I have been looking for a long while for a cheap NAS (network attached storage) to work with my Macs. Many are overpriced and even then, they only support Windows, idiots Anyways, I was over at our local Costco and I found a device from SimpleTech called “SimpleShare” for 299.99 for a 400gig drive. Hmmmm… he thinks, thats not a bad price for a NAS, should I gamble? And so I do, I buy one and take it home. From the time I unboxed it to running was under two minutes. All the Macs see it fine from finder without any issues using SMB. Outstanding!!!! Even the administration can run on Safari and I was able to flash it to current code from Safari.

The device is amazingly flexible with a USB port for a printer or more storage. The extra drive can be configure as just another volume or you can set up RAID 0 or 1. You can setup user accounts, specific shares and pools. In other words, for the price, this is a very flexible device. So far in my limited testing, it has been flawless and even has a decent response time when opening windows or scrolling. It must be running an embedded version of Linux based on a few cavets such as a NTFS drive mounted as a legacy drive is read only and that the native drive is formatted in a special “raw” state. Add in the few comments about NFS and you can see where I’m going with this line.

Regardless, if you are looking for a cheap NAS and one that works with Windoze and OSX, take a look at this. It is available from places other than Costco but the price was right and I didnt care about the latest “free” software that was included on the newest version. A quick flash brought the drive up to current firmware so the 150 I saved is worth the flash job.

One of the worst things a laptop owner can have is that their baby is ripped off. Stolen, the word brings fear to the mobile user. We have all see and read the stories of the idiots that leave laptops in plain sight in the car or unattended on a table but what about us that tend to the paranoid side and still get ripped off?

For us on Macs, there is a very cool piece of software that you can buy for about twenty bucks or a bit more for a family pack that is installed and placed out of sight even if the system if examined by the crook. It’s called Undercover and it is by Orbicule.

This software is very cool but not so much to the crooks.  When you call Orbicule and say your laptop is stolen, they activate the software so as soon as the Mac hits the internet, things start to happen. Like most versions of this type of software, it phones home with an IP address (internal and external) and some other network information. But wait! there is more, with the new Macs and the iSight camera, it starts to take pictures of who is sitting at the keyboard. Smile, you are on candid camera   The software also takes screen shots of what is going on and sends to mother.

If you can not recover the Mac so far, plan B says that the screen will start to randomly dim to where it’s unsable with the hopes that the scumbag will take it to a repair depot or the like. The final straw is the Mac will start telling the world it’s stolen and that there is a reward for it’s recovery. Not very profitable for the thief to keep something like this around so the idea is that you have a chance of getting it back, even if it takes rewarding the jerk.

So, is it worth it at thirty bucks or so? I would say so given the MacBook Pro is something around 2,500 bucks and most of us do not have insurance on the Mac for theft.

Keep in mind that this does nothing to keep your data secret, it just gives a chance at getting the hardware back. If you want to keep state secrects then you need to be looking at encryption. Stay tuned and dont touch that dial for another story of OSX Secret Agent Man.

One of the great things about my Macs is the wireless that is built to them. The downside is that in my two story house, I have a few dead zones from weak signals and noisy neighbors. I have two access points in place, a Cisco30mw unit which has been bullet proof for the past three years but slowwwww. And a 20 to 100mw unit which started life as a Linksys before an “upgrade”. The Macs have always worked troublefree with the Cisco unit but it tooks months to get them working with Tiger and the Linksys. Finally after a patch from Apple, I could use WEP with the Linksys and have it work. Now, I need to correct my dead zones. Enter some old/new technology which runs your network over power lines. Not too complicated from an electrical standpoint but troubleshome for noise and speed. But according to Mossberg in the WSJ, the Netgear WGXB102 54Mbps Wall-Plugged Wireless Range Extender Kit has it all and it works. Ethernet over AC lines and a Wireless link. The price is right at Amazon right now at 119 bucks with a 20 dollar refund/rebate. So for a bit more than a normal access point, I might be able to extend my network via the AC lines and finally get some decent coverage in the living room

A second note of interest is not Mac related but more administrator related. Many of us have to support the Windoze world as part of our job while we hope that the powers that be get smart and go OSX. One aspect of my job at times is to migrate a server from old hardware to new. In this case, it was a old Dell dual PIII server on a RAID 5 array that needed to go to a new Dell 1850 Xeon with RAID 0. Normally, I try to clone the server using my favorite tool, Acronis True Image. But in this case, the image crashed on boot, too many differences.

But Acronis has a new product called “Universal Restore” that will examine the new hardware and get the proper HAL, drivers etc for the new system and insert them on the fly during the cold metal restore. And it WORKED! In less than two hours I had migrated the Windows 2003 OS and the TS license server application to the new Dell and had it up and running. The TS license server was the pain in the ass since I was supposed to call Microsoft and have them re-issue the licenses for TS. What a pain that was going to be.

Like I said, not a Mac toy but way too cool not to share for those of us supporting the Windows world.

In a few weeks once I have ordered my NetGear AC adapter, I will post my sucess or failure of running wireless over AC power lines. I should also have a new Blue Snowball USB mic to start putting together some pod casts. You have to love eBay at times aside from the fact you can go very broke very quickly bidding on this and that.

After the past year of using blogger.com, I decided I wanted to move to a method with more flexiblity. WordPress has the reputation that matches the Mac for ease of use and nice, clean and elegant look. Not to mention some of the issues I’ve had with the no-so-friendly themes of blogger.com. It’s not a bad service, I think I just outgrew it for what I want to do.

So in that theme, I will be moving my hackamac blog over to here and start adding new posts here at WordPress.

MS Noordam

Here is the Noordam where myself and about 75 other Mac/Photo geeks lived for 10 days while we sailed around the med. To say we had fun is an understatement. Even my wife who was not a photo or Mac geek when she started the cruise (note the past tense) got into the photography after sitting in one of the classes. Her pictures improved considerably in just a day of shooting in Barcelona.

The running joke for us was the various “death marches” we ended up on after using the official tour bus to get us somewhere and then we would bail out to walk back to the ship. This made for some tough walking given the 100 degrees and the 100% humidity but we managed to get some gorgous pictures long the way.

To see more pictures, go to http://www.flickr.com/photos/lightandimages

Self Portrait,