I was becoming afraid of not having redundancy with my 750Gb drive so I decided that I wanted to upgrade to another RAID 1 configuration for this data. But I didn’t want this to be done inside my main computer, I wanted to go external. Lastly I wanted the data to be shared across this external drive to my network and not dependant on my personal machine being on.

The solution was to find an external 2 bay NAS. Once I made that decision I began my research. Buying a NAS is somewhat of a tricky affair as there isn’t as many resources available as with other major electronic products. Also, there are many companies with offerings that I had never heard of. After spending tons of time Googling my way across many websites and resources I finally landed at the NAS section of SmallNetBuilder.com which offered the best information.

What made the site so great was that they offered a custom filtered charts area where I could plug in the requirements of what I was looking for and view products returned that they had reviewed and rated. One of the most important factors for me was the network speed of the device. Other things I was looking for was BYOD (provide my own hard drives) RAID, Gigabit LAN, FTP, UpNP and a reasonable price.

After narrowing down the field based on my requirements the D-Link 323 appeared to be a lead contender based on having gotten good reviews and being the lowest priced solution by far. The review on SmallNetBuilder was great but I wanted to hear the voice of the people. So I made my way to the Amazon and Newegg pages and also found that the users who had purchased this unit were happy. I was sold and ordered mine from Amazon. But before I did, I had to decide which drives to put in the unit. At the time I made my purchase in April, the best bang for buck was for 1 TB drives. I did more research and found overwhelmingly good recommendations from several people for the Western Digital 1 TB Caviar Green SATA drives which is what I bought.

When I got all the hardware I arranged it nicely for the unboxing shot you see below and then immediately dropped the drives into the enclosure. It was easier than snapping together two Lego blocks. I then powered it on and followed the directions to setup my 2 x 1TB drives in a RAID 1 configuration. The setup is done through a great simple interface using your browser that is very similar to managing a router. That went smooth and then it was time to backup the 750Gb drive in my machine to this new NAS. Sure enough the speed ratings were true and I was happy with how quickly the process went considering it was happening over LAN and not USB or external SATA.

After I copied the data over I was able to remove the 750GB drive from my local machine which I was happy to do which provided less power, noise and heat now from my main machine. Speaking of which there is a nice setting for the NAS which allows the 2 drives to go into hibernation mode which you can configure from the menu. So I continue to navigate and learn all of the features and menu system. Some of the other features offered by the D-Link 323 that I didn’t mention before are that it also can be an iTunes server, DHCP server, Bittorrent server, and offers Dynamic DNS support. You can also control access to the device by users and groups along with defining quotas. It’s a very feature rich device. And if you still are yearning for more there is a hack you can do to get even deeper root access with even more features with mods from here.

I really like the interface to control the device. It’s very clean and simple and offers tons of features. One of the only issues I had with the unit was with the iTunes server. I didn’t plan on using it, but ended up enabling it to see how it worked. I ended up not needing it but after having enabled it I noticed that my drives didn’t seem to want to hibernate anymore. The only way to fix this was to disable to the iTunes server. Not a biggie for me, but maybe for you. Also, I’m not sure if that was just my setup or a bug in the firmware but worth investigating if that’s important to you. I was able to successfully get the UpNP running and recognized by my PS3 and in turn was able to stream all media from the D-Link 323 to it.

So in conclusion I am very happy with the D-Link 323. It was great to be able to purchase such a feature rich and high performance NAS that came highly recommended even though it was the least expensive one available. If you are looking for an external enclosure that you can tuck away in the closet next to your router, get redundancy so you don’t worry about losing data, and getting great speed over your lan, than this is the NAS for you.

I became a huge fan of being able to quckly brew a single cup of coffee. I also really enjoyed my Senseo, but alas the unit died on me recently and I was prepared to replace it but had been hearing buzz about the Keurig Coffee Brewing System and decided to do a little research.

Everything I read about it pointed to a pretty good system. So a few weeks ago I’m walking the aisles of my local Costco when low and behold I came upon a special Keurig package deal. It was for the Keurig B60 model, came with a ton of sample K Cups (the single serving cups used) and even included an adapter to use your own coffee as well. I figured I had to try it and snapped it up.

