News and Reviews

There are many articles with the infamous VMWare "No space left on device" message. Most suggest installing the tools VIB separately, or before the upgrade. While that did work for me on one host, it did not for another. I thought I would let you in on ...

Three years ago I wrote the article Building a multi-room networked home audio solution for FREE, Part 1 and never wrote part 2, where I promised I would show everyone how to put together a professional grade system for around $1,000. To date part 1 has been the most popular home network article on this site with over 45,000 views (next to the random article I wrote on how to remove a broken dipstick, which has over 73,000 views).

A few things have changed in those 3 years, inflation happens you know, but prices are still close to the same. There are more options now however, which I'll highlight as we go. My home has an accessible crawlspace which made running speaker wire insanely easy. Without that you may need to get creative, this article is going to assume you have the ability to at least run a little wire.

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I'm re-writing this article simply because the Vortexbox site was hacked and this excellent information in the original Logitech Squeezebox replacement for under $30 was lost. I did find some excellent writeups such as Turning a Pogoplug in to a Music Player, however every site I found was missing something and sent me digging. This hopefully can be a complete guide for anyone late to the VAMP game. Note that I simply regurgitate the information and the true geniuses have done all the work before me.

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I always worry about the files and data we'd lose if our house were to burn down. With those fears in mind I was ecstatic to test the ioSafe N2 fireproof and waterproof NAS for SmallNetBuilder. It was much more than a cute feature review, we actually threw this thing in to the fire, let it burn for 30 minutes, then pulled it out and submerged it in a tub of water for 3 days. It's worth the read and a great product if you have no backup solution in case of fire. You can see the entire article over on SmallNetBuilder, ioSafe N2 NAS Reviewed.
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I finally got around to "building out" my Raspberry Pi. Building it out is a rather superfluous explanation, basically all I did was remove it from the package, open the case I bought, put them together, add the SD card, and connect a cell phone charger. For the initial run I hooked it up to our Samsung TV, stealing the HDMI and network cable from the Seagate FreeAgent Theater I used in the TVersity review. What follows is just the simple speed test I ran against it.
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