I’ve been removing some old 300Gb hard drives which are being used in my fileserver (vanguard) as they seem to be running ~8 degrees hotter than the other drives. I read a review recently over at PCGamesHardware which had the new 1.5tb Samsung drives up against the 1.5tb Segate’s and the 2tb Western Digitals.

While the Samsung’s are a slower (5400 vs 7200) drive, the 5Gb copy time is what really sold me. I bought 2 of these drives for $130AUD each and started the upgrade yesterday. The drives being under heavy load has them sitting at 31c right now. Compared to the 39c the 300gb drives were sitting at, that’s a remarkable improvement.

All I need to do now is gather some foam inserts to put in the unused drive trays to stop air gathering around the drives.

The guys over @ Lifehacker have a good article posted on their website on installing Apple’s latest OS, Snow Leopard, onto your Hackintosh PC. The article is more or less the same instructions which can be found on InsanelyMac’s forums, but with some great screenshots to help you get going.

The article steps you through copying the DVD to a USB drive, a few terminal commands and the recommended BIOS settings. If you’ve previously run 10.5.x on your Hackintosh, this should be a piece of cake.

Like most nerds, 3 things (primarily) take up my life: computers, comics and tv/movies. One of my favourite shows since it started has been heroes. Season 1 was great, season 2 started the downward spiral of the show, with the middle of season 3 starting the shows return to it’s former glory.

Alas, one thing I think the show has been missing is the ultimate Peter vs. Sylar showdown. Infact, the show has been missing a big showdown for <some character> vs. <some character>. For a show about people with super powers there seems to be a great lack of a display of superpowers on this show.

Peter and Sylar have met a few times with each time the fight ending after 10 seconds or so (s01e19 for example) or the producers/whoever cut away from the action and leave us to “imagine” what happens. One thing I would like to see is alot more fights. Sure, there is the plot to progress the story and such, but the comic book nerd in me wants to see fights. It wants to see people with super powers beating the shit out of each other.

Hopefully in the next season the writers and producers will finally get this right.

After two months or so of planning, I finally completed vanguard and retired cerebro. The one complaint I have about the Norco RPC-4020 chassis is that it seems a bit noisier than my previous CM Stacker case (which had the same amount of fans). The fans in the Norco case have a higher RPM, however drives in the Norco case seem to run at about 38c while the same drives in the Stacker ran at 25c.

I also had one drive die not long after I plugged it in, however the SMART error registered about 37 days ago. I will upload some pictures later on once my parity resync completes.

After a week or so of research, I decided to go with the Supermicro C2SEE motherboard for my new fileserver (vanguard). You can check out the specs of the board here. For a quick summary, the main features are:

• 6 x onboard SATA ports
• 4 x PCI slots
• 1 x PCIe 16x slot
• 1 x PCIe 16x (@ 4x) slot
• 1 x PCIe 1x slot
• DDR3 RAM
• Onboard 10/100/1000 NIC

The main reason for choosing this motherboard was that the company who sells unRAID (lime-technology use this same board in the pre-built servers they sell, and it’s lime-technology recommended. I figure if I use this board, I won’t have too many issues.

As part of upgrading the amount of hard drives in my current fileserver @ home I wanted to find a case which could handle more drives. I currently have a CM Stacker which handles 12 drives (utilising 4-in-3 cages) and I was finding it a bit of a hassle to constantly unplug/replug all of the drives to change one. While browsing the internet I came across the Norco RPC-4020, which is a 4RU case that handles 21 hard drives.

The issue with buying this case was that nobody in Australia stocks them. I ended up getting in contact with the people @ IPC Direct who said they could ship it to me.. for $196 USD! Recently I was on holiday in the US along the west coast and IPC Direct said they could ship the case to my hotel which nobody was able to do. On my flight I had the norco classed as a 2nd piece of luggage and it cost me $0 USD to bring back.

The next step in upgrading my fileserver will be to buy the new motherboard (Asus P5Q Deluxe) and CPU (intel something..) and start the transfer of the hard drives from the old server to the new. If you are looking for a new server case I HIGHLY recommend the Norco RPC-4020. The case comes with the 20 SATA hard drive trays and houses one drive internally and seems to be a fairly well made case. Coming in at $300USD, it’s worth every cent.

Recently with work i’ve found lately I am getting more tasks than I can handle, which put me on a quest to find a good to-do list application. As I carry around a macbook with me pretty much everywhere I go, I thought looking for an osx app would be the best. I looked around for about a month and wasn’t really impressed, until I came across The Hit List by Potion Factory.

To my suprise, MacHeist also had ‘The Hit List’ as an unlock app in their latest bundle. After the app was unlocked I decided to purchase the bundle and give it a go. To my suprise the app is close to perfect. I’ve had it for about 2 days and put in my todo task list and everything seems to be working well. I can have folders for different sections of my job, then have client based task lists in each of these folders with tasks that need to be completed. There are also ‘Today’ and ‘Upcoming’ for tasks that need to be completed soon (after you set a due date) and a nice ‘Learn the Hit List’ task list with some nifty shortcuts for every day use.

SABnzbd v0.4.8 was released a week or so ago on their official site. The list of bug fixes includes:

Fixed various par2-repair problems for OSX

Solved long queue display problem for OSX

Fixed news-group and newzbin-category to SABnzbd-category conversion

The only real issue I have experienced with this app is the long queue display problem in OSX. With an NZB queue of over 400 items Safari would become somewhat unresponsive when changing the post processing script and Firefox would become pretty much unuseable. With 0.4.8 those issues seem to have disappeared and once again the universe is correctly aligned.

With Unison and NZBdrop seemingly lacking development there doesn’t appear to be much competition out there for SABnzbd who are making the best app right now. Unison hasn’t released an update to 1.8.1 in over a year and the NZBdrop developers are somewhat unresponsive to emails, don’t approve posts on their blog etc. Check out SABnzbd 0.4.8 if you’re looking for a new NZB app on OSX. I can tell from the apache logs on this web server that alot of you are!