Monday, December 21, 2009 at 1:29PM I think the lighting is soooo much better in this one compared to the last. Following Chris Walls suggestion at the TweetUp I turned the lights to maximum and pointed them up to the ceiling and the walls to bounce the light rather that have them directly shining on me.
Seems to have done the trick!
Thanks Chris
Friday, December 18, 2009 at 6:40PM Got a bit of a shock a few days ago when one of the disk lights on the standard Drobo I have turned red!
I use the Drobo as my master backup storage for all my ScreenCastsOnline project files (as well as an offsite backup). At least, most of my backups - I don't back up intermediate files that can be re-created to save space. A bit of a false economy which I'm thinking of changing.
Anyhow, back to the red light.
Luckily, it was an indicator that I was running low on space and just a warning that I should replace one of the drives with a drive of a higher capacity. This is one of the major benefits of the Drobo in that you can upgrade seamlessly, just by swapping out a drive and the system will magically expand!
However, when I got the Drobo, I populated it with 4 x 1TB drives giving me a useable storage pool of 2.7 Terabytes. Ok, so just swap out one of the 1TB with a 1.5TB or even 2TB drive then...
Hang on?
If I configure the Capacity Calculator on the Drobo site with 3x1TB and a 1.5TB drive, it still only shows 2.7TB available for data but now 436GB "Reserved for Expansion"
Eh?
OK, so add a second 1.5TB drive in and at that point, the available for data goes up to 3.2TB. So an increase of just 500GB would have cost me £160 with 2 x 1.5TB drives
Let's forget about 1.5TB drives and go with 2TB drives.....
Lets add in a single 2TB drive to the 3x1TB drives = No increase in available for data value
Add in a second 2TB drive = Increases to 3.6 TB available for data giving me an additional 900GB but at a cost of £250 using the cheapest 2TB drives I could find.
Now I'm not knocking Drobo here as the benefits of having such a clever device are manyfold, but I think that the expandability aspect only becomes cost effective if you start with relatively small drives to begin with, or if we get really cheap 4TB drives very soon!
So my solution....
DroboPro baby!
To be continued
Wednesday, December 16, 2009 at 10:25AM 
It's not often I do a product recommendation in the blog (even if it is a little quiet on the Apple front) but I just had to let you know about a new iPhone app I've just downloaded and installed - Pastebot (£1.19)
Beautifully designed and extremely useful, it gives you a copy and paste buffer on the iPhone (or iPod touch). You know when an application just feels right and is a pleasure to use, well this is one of them!
The really useful part is that the developer has also created a free Mac application (PasteBot Sync) which allows you to seamlessly sync your clipboard buffer bidirectionally with your iPhone and a number of Macs. It will only sync with one Mac at a time but you can configure multiples and switch between them in the app. Actually, it doesn't "allow you", it just does it, in the background.
Very nicely done and well recommended!
Tuesday, December 15, 2009 at 11:25AM OK, so doing a blog post and a YouTube video comment on the same day isn't going to happen! Unless, there is something of significance that happens after I post the video comment.
Looking for some feedback....
On the days when I do a video comment, do you want the video posted to the blog too?
Or should I leave the blog video free and just leave it as text only (baring in mind, there is a separate page for Video comments in the header) ?
Please let your voice be heard by answering the poll below: