Technology Blog of Peter Manis » Hardware

My impression of the ipod touch

Peter Manis — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 09:36:52 +0000

The other day I purchased an iPod touch with the hopes of having a mp3 player that did what I wanted and a platform to develop applications on. Prior to using the touch I had never used a touch screen Apple product moee than a couple minutes so I left the store wondering how many days I had to return it. That night I spent over three hours playing with the device and the apps in the store, it was very hard for me to put the device down. I love my G1, since I work for Google the integration the device gives me is very important to me and would keep me from using something else. So that being said I love how smooth the iPhone and iPod Touch are, how easy the onscreen keyboard is to use, and the amazing apps that are available. I think the G1 will get to the same point, things will obviously be different and one will have features the other one doesn’t have, but the big difference right now is device maturity. There have been things about the iPhone that people have disliked that are now being fixed and things missing from Android are being added. I enjoy having the G1 as my primary device, but I think having the touch available to do certain things is important. I have been using my touch for most of my Twittering and I am currently writing this blog post from the awesome Wordpress app in the store. The keyboard took some time getting used to but now I can type pretty fast on the device and most things I miss are caught by the auto correct. One oft big worries before buying the device was size, and how it would feel in my pocket at work. It is so thing that I don’t even notice is when I am work so I can move freely without it being this giant block in my pocket. I also don’t have it moving around in my pocket freely like smaller players might. Overall I am very happy with the purchase they won’t get me to move to an iPhone, but I support the use of the touch to complent the Android based products.

Apple Remote Works, but only on some applications

Peter Manis — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 20:03:40 +0000

I ran into this problem recently where my Apple remote would not work with iTunes or any other application of the sort. It would however open Boxee if you pressed the Menu button. I followed the recommended steps of verifying your remote was transmitting an IR signal and all that, and I knew it was because Boxee would open.

This afternoon I removed Boxee and hit menu, FrontRow opened, as it should have, and then I tried it on iTunes and it was successful. I’m not entirely sure what caused the problem, but I didn’t use Boxee enough to bother keeping it on the machine anyway.

Hard drive sizes

Peter Manis — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 00:27:57 +0000

This afternoon a friend mentioned how annoying the whole deal with drive makers going by 1000 vs 1024 for sizes. In a way it does suck that they are using a system that is different from how a file is sized, but at the same time you should just start remembering the formatted size of a drive. Here is the list I had on my personal blog from long ago, it details the a good number of drive sizes. Calculations were based on (Drive GB x 1000000000) / (1024×1024x1024). I do get sorta tired of the complaint only because if someone really has the time and energy to bitch about something so small they haven’t spent enough time dealing with standards, guidelines and compliance in the technology world to realize that this is just an inconvenience and not really a big enough one to complain about.

   4 =   3.73              120 =  111.76
 4.3 =   4.00              147 =  136.90
   9 =   8.38              150 =  139.70
  10 =   9.31              160 =  149.01
  18 =  16.76              180 =  167.64
  20 =  18.63              200 =  186.26
  30 =  27.94              250 =  232.83
  36 =  33.53              300 =  279.40
36.4 =  33.90              320 =  298.02
36.7 =  34.18              400 =  372.53
  40 =  37.25              500 =  465.66
  60 =  55.88              640 =  596.05
  74 =  68.92              750 =  698.49
  80 =  74.51             1000 =  931.32
 100 =  93.13             1500 = 1396.98

File Server

Peter Manis — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 09:24:40 +0000

For a long time I have been planning to build a massive NAS to store all my projects and photographs and my Linux distro collection. When I bought a lot of network equipment a while back a 5U case was included that I decided to use instead of ordering something. The case has 12 standard 5.25 bays and 1 slim 5.25 bay. It fix extended ATX motherboard and is quite long, so it gives me plenty of space. To make efficient use of the space I am putting in hotswap drive bays that will fit 5 hard drives in 3 bays, giving me a total capacity of 15 drives. I have also found a RAID card that supports RAID6, online expansion and all the goodies, and runs about $435. This is more than I wanted to spend, but RAID6 and an oncard processor is worth it. The machine will run FreeNAS and will allow me to have only 1 hard drive in all of my other machines. As of right now I have ordered and installed the following:

AMD Athlon 64 X2 4000+, Socket AM2
G.SKILL 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 800
ASUS M2N-SLI Deluxe AM2 NVIDIA nForce 570 Motherboard
MSI GeForce 7300LE 128MB 64-bit GDDR2 PCIe Video Card

I just ordered a IDE->CF card adapter and one of the drive bays to make sure it is what I want. If I like the drive bay, the remaining parts I need are the RAID card, and 8 Western Digital 750GB hard drives. In RAID6, I will have 4.09TB of total space, if I went with RAID5 I would have 4.77TB. While RAID5 is good, I would feel better if I knew I could lose 2 drives and still have all my data safe. I mean this is going to be backups of my systems, and all the files that are most important to me. I may need to upgrade the power supply along the line, but for the time being I should be fine as it has a 420w PSU. I will post pictures when I get my new camera.