Computer-fu
Dell have already shipped clifford. Estimated delivery date is still the 18th, but I wouldn’t be completely surprised to have it sooner than that.
(clifford is an XPS M1530 in red, T9300 CPU, 4GB RAM, 320GB disk, 256MB GF8600M GT GPU. Pretty much a desktop replacement system.)
I’ve ordered an external enclosure for the 300GB PATA disk in the old gaspode (the house server we barely use any more). With that hooked up to clifford via Firewire it may well be faster than the interal disk (7200rpm Firewire vs 5400rpm SATA), will do very nicely for storing all our video/etc, much of which is synced down to the AppleTV anyway.
If I can get mt-daapd playing nice on the AppleTV (and by all accounts it’s a doddle) then the only thing left here that requires an “always-on” computer is the overnight EPG/favourites upload on the Topfield. Which will be moot in a few months when we get TiVo.
This leads to the very-appealing prospect of my only needing one computer for my own stuff, plus one for my partner. This will be replacing three machines (G5 iMac, Core2Duo desktop, Athlon psuedo-server) with one little laptop that’ll sleep at nights unless I’ve got video jobs to run.
I expect this will lead to a fairly significant electricity saving. Which makes me a happy bunny.
The only change I might think about is getting one of those consumer-grade NAS units. The D-Link DNS323 looks like a reasonable choice at AU$300 plus disks. That’d stay on 24×7, but it’d be the only thing that did.
Backups? We use Jungle Disk for our documents/photos/etc — the stuff we’d be really unhappy to lose — and music is synced down to the AppleTV so we’ve automatically got two copies of everything there. Video, well, if I ever fill that 300GB disk (possible, but meh) then we’ll have more than we can copy to the AppleTV, so there’s some exposure there, but really, who cares? Most of it we’ll only ever watch once anyway, this is more about simply having a library of stuff available when we want it, none of it is irreplacable.
I’ve been working for a few days now using Mandriva under VirtualBox on WindowsXP as a “paid work” environment. This lets me use things like iTunes while also being able to have a UNIXy work environment. So far so good, and I think that’ll work out nicely in the longer term. Best of both worlds, effectively, with no great compromise required on either side.
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