The Status Quo

So, here's where I'm at right now technology wise.

• Computing
• 1x PC. It's not a bad bit of kit. Tech specs - 2x500GB SATA hard disks in a RAID 0, with a Crucial 128GB Synapse SSD in place as a cache drive, running Windows 7 Home Premium. Intel Q6600 2.4GHz quad core CPU with a Tuniq Tower on it, which is nice and quiet, 4GB of OCZ DDR2 PC-1066 RAM, and an XFX Radeon 6870 1GB GPU. There's also a 160GB SATA hard disk that currently doesn't serve much of a purpose other than a scratch drive. Also got a Wacom Graphire4 attached, nice graphics tablet, shame it's so underused. Also got a nice BenQ FP241W 24" monitor, and an old Relisys 19" one that's dying somewhat and has a grey line running halfway across the screen about an inch down, but it's soldiering on. I'll replace it at some point no doubt. Also got a Logitech 5.1 speaker setup connected, which does well for games and video, Microsoft keyboard and mouse, cheap webcam, etc.
• 1x Printer - HP Photosmart B110. Does the job, cheap and cheerful, eats ink when printing photos, seems to jam up with some photo paper and slant the last part, making some nasty clicking sounds. Hmm. Scans reasonably well though.
• 1x Netbook: Dell Mini 9, with 2GB RAM, 32GB SSD, 32GB class 10 SD card, 3G card built-in, and the rest as stock. Originally bought for it's fantastic ability to run OS X natively. Got bored of that since, and put Windows 7 Home Premium on that too. Works pretty well.
• 1x Laptop: an old Toshiba Satellite Pro A40 from memory. Sits on my bedroom next to my bed, and mainly gets used as something to watch videos on, and the odd bit of surfing in bed. Sits on an Ikea Dave laptop table, which is brilliant. The graphics are a bit old though, Intel 82855, and it's a bit slow. Runs XP. Isn't bad at playing normal videos although I sometimes have to kill off Microsoft Security Essentials to stop it being chuggy and trying to scan things when playing stuff back. iPlayer chokes occasionally. Runs on wifi.
• 2x HP ProLiant N40L MicroServer. £240 each at the time, with £100 mail-in rebate, so £140 a pop. Each came with a 250GB SATA drive, the case has 4 caddies for drives, comes with 2GB RAM by default, an internal USB slot, but apparently they want you to purchase a drive kit if you want an optical drive (probably just needs some of those big round screws to slot in that you find on many HP/Compaq PCs). I therefore of course just installed from USB. Got an 8GB Crucial ECC DDR3 RAM kit (2x4GB) for £50, and promptly swapped the 2GB and sold-with 250GB SATA drive from one into the other, and put the 8GB in the one I just took it from, along with 4x1TB drives that I've acquired along the way, and installed FreeNAS 7.1 on it, running with ZFS, installed on a 4GB USB flash drive mounted internally. Few hiccups along the initial install (ZFS memory requirements can be a bit funky, needed a bit of tweaking, as it happily eats whatever it can in cache), but it's running like a champ now. The other I still haven't deployed, but it's got the 2x 250GB drives and 4GB cache. Might virtualise stuff on it, although the original plan was to run something like LinuxMCE on it, using it as the control server. That's not off the table yet, depends on how my experiments go.
• 4x O2 Joggler - intended for use with the LinuxMCE kit, as you can readily boot them off USB and run Linux. For the £50 a pop they were at the time, plus cashback, they were a bargain. They've actually ended up mostly running as Logitech SqueezeBox clients though. Just need to get that server fixed up on the NAS box... but that's another story for another post.
• Car PC to be: An Asus Eeebox that runs on 12V, 2GB RAM, 250GB or so hard disk from memory, and a Lilliput LED-backlit touchscreen. More to follow on that one, but it'd be nice if it all integrated nicely with the stuff at home.
• Bunch of old hardware in the graveyard, which I really should do something with. Like selling on eBay, perhaps.
• Networking
• ADSL Router is a BeBox, aka a Thomson Speedtouch 540. It works well enough bridged straight into my main router.
• 2x Linksys WRT54GL routers, running Tomato. Works *extremely* well. Got the VPN-enabled version on them, which also comes with full bandwidth limitation on it. One connected directly to the router via the above bridge, and one in the front room. Total overkill I suspect, but never mind. The second is connected via a basic cheap 100mbps powerline ethernet link, via the gigabit switch between them below.
• 1x ZyXEL GS-108B  8 port gigabit switch. Cheap, cheerful, does a fine job.
• Home cinema kit
