I’ve always been fascinated as to how cockroaches always seem to elude my best attempts to exterminate them from my old apartment - nothing seemed to work, traps, insecticide bombs, sonic gadgets.. anyway, HowStuffWorks.com has an article about the science behind cockroaches. Some of my favourite quotes are

..much of their nervous system activity takes place in nerve ganglia located throughout their bodies. This is one of the reasons why a headless roach can live for more than a week..
..Using its metathoracic legs, a roach can move about 50 body lengths in a second. A human moving that quickly would be running about 200 miles per hour..
..A German cockroach and her young can produce 300,000 more roaches in one year..

My windows-based PC died recently - getting Dr Watson’s when I was trying to open a file explorer, the progressive death of the tcp stack etc.. I could have gotten it repaired (there were a few potential explanations in its behaviour) but I wasn’t sure what the point was. I use my mac for everything and the only thing that I really used the PC for was connecting to my work VPN. However Checkpoint finally released the tiger VPN client so that really left the PC as being a drain on my electricity bill.

Home Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices have come a long way. One of the more attractive offerings is from a Taiwanese company called Thecus. They offer an entry level USB storage connected to SATA disks but I opted for their ethernet connected storage array the Thecus 2100B.

Setting it up is a snap. Unscrew the casing, use the thumb screws to release the cage that will store the drives and you slide in the SATA disks. In my case I resurrected the drives from my old PC and put them straight into the box. The casing itself would benefit of being made from something that feels a little sturdier. My external disk has a nice brushed metal finish and just feels solid. The thecus looks nice but just has a plastic casing.

The drives only slide in one way and there doesn’t seem to be any loose fittings in the drive cage. Slide it all back together, connect the ethernet and the power cable and turn the baby on.

The included disk only has the the PC setup file but a quick trip to the thecus site lets me download the mac installer and the latest firmware patch.

The installer just browses the network and finds the thecus devices that you have present. From there you have the option of formatting the drives to whatever flavour of raid you want (RAID 0, 1 or JBOD). You can also set up services such as iTunes, Samba/CFIS etc. Finishing this lets you launch into the default home page of the box (the machine is configured through the web) that gives you the option of using the webdisk , music, gallery or a login to an administration console.

First thing that I did however was to upgrade the firmware. This is a very painless process and doesn’t take a lot of time. I have to say that I hope they spent more time on the functionality of the box rather than the web interface because it is pretty crap. It does the job but it aint pretty.

The main purpose of this box for me is the storage capabilities so I move straight to the administration screens to create users and groups. From there it is a matter of creating some folders that I can link to and setting the access controls to those directories. Access controls are simple but what I expected about this entry level product. It is all deny/read/write access based on users/groups. Access is set by directory and it looks like you can only create directories at the highest level. However, when you save information to the shared folder it will create whatever folder structure was set in the files that you are storing. I don’t see this being a huge problem as I tend to use the external storage just as buckets and don’t need a very granular level of control on what I have in there.

I haven’t tested the speeds, but the folks at Hexus have. Verdict is that it is adequate for home storage but it is not going to impress any speed freaks - streaming that is at around 6-10MBps. It’s doing the job for, is pretty quiet and is something that I can just set up once and forget.

Very cool - this
company assists people who have had their nice new shiny macs stolen. Once the machine has been stolen you tell these guys that it has been stolen and they do the rest including

• Monitoring the connected net address and working with the ISP to track down the physical location of the machine.
• Taking photographs of the person who is using your machine.
• Tracking their usage of the mac, in this case witnessing them watching porn, playing WoW, deleting all his personal files.
• Coordinating with local law enforcement to retrieve the mac.
• Helping you recover the files.

The software is not bad - it has a couple of different modes. The first is a monitoring and reporting service, similar to what was described in the case. The other is more invasive and will gradually slow the machine down and let the thief know that it is aware of its status. It then starts flashing messages to the thief as well as “shouting” messages at him and people around him. The software is all tied into the firmware so it would be relatively tricky to remove it.

Story is here. Thanks Phil for the link!.