Posts by Michael Sage

Ten... freeware gems for new PCs

Oh and cdburnerpro, magiciso disk, chrome, virtual box....

What about putty, Paint.net, gimp.....

All things that go on my machine! :)

Ten... two-bay Nas boxes

Re: I went down the DIY route

Another vote for the Microserver.

My first one is running ESXi with a couple of VM's on it, a second running Windows 2008 R2. I have to be honest I also have a Netgear ReadyNAS as they are on the VMWare HCL so using that as an NFS datastore and backup target for the windows server. Lovely!

Ten... IPTV set-top boxes

The current one in the UK is WDBGXT0000NBK-UESN

I have 2 gen 2's which I will be replacing with the 3rd gen, although I wish WD did a multipack or trade in program!

M

How can family sysadmins make a safe internet playground for kids?

This is the route we took as well.

As a lot of people have alluded too you can only protect your own network and less technical parents will let their kids have unrestricted access to the internet.

The only thing we ever did was stop their internet access at 10 o'clock (just a simple firewall rule on a schedule) this was to stop them staying up to late in the evenings.

Obviously random auditing helped with this! Although once they had learnt to clear up behind themselves this became a bit pointless. I did have VNC installed on their machines so I could randomly and unnoticed check what they were up too!

DIY virtual machines: Rigging up at home

I am running a whitebox VMWare ESXi Server, 8Gb RAM, connected to a Netgear ReadyNAS NFS & iSCSI datastores. This runs my Windows ThinPC machine, Zimbra & a core DC for my testing server.

Another whitebox running what ever virtualisation platform I am playing with at the moment it is running proxmox at the moment. (this machine isn't a 24/7 machine)

I also have a HP MicroServer (also with 8Gb) which is running 2008 R2 as a DC / Fileserver, I would have moved this over but I like it for out putting films and things.

I will also be adding a raspberry pi when they launch! :)

OnLive Game System cloud gaming console

PlayPack

If you have the playpack you get a 30% (I think) reduction on the cost of buying the full games.

As a casual gamer I love it, and so do my kids. Being able to play a game for 1/2 hour is great, over Halloween they gave you access to some games for free for 3 days.

But, it chomps through you BB allowance, my daughter played lego harry potter for an hour or so a day for a couple of weeks and managed to rack up about 3-4Gb a day!

Five amazing computers for under £100

Back in the day....

I really enjoyed this article... I would like to add another few contenders thou...

The Nokia 9000 communicator.... way, way, way before it's time, another excellent pocket terminal, internet and email access..

Amstrad NC100, already been mentioned, I used mine for connecting to a local BBS to get my email.

Handspring Visor, the cheap Palm. I loved mine, and it only cost £99 then! :)

The cobalt Raq 2/3/4, used to be the best shared hosting platform back in the day, so easy to setup and secure, when Linux was still proper difficult!

Fifty years later, steam appears on British railway

Trains

Technically the new train is an A1 peppercorn... The flying scotmas was a A1 and then modified to become an A3. The orginal A1 was designed by Sir Nigel Gresley, the A1 Peppercorn was designed by Arthur Peppercorn.

Enough.....