• Receiver - Denon AVR-1910. Works well enough, but annoyingly the dynamic EQ stuff would never quite work in my room, and couldn't figure out where the sound was coming from with regards to the speakers. Always bugged me.
• Speakers
• KEF 2005.3 5.1 kit, used as front centre, two sides and two rears on stands, and a KEF KUBE 2 that came with it.
• KEF IQ... something... floor standers. Really can't remember. They're tall, and sound nice? IQ5 maybe.
• Playstation 3. It plays the videos and blu-rays, and games, naturally.
• Wii. Not strictly home cinema, but it's connected up, and runs games from the hard drive using WiiFlow. PS2 as well running games from hard disk using Free McBoot and Open PS2 Loader.
• LG CF181D LCoS projector. Brilliant, brilliant bit of kit. Shame I can't zoom out enough to have it at one side of the room with the screen at the other! Admittedly took me about 6 months to get the thing sorted properly as the first one that arrived didn't work properly after 15 minutes of use, but worth the wait.
• Beamax motorised remote control screen - comes up from the floor. Again, pretty damn cool, and semi-portable (as in portable like luggable laptops were). Tends to end up staying up most of the time, which probably isn't great for it. Must oil those cables.
• Mobile
• Nokia N900. Ahh, the best I've had, the worst I've had. Fantastic mobile computer. Runs Maemo Linux, which has now been utterly hacked to death and demonstratively improved by the community (who needs a stock kernel anyway?). It's got a good web browser, Opera Mobile works fantastically on it, plays a wicked game of Sonic the Hedgehog on a Megadrive emulator, my typing speed on it is great, the camera is... okay, it's got shell access, loads and loads of Linux applications... but that's the thing. It's a great computer. It's SMS implementation is... buggy, at best (read: keeps doing stupid things with messages making me delete certain ones in order to make it work properly again - which it'll only let me delete under certain circumstances), the email was quite prone to crashing (although the community software updates seem to have taken care of that, since Nokia abandoned it), I can crack WEP networks within minutes on it and have a good go at WPA too... but Nokia walked out on it's new killer platform, and embraced Windows Phone. This phone I saw as the geek dream phone. And it was. It's brilliant. It's utterly brilliant. But sometimes I'd just like to be able to get commercial software on it other than Sygic satellite navigation and Angry Birds levels. Annoyingly, there's actually Android players for it which will run Android apps at native speeds - but they were only ever offered to OEMs, and not the end users. It sort-of runs Android as well - by which I mean you can dual boot, and quite a few functions work, which would probably be more useful if it could send/receive phone calls - specifically the audio on them. Don't get me wrong, hats off to the NITDroid guys, but yet again it's an example of stuff being hacked onto hardware that doesn't quite work. It's not their fault, they don't have access to the specs/hardware/etc, but the end user experience ends up lacking. And I'm sick of having half-arsed solutions. Oh, and finally - this phone, when trying to answer a phone call, has an annoying habit of moving the on-screen answer button when you pick it up (rotating portrait/landscape), and if you lock it to landscape, it doesn't display properly. No doubt it'll get fixed, but still. Grr.
• Camera
• Canon 550D SLR. Great bit of kit, likely somewhat wasted on me in all honesty. I love the camera, and am still learning how to use it, along with getting the right effects, and post-processing, but I haven't had time to indulge in it, unfortunately. I'm hoping that'll change soon. I've also got an SD card with the Magic Lantern firmware on it, which looks cool, if I ever end up filming anything.

So, there we have the beginning hardware. At the moment it's a jiggly mess playing stuff on the PS3 as I'm doing it temporarily via the PC on PS3 Media Server serving from the NAS box, but that somewhat defeats the point in having the powerful NAS that can run it itself (once I sort the binaries out on there, just haven't had time to fix it up). I need to transfer 64-bit binaries for the Squeezebox Server onto the FreeNAS box to get the audio all synced up etc. And once I've got all that figured out, I'll work out what on earth my plan is to make this lot converge. I also want to get home automation in, although that may have to partially wait until I have my own place, so I can drop in cat5 all over the place, and just use powerline control for it all, or RF. Time will tell. I wanted to record where I was at before I started though, so I can observe the changes as I go.