Overall the system is somewhat similar to the Senseo but there are a few noticeable differences. For one this unit is built much better and feels sturdy. The K cup system is also a lot cleaner than using the exposed coffee pods. No muss or fuss having to clean parts after a brew. Brew time appears to be about the same. The Keurig does have 3 cup size settings (small, medium, large). You can really only use the first two settings with standard K cups, I tried the large but the coffee tasted to weak for my taste. The large option is nice if you brew your own with the adapter where you can control the strength.

The system came with a ton of sample coffee’s and so far I’ve enjoyed the Newman’s Own Organics Special Blend (Extra Bold) brew the best. It also came with a selection of Teas as well as hot chocolate. There seems to be huge support from coffee makers for manufacturing K cups. So basically it has great support in the market and seems to be sold and stocked in many outlets now.

I do admit that I miss the forthy crema that the Senseo used to generate but I’m willing to trade it for the better tasting coffee the Keurig makes. If you are in the market for a single cup brewing system you should definitely take a look at the Keurig. Overall I’m very happy with it. they also offer smaller models than the one I got.

My Video Demo

Other Resources

• Review of the Keurig vs. Senseo vs. Tassimo
• Keurig B50 Review at Geardiary.com
• Keurig Coffee Makers on Coffee Geek
• Chowhound discussion of Pod coffee makers

Here’s a snip:

DJ Mark Ronson is a sought-after turntablist, born to rock royalty, who’s worked with such diverse artists as Macy Gray, Jay-Z, and comedian Jimmy Fallon. The son of legendary rock guitarist Mick Ronson and the stepson of guitarist Mick Jones of Foreigner

His recent work titled “Version“ features a diverse pairing of songs and vocalists. One song is a cover of The Smiths “Stop me if you think you’ve heard this one before”. I’m a big fan of The Smiths (glad to see Johnny Marr join Modest Mouse) and have continued to follow Morrissey, and had heard the original song more times than I can count. I’m not easily impressed by cover songs, yet this one caught my ear by surprise. You can listen to the original and watch the video on Youtube here as a reference.

Morrissey-solo.com writes:

The segueing with The Supremes’ “You Just Keep Me Hangin’ On” is just one of many remarkable points on this excellently wistful version.

You can read the rest here and on that same page I read a criticism regarding the “yeahs” in the song which I hadn’t really paid attention too until listening to it again closely. One of them actually occurs in what has to be one of the strangest lyrics ever uttered in a song. “And the pain was enough to make a shy, bald, buddhist reflect and plan a mass murder”. Although I agree that the “yeahs” are un-necessary (especially after that lyric) it didnt’ take away from my enjoyment of the song.

The vocalist on the track is Daniel Merriweather. You can learn more about him and hear the track on his (gulp) MySpace page.

I wasn’t very impressed by the video, but you can view it on Youtube if you are interested.

The rest of the songs on the CD are good and another one that really stands out is a cover of Radiohead’s Just. This CD is definitely worth checking out.

• I was having IE6 compatability issues where the sidebar was wonky and didn’t appear properly
• didn’t like being at the mercy of the modder to update based on newer K2 releases
• I started having some issues with the Sidebar Modules embedded in the latest K2 and once again didn’t want to be at the mercy of K2 for SBM upgrades
• I was bored

My search for Cleaker took a while. My requirements for a new theme were:

• 3 Column with content on the left followed by 2 sidebars on the right
• Flexibility to change the overall theme width as well as the columns
• Support for Widgets (hence Sidebar Modules)
• Navigation buttons in header based on Pages
• Ability to have a custom header image
• Looked good

This was a pretty time consuming process but in the end it was worth it. Cleaker met all of my requirements and then some. The first step was to prepare by porting over all of my existing theme customizations necessary to Cleaker. I’m pretty good about keeping a text file that identifies every customization I make to my theme along with details and the actual code. These items include content from third party services like Google Analytics, code necessary for plugins, scripts for widgets etc. I highly recommend you do this as it can be a nightmare trying to remember where all these pieces are without them being documented. So edited the templates necessary as well as created all the sidebar modules necessary.

