Drive Bender: Low Cost Drive Expansion & File Duplication

You have some data you want backed up, you have a bunch of drives, internal and external, and you don’t have a pocketful of cash. What are you going to do? In this post we’ll look at Drive Bender from Division-M and why I chose it over the other options available.

To RAID or not to RAID, that has always been the question for me. We all want to have our data backed up somehow. Lose a drive full of personal stuff, your movies or music etc, and the pain can go from simply time consuming (re-ripping your CDs or DVDs), to excruciating if you have lost data that is unrecoverable. I have to be honest; I have not been too good about keeping reliable backups of all of my stuff.

Hulu… Plus Ads?

I love me some Hulu. Certainly a good amount of content available and the interface is great. It doesn’t have everything I had with a full cable, but for $7.99 for the “Plus” version versus an absurd bill from Comcast, I’ll take it. The only issue I have, and it’s a big one, is I cannot escape the ads. Ads, ads, ads, Ahhhhhhh! I cut the cord, and still ended up with ads.  According to the Hulu website, they have decided to keep ads on the subscription “Plus” version to because “We have found that by including a modest ad load, we can keep the price of Hulu Plus under eight bucks, while still providing users with access to the most popular current season shows on the devices of their choice”. 

I am my Brother’s Keeper: HL2770DW Laser Printer

After a decade, I bit the bullet and bought a laser printer. Perhaps I am one of the last holdouts, clinging to the mindset that laser printers were far too expensive for home use and the limited amount of things I print. I can always just go to my office and whip out the docs I need. For the past decade I have been using inkjets at home, slow and expensive per page; but they were cheap at the time, and I had color printing. To me it was a reasonable trade off, inexpensive and I could print in color if need be.  I work out of my house most of the time; so for text, Word Docs etc that were a few pages long, I would print at home. For anything of substance or that I needed several copies of, I went through the process of emailing the doc to myself or putting it on a USB drive, get in the car, drive to my office, and print out the copy. A complete waste of time.

WD Live HUB: Centralize All Your AV

I’ll call this a review, but my aim is really to show you how cool this device is and how many things it can do for you, centralizing all your home media in one place. You want an actual review? I can do that in four words:

GO BUY ONE NOW!

That would be it. I am am probably one of the biggest advocates for the device, an incredible product for the price, that changed the entire way I view media and the way I access it. I positively love my Live HUB and cannot even imagine life without it. House on fire? I'd probably grab the HUB and a few of my external drives leaving the rest of my belongings to go up in smoke. Devotion or insanity? Read on and decide.

But an article where I just tell you how much I love a product would not really be very helpful or interesting in any way, so instead I’ll relate a story of how I chose to go in the direction of buying a WD Live HUB, and then show you some screen shots so you can really see what using this is like. I have read many a review that simply describes the capabilities of a product, but that won't give you the real feel for how you as an end-user would use it at your home. Hopefully seeing screen shots of my implementation of the Live HUB from my TV Screen will give you that perspective, and possibly realize what you are missing.

My New Favorite Gizmo: TP-LINK Print and Storage Server

I have been looking for a few things recently, one being a print server so I can have my cheap old DeskJet out of the way and hooked up without having it attached to or server, and some type of network drives. I would love a crazy NAS with multiple TBs in a RAID configuration, but that is simply not in the budget at the moment. I was, and am, convinced that there is an inexpensive solution to this.

I have multiple external USB drives, 3 2TB drives, a bunch of smaller ones that don’t require separate power, and then of course a handful of thumb drives. I have considered buying a network drive such as the WD World Book, but since I already own the above externals, it seemed like I could just use my existing hardware for this exercise.

The Continuing Quest for Faster Internet

A few weeks ago I woke up to find that my internet access was down. I did the typical troubleshooting, reset the cable modem, my router etc, but to no avail. I called Comcast (still the best internet access in my area), and they determined that my cable modem was dead. 

The very nice service person from Comcast said that I would actually get much faster speeds with one of the newer modems anyways, and as well that for an extra $10 a month I could upgrade from 12MBs down to 20MBs down, which I gladly accepted. I can’t believe I was unaware that they offered faster service and I didn’t know this.

Geeking Out On Remotes: Logitech Harmony 700

I have been doing a bunch of research on remotes, as I am simply at a point where I have way too much stuff and a table full of remotes that don't work well together. I wanted something that would handle my WD Live HUB, ROKU, Stereo, Blu-Ray player and TV and intermingle them smoothly (EX: When I am using the HUB or ROKU on the TV, to know that the volume should turn up the stereo not the TV etc). I spent a bunch of time on discussion groups for my various pieces of hardware, and it became evident that pretty much everyone will tell you to buy a Logitech Harmony Remote, but even that becomes confusing as they make 10 or 12 different ones. It all depends on what features you need, how many devices you want to control, if you want RF in addition to IR, touch screen or not, visual screen showing what device you are using and on and on...

After enough research I settled on the Harmony 700 which can handle 8 devices, and has a nice screen (not touch) at the top. Although it did take me 3 days to get it setup and one call to tech support, I am now very pleased with it, and I was warned it was really complicated but once set, you are good until you change hardware. Well that is certainly the case. The only major problem I had was getting it to change the TV to the appropriate input, but I eventually solved that by configuring my TV to not skip unused inputs. That way the remote could always move the same amount of inputs and get to the same place, regardless of which devices were actually powered up. It did take a while to configure completely, as I would discover a thing that either did not work, or a feature I wanted to add, I would re-attach the remote to my laptop and configure that feature.

Cutting the Cable Cord Part III: Installing PlayOn

Play On, How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. This is the third article on cutting the cord from cable TV, but is essentially a review on PlayOn. I love this product, and today we go in-depth on the setup and configuration. This article is longer and has more detail than I usually write about, but since I find PlayOn to be the the main piece of getting to my end-goal, if you are heading in the same direction as I am, this will show you all the configuration options. Of course the real answer is; Download the trial version and install it on your computer.

In my quest to rid myself of Comcast’s cable TV (I’m still using Comcast Internet), I had most of the heavy lifting done. From the previous two articles on this topic you already know:

Why I Love & Hate Spotify

Well mostly love... Anyways I also use Pandora pretty heavily since both that and Spotify go through my TVs and Stereos in the living room and the bedroom, very convenient. I have a Michael Schenker "station" on Pandora which is great, lots of Shenker, Gary Hoey, Eric Johnson, Satch etc, and a Schenker song "illusion" from the Arachophopiac album comes on and its great, I love it. I have never heard that album, or the singer for that matter, so I of course just shift to Spotify to check out the whole album. I search Spotify for Schenker, and they have tons of stuff of his,or that he played on etc, but nothing new except remasters of older stuff. Aghhhh. So I go to allmusic.com to figure it out

Cutting the Cable Part II: Choosing My Solutions

My ongoing quest for freedom from cable TV has been a fascinating adventure the entire time. I have read and researched a lot of products and services, tested a bunch of software and actually really enjoyed the process. For starters, I have been moving away from TV for quite some time now. More focused on music, movies and the ever growing genre of video and audio podcasts. That is not to say there are not TV shows I would like to watch. Programming has been increasing in volume at a ridiculous pace, but also the quality of programming has been getting better. You can afford to be choosy these days. Not like the old days when I remember having 3 VHF channels and 4 UHF ones. We watched whatever was on at that time, until the VHS tape came out, and with that that, the video rental store. So now I am ready to cut the cable. I want what I want, when I want it, yet don’t want to pay Comcast and absurd amount of money every month for a bunch of channels that I could care less about. Six home shopping channels? Really, I am paying for this crap? No not acceptable.

Cutting the Cable Cord Part I: Getting the Hardware

Fed up with the ridiculous cost of Comcast TV, which I barely watch anyways, I have been researching the best method for cutting the cable for the past year. Finally I came up with a reasonably priced plan, and got set out running a few tests. The plan is to test PlayOn (which I will review in detail in another post), which takes video from the Internet, and pushes it out to any DLNA client. It requires a relatively fast processor to transcode the video before making it available to your client. I was already running a dedicated UTorrent server, so put the trial version of PlayOn onto that machine, but found the video too choppy. The processor was far too slow, but the system worked well enough that and I was able to determine that PlayOn would be an acceptable answer if I had enough processing power to run it. The interface seemed to work well, my set top boxes (WD Live HUB and Live Plus) were able to see the PlayOn server, and the video showed up on my TV. Okay, we have a plan.  I determined to get myself an early birthday present, and buy a used computer with a fast enough processor, and make a dedicated PlayOn server. Worst case scenario was that I PlayOn would not meet my needs and I would end up with an extra computer. No real issue at all, I have a list of things in the planning stage that would require another computer, such as build a backup server, and a host of other ideas..