A geekery post.

Hello World!

So we have just recently moved into a new apartment, and that means it's time to tear down the network, computers, and any attached peripherals and re-employ it, providing any improvements possible. So, well, of course, we always look for better solutions...

And it turned out much the same, although I am getting more serious about setting up the little things I've been wanting to do for a while.

First off, my reasoning for doing some things are because my life pretty much revolves around gizmos and gadgets. In this two bedroom apartment we have five tvs (although none of them networked! man those tvs need to get cheaper), two xbox 360s, a playstation 3, a wii, a regular xbox running media, two big rig computers, a laptop, two netbooks, a windows 7 machine we're pretty much using as a NAS, and a linux machine for (hopefully soon) scheduled backups. Our power bill sucks.

I found this neat little program called dropbox which has become recently very published, and well deserving of those publications. It's quite amazing what you can do with it when you have people coming up with all sorts of ideas. The basic premise is that you sign up for it, you are allowed a "2gb" limit without paying, and you can install the client or use the HTTP client to access your account. Installing the client lets you create a folder on your computer that is very much a shared folder between computers. If I was to update a file in this folder on my netbook, it would instantly (if connected to the internet) update that same file on any computer I have the client installed on and associated with my account. As for ideas...here's an example: my roommate is going to italy, and needs a place to drop all his photos since they will be stored in RAW and well...they are big files. So, we created a dropbox account for him, and I knew there had to be a solution with this cool little gadget I found out.

And there is! Create a dropbox account...download a program that can monitor, copy, and delete folders, subfolders, and files (I used watchDirectory)...and voila. After setting the watchDirectory program to monitor my dropbox subfolders (only three currently...documents, photos, programs), and copy any file in them to the respective backup folder on the storage computer (aptly named DropboxBackup\William\(respective section...photos/docs/whatever), and then delete it...voila. I copied a photo onto my netbook, then watched as the photo was stolen from my PC, copied into the NAS computer, then deleted from the dropbox account, thus making the 2gb limit...well...kind of limitless!

But that's just one example, and there are sooo many. Really neat program.

Finally got the gigabit switch up and running, need to still network one of the 360s and the PS3 (wireless HD streaming sucks..), wall mount a tv, ...and the list goes on, but it will slowly get accomplished. I was just super excited at discovering dropbox for now :)

Good night!