March 23, 2010

Tmup 203: Snow Leopard From Scratch – Accounts Part 1

Filed under: Podcasts — Victor Cajiao @ 9:31 pm

Standard Podcast [00:46:49m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

We continue our Snow Leopard from scratch series. Today we talk about Account management.

Tonight’s show is brought to you by:

SmileOnMyMac

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This show is a member of Friends In Tech

Show Notes:

Merlin Man Kung fu grippe and his TexExpander 3 Fills post <awesome>

Creating User Accounts (from OS X help files = type accounts)

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March 20, 2010

Monitors in Motion Articulating Arm installation

Filed under: Podcasts — Victor Cajiao @ 7:11 pm

Podcast Video [00:03:14m]: Download

While at Macworld 2010, I met the guys from Monitors in Motion. I bought two of their arms (at a discount (full disclosure) so that I could try them out. Here is a video of the process to install the VESA mounts and arms on my Apple 23″ Cinema Display and Samsung 25″ display. The process took about 3 hrs in total and I did get some assistance from Adam. Overall the build quality is superb. The only thing that lacked was documentation on how to mount them . I’ve talk to them about this and they are working on this aspect. Otherwise I’m thrilled to have them.

Monitors in Motion is in the process of setting up an on-line store. If you want to contact them you may do so at adam@tvmonitorarms.com

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March 19, 2010

Pogoplug and Drobo USB – I think I’m on Cloud Mine

Filed under: Hardware Reviews — Victor Cajiao @ 2:39 pm

I think I first heard about the Pogoplug on on TWiT a while back. At the time I really did not have a need for a device like this and all my hard-drives were being used for backup and archive storage. Recently Tim Verpoorten over at The Mac Review Cast covered the Pogoplug and given the upgrades that he mentioned I decided to buy one. I had already had a letter out to Cloud Engine the makers of the Pogoplug for a review unit, but this one (full disclosure) I paid for in cash $127.00 U.S. at my Amazon store.

Since I recently got the Drobo S , I now had the Droob USB free to be used as off site storage or backup.

After talking a bit to Pat Mahon about this unit and its potential, we mused and our premise was this. I buy a Pogoplug and attach the Droob USB to it. I take it to a relatives house, or send it to George Starcher to keep at his home. By doing this I could have a 2 TB redundant storage device that I could access from my computer, any browser or my iPhone.

I read some postings on the Pogoplugged forums that I may run into some issues because the Droob USB is formatted as HSF+ Journaled . Well that’s why I’m a geek and I was willing to risk it as the data on the Drobo is all backed up.

I got the Pogoplug today and in eight minutes had it hooked up to my network and I was talking to it via the web-browser. Literally, I plugged the power cord in to it, then my Ethernet cable went to their web page and followed the activation process.

The moment of truth was here. Would the Pogoplug see the Droob USB using the HSF+ Journaled? Well it took about 6 minutes but sure enough the drive was recognized and with in 25 minutes of me first powering up the Pogoplug I was up and working.

I was then able to create a public area and share out two photos with my Twitter followers. I had conformation from Steve Stanger that he could see this pictures no problem. I then installed the local Mac client and the Pogoplug drive (which from now on will be know as the DroboPlug) was just another drive I could access on my Mac. Next I downloaded the Pogoplug iPhone app and that saw the DroboPlug no problem. As a matter of fact I could even stream music from the music backup I have on that drive to my iPhone. Call me impressed.

The last step in this little Friday afternoon geek adventure was to use ChronoSync (one of my favorite Mac apps ) to create a cron job that would backup (sync) a few of my mmost precious files from Dropbox to the DroboPlug. I set up that cron job and as I write it’s backing up those files from my Drobox cloud to the DroboPlug cloud.

It’s not often that I can say with 60 minutes of trying a new piece of technology that I would recommend it. However, my first impression of the Pogoplug is a strong one, and I would recommend it highly at this point. I believe I still will be getting another unit from the folks at Pogoplug. I’ll use that to test their Active copy enhancement feature that is suppose to allow for easy offsite backup from Pogoplug to Pogplug. More to come