I should set up a source control system.

As I have the entire .Net suite on hand I was thinking originally about Visual Source Safe or Visual Studio Team Server. Visual Source safe works, but is flaky and some come with it's own issues, so I was looking for something more modern. Visual Studio Team Server is great, but also requires a dedicated machine. I really didn't want to try and see what happened when installed on my Windows Home Server (WHS) box.

Jeff Atwood had a post on Setting up Subversion on Windows and while I love the whole open source stuff, subversion is just a little messy for my liking. It doesn't integrate directly with Visual Studio 2008 (as it requires another third party tool) and it's only in it's first version running as a Windows service.

So I decided the checkout Perforce. The great thing about Perforce is that even though it's rather expensive, they offer a two user edition free of charge which is great, just what I'm looking for and Perforce comes with a Visual Studio 2008 source control add-in.

Installing Perforce on Windows Home Server

First of all you need to download the two components, server and client. You can get these from the Perforce Windows download 32bit site. You're looking for the "Perforce Server Windows Installer" (this is what we put on the WHS) and also "P4V Installer" which is what we will put on our client machine. (I recommend you download these to your home server).

Now connect to your WHS machine using the Windows Home Server Console tool and add a new share called Perforce. Now change the user access rights so all users on your home server can not access the share. We don't want users to connect directly to this share, but we want WHS to manage to expansion of share when we outgrow your available space.

Now close down your WHS Console and log in using the Remote Desktop Connection tool to your home server.

Once you are connected open up the directory to where you downloaded perforce.exe. (In my case I downloaded this to \\homeserver\Software\Tools_Utils\Perforce\ and this is in turn available on your WHS in D:\shares\Software\Tools_Utils\Perforce)

Run perforce.exe to start the installation. The first dialog is for the locations of the software. I recommend leaving these as default as you want the application run from your system drive.

The next screen on the install configures your port number (I've left the default port) and then there is the option to specify the root directory. This is where you point Perforce to the directory you created when connected to the Windows Home Server Console. My share was called Perforce and is \\homeserver\Perforce\ while in setup you need to point it to d:\shares\perforce\. See the screen shot below. Check your d:\shares folder to get the right name, depending on what you already have there it could be named something else.

After you click next you are presented the client configuration, here you can just click next again. Then click Start to install Perforce.

That's it! Perforce is up and running on your WHS machine! Nice and easy and takes a whole 5 minutes to install.

Running Perforce Client

Now that you have Perforce installed on your WHS you will need to create an account. Install p4vinst.exe on your client machine and then once installed run the tool P4V.

Connect to: server: should be changed to your server name, in my case homeserver and the port number should match what you specified during the Perforce install.

In Connect as: click New... and then provide a username, email address and your full name.

Un the Open workspace: section click New...

You are asked for a workspace name. I would give the name of your machine.

Now create a folder where you want to keep a local copy of your files. I've put mine in C:\p4clients\steve-vaio-sz\. In the New Workspace dialog set the root to the same folder you just created.

Click Save.

Click OK and you're done.

Nice and easy.

Ok, so after a while I was thinking that buying another music device was pointless. Pointless because I realized I already had something that would work...

Shortly after I bought my iPod I picked up an Apple AirPort Express so I could stream my iTunes music from my PC to my stereo. This was great, but my recent hatefulness towards iTunes and my new found love for Windows Home Server had made the AirPort Express product useless.

Not only that, but my 3Com modem router died a good while back and I was using the AirPort Express as my wireless network up connected to my original static modem for my Internet connection. This was all great until I wanted to access my Windows Home Server from outside my network and the static modem and the apple hub could just not get a long together. So 11 routers later I finally settled on a Belkin one. All great, except my HTC TyTN II mobile phone could not connect to the router with it's wifi connection, so I was still stuck using the AirPort Express to allow my phone on the Internet. This worked fine, but a month ago I signed up to the 02 Mobile Broadband 1gb add on. Fantastic stuff, even allows me to pickup my mail while my phone is "off" unlike with the WiFi connection.

So since I've not need to use the AirPort Express to route my mobile to my router anymore I can use it for it's original task. Streaming music. This for me isn't a perfect solution now. To original devices I was thinking of getting (the Roku SoundBridge) would have been great as it would have streamed all my wma music straight from my Home Server without having to have my laptop running. This solution now requires me to have my laptop on to listen to the music. Not only that I have to stream from iTunes too. This isn't too much of a problem because I did buy an adaptor for my car and had to convert my music anyway for that. I also tried out AirFoil and oAEP, but neither worked. AirFoil can't stream audio from Windows Media Player and oAEP requires a Wave Out Mix in the sound mixer which my laptop doesn't have in Vista.

Either way I can now listen to some music in the Kitchen while I make dinner. Isn't technology a bitch.

I love my home server. I think it's one of the best products to come out in a long time. Microsoft bringing out great software and the hardware vendors with their great equipment. I would be one of the first in line to say I'm not a fan of HP stuff, but this home server is sweet, real sweet. More for another post I guess.

My main use for my home server is to host all my music. I have a load of CD's and they are currently in my 301CD Jukebox, but to remember which CD and track is in each place is a nightmare. So I decided to rip all my albums and stream them to my 360 through my home server. It works and works really well (other than the fact the 360 can be noisy).

Why don't I use my computer to stream? Well I only have laptops and don't always want to keep them on when listening to music...

So where are the woes? Well, the setup with the home server and the 360 and also streaming from the home server to my laptop is so good I want something similar in the kitchen. I make all the food in the house and spend a good time in there. I want to listen to my music there too. Now my kitchen hifi is probably even better than my 7.1 setup for music, mainly because of better speakers. (Monitor Audio Bronze 2's). But how do I listen to my music on my stereo? This is something that I've been looking into for the past couple weeks.

So I've been looking for network music devices that play pretty with Windows Connect, the media streaming component of the home server and while there are some really nice devices out here they are all too expensive for a kitchen. So I've been looking around and found the Roku SoundBridge M1001. This is for sure a few years old, but still appears to be one of the best on the market. At €115 it appears to be an ok price. Not cheep, but not at all as expensive as some others. Let me mull it over a few days, but I recon it's a buy.

I love music. I buy loads of music, though not so much recently. A few years back I bought an iPod and and a car stereo with an iPod adaptor so I could control the iPod within the car without having to use the iPod to change tracks. It was a sweet setup and my wife still uses it as I've changed cars.

Before I got my "new" car I fell out of love with the iTunes store. Sure it offers great music at low prices, but at what price? You don't get CD quality music, and if you hook that music up to a great set of headphones or to a high spec sound system you really notice the quality drop. So I stopped buying new music and just listened to what I had.

When I got my car in November 2006 it had no iPod adaptor and since then I had been burning music to disc, then that got to be too much effort so just selected about 20 albums to listen to in the car. A year and a bit later I am finally going mad listening to the same stuff over and over again.

So I bought a USA Spec iPod Adaptor (Model PA11-VOL) for the Volvo. After a careful and difficult install; mainly due to not having the correct tools and being too eager to get it installed, I now have an iPod adaptor for the car. The original reason I bought this though wasn't to use my iPod, but to use the aux in for my Windows Mobile HTC TyTN II phone. I bought all the adaptors and everything, but the hassle involved and the lack of steering wheel controls for the phone I've gone back to the iPod .

Another benefit this has brought is that I can now listen to podcasts from Giant Bomb! Great stuff.

It's been a while since I’ve been back here and to see my last post was talking about trackball mice I can see why I stopped. I was writing about rubbish. I think the problem with keeping a blog is to work out what exactly to write about. I guess I should just keep it to things I do and like. Writing about what's on my mind doesn't really work.

I've also been thinking about setting up my own custom blog on www.stevegonline.com, but so far it's only an idea. I had a look at setting up wordpress blogging software and to be fair to it, it is pretty good. Unfortunately my knowledge of CSS is very limited at the moment and to customize the theme was going to take more time that I would have liked.

On a similar but other note I am studying for my MCP exams again. After putting it on the back burner for some time now it's been hard to get back up to speed, but another week should get me where I am comfortable again.

Whatever happened to the trackball I asked myself this morning. It's a bit of stupid question to be thinking about, but I do have my reasons.

Recently I got rid of my desktop computer. I'm sick fed up of them, but that's for another post. So I'm left at the moment with my laptop. Right now I am using the Microsoft Presenter 8000 mouse with it and you can see my review below, but I've found using it as a main mouse for several hours is a terrible experience as it's not designed to replace your main desktop counterpart. So digging around I find my old Microsoft Trackball mouse.

The Microsoft Trackball I have is about 5 years old. I picked it up when it first came out and I love it. Though I stopped using it sometime ago now. It wasn't any particular reason, maybe it was because I started to play online games more and got tired changing mice every time. So anyway out it comes and I plug it in. It still works and though it's not the smoothest it's still pretty good.

Now the mouse is a little old, dirty, eh... old. So I started to look to see if I could buy a new one. Surely they've updated the trackball since I bought this.... eh... No.

No? What the hell, it's been 5 years since this came out and though there have been some, they are mainly for forefinger control and not using your thumb to control the pointer. I was pretty upset about this. This leads me on to the question, whatever happened to the trackball? It would appear to me that the major companies gave up developing the mice, probably due to poor sales. So where does that leave me.

Microsoft and Logitech have not released any new trackball's and I can't find any other company that has made ones of any great quality so... guess I'm buggered then.

Microsoft, Logitech if you're reading this... please make a new trackball with the following features.

• Laser accuracy, with a higher response. The current trackman and trackball are pretty poor.
• Side scrolling wheel
• Cordless/ Wireless... though the idea of a trackball doesn't move, but would be useful for say laptop usage.
• Back/ Forward buttons... Microsoft has this on theirs, but the sole reason I won't by the Logitech Trackman is the lack of them.
• More comfortable. Where the Microsoft one nails t pretty much, I would love one with that leather texture they have on their natural 4000 keyboard palm rest.

Oh well, I'll see how long this last, but might end of buying a Wacom tablet or the new natural ergonomic mouse from Microsoft.