www.TheJoe.com

I have been searching for the ultimate home office router/firewall. I would like the following:

1. Gigabit
2. VPN Endpoint
3. QOS

Those are the main points I want in a router/firewall solution. I have been doing a lot of stuff on the road of late. I would like to access my net at home with a reliable commercial solution. (no offense open source)

I am now starting to do some research. I am looking at some possible sonicwall, watchguard, or juniper solution. However, I would like a less pricey solution. Preferably D-Link or Netgear. If anyone out there knows of anything, please reply.

Apparently, I am not the only one looking for these things. Greg Hughes seems to be searching for this as well. (I Have a dream the Perfect gigabit wireless router with vpn and QOS)

The Search is on!

I went and did it. I put the 500 Gig Hitachi drive I got today into my Macbook Pro. I shot video of the whole thing. I shot video of the 320 Gig install, but since I got the 500 so shortly after, I just decided to do the one.

Here it is:

For some odd reason, my camera imports are acting up. It took 4 or so imports to get most of what you see in the video. As you can see, certain sections of the video there is jitter, I did the best I could. I was planning on doing a time-lapse of the rebuild, but it was just unusable.  So, I added a text ending instead. I hope you like it!

One note on the drive. This drive is 12.5mm vs the 9.5mm most 2.5″ drives are. From my understanding, the Macbook Pro 17″ is the only Macbook that this drive will fit inside.

Anyways, this time I did a Time Machine restore to the drive once installed, and it went flawlessly.

It’s a nice drive, I did the video you see on the Macbook Pro with the new drive in it.

As usual, we plan on referencing our videos on the Techno Chubby Site when it gets up and running.

Good Stuff!

I just finish installing the Western Digital 320GB Drive in my MacBook Pro.  Get everything installed and OH SNAP!  I find a 500GB Hitachi 2.5″ Drive.

Well, needless to say, I am a space whore.  So, I ordered one from Other World Computing.   I did the Express overnight.  I ordered it yesterday morning, and today, it’s sitting on my desk.  It’s slightly larger than the regular 2.5″ drives.  It’s 12.5mm vs th 9.5mm height that most 2.5’s are.  However, I have done some research and it looks like it will go into a MacBook Pro 17″ with no issues.  I guess we’ll find out.

I am going to install it soon.  I’ll let you know how it all goes.

Here’s the link to what I got: http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Hitachi/0A53487/

I know it’s being posted all over the net right now. But I just wanted to put in my two copper’s worth on this.

I have purchased the MacUpdate Promo Bundle, I think it’s worth it.

Shameless Link: Today’s MacUpdate Promo, 40% off

It’s a great bundle with a lot of great software. Here’s what they are selling in the bundle:

Hazel
Art Text
MenuCalendarClock
Leap
StoryMill
Typinator
DVDRemaster Pro
Sound Studio
BannerZest
Parallels Desktop

It’s $64.99 for all the software. I’ll be honest, I was leary at first, but there were a couple pieces of software in the list I was interested in registering anyways and I said, what the heck and gave it a go.

It’s the real deal. I got my reg keys all mailed to me and life’s good.

Anyways, if you want to get it and you click on this link Today’s MacUpdate Promo, 40% off I’ll get $3 bucks… Come on, you know you like me enough and want to give a little support to my musings.

Thanks all!

I spent part of my afternoon today upgrading my Macbook Pro’s Hard Drive to 320 Gigabyte from the 200 that was in it originally. Boy, does Apple pack some stuff in the space.

Anyways, I took video of the whole deal. I’ll be working on it at some point this week and get it up on YouTube. It was fairly painless.

After the install, I just did a fresh install from the Leopard disks that came with the system. When it got to the point when it asks if I want to restore an account. I just inserted the old drive in my trusty Thermaltake BlacX and it found all my settings and went to town. It even transferred my VM’s with no issues.

Great stuff!

I have been a VMWare fan for a long time. However, on the windows platform I found that it was somewhat easier to use the Virtual PC software to meet my virtualization needs. Recently, I switched to the Mac OS X platform. One of the deciding factors for me to do this was that VMWare released Fusion for the Mac.

This is an amazing software, it allows me to run Windows and my Linux distributions within the Mac environment. It extremely stable and very responsive. As shown in a previous post..

MacVista - Mac on top, Vista on the bottom

Here is my “MacVista” screenshot.

I highly recommend VMWare Fusion.

For more information visit:  Switch to Fusion or Windows on Mac

Good Stuff!

Well, I was planning on getting a bunch of other videos done today. However, I caught a cold and feel like I have been hit by a truck.

I may get some work done on the new version of TechnoChubby.   We’ll see how I feel.

We finished the install of OS X Leopard on the big black box that was intended to be our media server. We took a video of the install and posted it on YouTube.

We’re gonna do some more videos on how to do stuff like get unity working on vmware, install X11, and nvinstaller.

Back in January, we started working on a Home Media Center/Home Server configuration. I started moving some of the equipment that was normally found in my home office to the living room.

We started to build this monster machine that I thought would handle everything. Theoretically, it would and could but when it came to practice, it just didn’t work out. Here’s the YouTube of where we started with this thing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqcJ45XRNDM

I decided to turn that computer to our media editing machine and it worked fine, but not great. From my perspective, Vista was just not ready to handle the larger demands we were placing on this machine. So, we decided to throw OS X on it. We were quite surprised at how well it worked. So much so that we have decided to move to the Mac platform throughout our household. (As some of you have been reading)

Moving forward, we decided to look into the feasibility of using the Mac platform as our main Media Center that is connected to the living room television. We’re gonna re-configure our big black quad core and set it up and test it. If this works out for us, we’re planning on getting a full Mac Pro and do the same.

Here is the configuration:

Motherboard: Asus Maximus Formula
Processor: Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600
Memory: 8 Gigabytes of Corsair DDR2 (4 x 2GB sticks)
Boot Drive: 500 Gigabyte Seagate
Data Drive: 1 Terabyte Seagate
Video: xFx nVidia GeForce 8800GT w/ 512 MB DDR3
NAS: ReadyNAS NV+ w/ 4 x 750 Gigabyte Seagate drives

Operating System: Leopard OS X 10.5.2 via Leo4All (See NOTE)

“Server” Capabilities:

We will configure the DATA drive to do sharing via bonjour and smb to share our data throughout the house computers.

The ReadyNAS NV+ will be set up as our Time Machine backup drive over the network.

We are still looking into several DLNA/uPNP solutions.

This machine will have iTunes library sharing enabled as well.

Software to be installed and configuration:

VMWare Fusion

We will use VMWare Fusion to run various linux and windows VM’s for our needs. The main Windows VM will be running Vista Ultimate and will provide extender capabilities to our Xbox 360’s.

Toast 9 Titanium

We will use Toast with it’s Tivo functionality to pull and archive our favorite TV shows. We will also set up automatic conversion for use on our iphones.

That’s about it. We’re gonna try to do a full video of this when we do it and will add it to the technochubby stuff on YouTube.

Wish us Luck!

NOTE: Yes, we own a full copy of Leopard. We’d also like to point out that this machine is purely for testing. If this meets our wants/needs we will be purchasing a full Mac Pro. (Just like I just finished purchasing a MacBook Pro once I decided the platform was for me)

Also we do own licenses for all the commercial software that we install on our computers.

Well, the upgrade went fine. I am still using a very old theme, so it will be interesting to see how it holds up. I need to get around to updating it soon.

So much to do, so little time!