After finishing that process I began to concentrate on remaining issues. Currently I’m having layout problems I haven’t gotten around to with my Slickr plugin which I use for my photos page as well as with my Lifestream plugin for my Lifestream page. I’ve been too lazy to fix them as I struggle nightly whether to work on content or design and content usually wins. Not a huge deal and not the fault of the theme.

Next up was customizing the theme a bit for my liking. As I began to dig through the style.css file I was very happy to see that it was lined with helpful commenting. The main thing I wanted to do was modify the column the overall width of the theme as well as the columns. For anyone else interested it is easily done by editing the style values below:

#wrapper – changed width to 1000px
#header – changed width to 1000px
#content – changed width to 550px
#sidbarRight – changed width to 170px
#sidebarLeft – changed width to 150px
#footer – changed width to 971px
ul#Nav – changed to 1000px

There was still one more step necessary for these column changes to work and that was to modify the “contentbg2.gif” & “header.gif” images. Since I was increasing the content column and extending the overall width of the theme, I needed to move the seperator and add to the right side of contentbg2.gif.

Cleaker contentbg2.gif modified

I also had to increase the width of my header.gif image from 900 to 1000 pixels

I made some other changes too such as incorporating the blockquote style which I liked more from K2 and changed the font weight to bold for the headlines. I will probably play with the color scheme and make some other changes as well in the future.

I am very happy with this theme and urge others that are looking for a great looking, and easily editable theme, to give it a try.

My modified version of Cleaker 2.1 Widgetized is available here

So Olivier offered to create a Life-Line (Lifelog is his preferred term) page for me. I need to find out why he omitted a few of my feeds (Last.fm, Digg, Librarything), nonetheless, I was very excited to become a guinea pig for him. All he asked for was a small bio, my OPML file, a profile image, and to offer feedback. I was excited when I woke up today to find an IM from him with the url for my stream. So now that he has created my page it’s time for me to cough up my end of the bargain.

The first thing you notice is a very clean interface. The header provides the profile image, bio, and an RSS feed for the stream. Right below that is a tag cloud which is a nice touch. Missing on my page, but available on his stream, is a strip of avatars displaying recent readers from MyBlogLog. Now it gets interesting as he has provided a tabbed menu to filter the stream by type of subject matter. This is a great feature that allows followers to quickly jump to specific sections which I had mentioned would be a great feature that is lacking on other streams. Each tab also lists the number of items available. You can also choose whether you want to display summaries for each item. The last tab “About” provides details of all the feeds that make up the Lifestream.

Below the tabs is a small calendar that shows the current and previous month broken down by day on one line with an icon showing number of items available for that day above it. By mousing over the icon with number of items you get a popup block with a summary of the items for that day. Clicking on the icon will filter results for just that day. There are also filters for day, month, and year below the calendar. You then have the ability to allow for items you click on the either open up in a new window or tab within your browser. I couldn’t get either tab or window to work in Firefox and was only able to get it to open new windows in IE7 (finally some feedback).

Below the calendar the stream is displayed based on the tabbed filter selected. When viewing “All” each item is prefixed by the type of subject matter (tab) followed by the title and an icon allowing you to mark the item as read. If you are viewing with summaries and mark an item, it then collapses to just the headline and displays with a lighter font. A problem with this is that if you view without summaries (or clicking on an item marked as read) it requires 2 clicks to open the content. If items are displaying with titles only a mouseover provides full details and thumbnail image if available.

Overall I think most of the functionality is great. I think where it lacks a bit is in design. I would like to see some color coding done in the stream headlines either by stream type or individual feed. I also like the ability to prefix each item by a mini icon identifying the feed. I’m usually more of a minimalist but for some reason I enjoy these as quick identifiers in streams. Displaying the icons would also make for a nice legend in the “About” tab. The tag cloud is nice, but it doesn’t link the tags. A search box would be helpful as well.

All of the feedback I have given is specific to the user profile. Where I think things can get interesting is functionality that bridges users based on the content within their streams. I would not like to see this type of site mirror functionality of most social networking sites. I would rather like to see dynamic functionality generated by logic on the server based on the content of each user’s stream.

I look forward to following Olivier as he continues to work on his site Life2front over the next few months.

Olivier D. alias Ze Kat – LifeLine
Mark Krynsky – LifeLine