I've been looking for a solid storage solution primarily for digital photos and video which currently consumes just over 110GB of disk space (50GB/photos and 60GB/video). I was in CostCo (a "big box" warehouse store) the other day and they are currently selling the 1 terebyte Wester Digital MyBook Pro Edition II with the triple Firewire/USB interface for $369 which appears to be a very competitive price according to Froggle. I'd done quite a bit of searching for good solutions and this seems to fit the bill fairly well especially considering it has the flexibility to easily support both RAID 0 and RAID 1, my preference.

So, I get the box home and I'm excited to get it hooked up and put an end to the constant stream of DVD's I've been burning which covers only photos since the videos are too large. The MyBook couldn't really be much easier to to install, pop in the CD, hook up the desired I/O interface cable, firewire 400 in my case and plug it in. Unfortunately, that's where my experience ended, the small led indicator on the AC adapter brick lit up but the device never responded. The blue indicator lights on the front never flickered nor did the power button respond. I thought I'd noticed a hint of an electrical smoke smell briefly after I plugged it in and I'm guessing that had something to do with it. I fooled around for a bit adjusting the connections but the device was simply dead. Having purchased it at CostCo returning it other than a trip to the store was painless though I didn't have time, with two tired kids in the cart, to wait in line to pick up a replacement so I'll have to wait for another day.

I really like the device and even though I've read about it being rather loud I don't intend on having it on all the time so that doesn't really both me unless it wakes the kids which I can't imagine.

On a related note, I found this blog post by Jeremy Zawodny as it has some great information and lots of good comments.

Btw, in case you're wondering the screenshot here is a picture of $g(WinDirStat) of my existing backup drive which is a $g(LaCie 250GB USB external drive) of which I've recently found some not so glowing reviews.

What are you doing for storage? What about some of the available online storage solutions?

I have a $g(ReplayTV) 4500 and this past weekend I had it set to record 4.5 hours of the Superbowl extravaganza. Yesterday, when I woke up at started to download it to my PC using $g(DVArchive) and moments later my wife went down stairs and turned on the ReplayTV at which point things went downhill. I immediately noticed that the transfer rate had dropped way down so I went downstairs to have a look and found my wife had turned the Replay on which meant it was trying to stream and play an 11.4GB file at the same time. It didn't work.

After several minutes waiting for it to respond to the remote it was clear something had gone wrong. Eventually, I rebooted it and when I got back into the channel guide I noticed the Superbowl along with about 3/4th of our other recorded shows were gone. Things got worse when I attempted to restore our scheduled shows which caused scheduling conflicts with programs that were no longer recording!

At that point, I downloaded the remaining contents and performed a factory reset (382 zones, for those of you who have a Replay). That worked but required me to completely reset everything from the network settings to our entire recording schedule.

I actually watch very little TV these days, mostly stuff from $g(Netflix) (recorded onto the Replay) but when I do I have to use commercial advance or chances are I won't make it through the entire show.

Anyway, so much for watching the $g(Superbowl commercials) from the comfort of my couch.

Last summer my wife and I purchased several new appliances two of which included a range and an over the range microwave. The latter presented a bit of a problem such that when we added the height of the microwave to the cabinet it didn't leave much room for pots on the back burners below. Fortunately, one of my wife's uncle's builds cabinets so I removed the cabinet above the range and had him shrink it about an inch and a half (3.8cm).

Now, being a geek I couldn't just sit down and draw out a diagram when I have a perfectly good computer right here in front of me? I happened to recall reading about Google SketchUp on The Daily Grind so I downloaded it and proceeded to model my kitchen in 3D. I was pretty impressed at how easy it was and the model came out better than I had expected. I've never used modeling software like this so it was a kick to play with.

So, if your even slightly interested in 3D modeling I think you'll find Google SketchUp well worth the download. Of course, the price is right too.

Over the holiday break I was trying to use iTunes to download and listen to a few podcasts and the performance on my Dell 530 dual Xeon 1.4GHz machine is just awful. To the right is a screenshot of Process Explorer specifically for the iTunes.exe process while sitting idle on my machine for over two and a half minutes. There are no downloads in progress and no other processes taking any CPU.

What's it doing? Every few seconds the CPU spikes to 47% and the mouse flickers like crazy when I hover over it. In fact, the mouse flickers even when iTunes doesn't have focus and only stops if I minimize it.

I really like the iPod device but iTunes, at least on the PC, has become a serious pain.

• There is no automatic update for iTunes so it constantly prompting me to visit the Apple web site and download the latest version.
• It never remembers my QuickTime setting where I turn off the tray icon
• The download is 33MB just to go from 7.0 to 7.02

What's your experience like?

I just noticed that Netflix has added an RSS feed for tracking my personal rental queue. That's sweet! Subscribed.