First of all, this little story is made of fail, however I’m happy with the outcome
First of all, let me take you back a couple of years. As myself and C tend to have a lot of shared content, eg Movies, Music, Photos, we used to use the good old shared folders on our Windows PC’s. The downside of this was if a machine was off, you had no access to the shared folder !. So I went with plan B, build a cheap server out of old parts I had kicking around, and have all our content on that. This way neither of the 2 main machines would need to be on, and we could still access shared content.
After 6 month or so running like this, I just found it used far too much power, and went for plan C…a NAS drive. I bought a 500GB Western Digital MyBook World, plugged it into the network, and bobs your uncle, storage that didn’t need a PC to be on. My only issue with the drive was it was very slow, I even upgraded my entire network to gigabit to try and improve the speed, but to no avail. About a year later, I decided to upgrade the firmware on the device, which somehow repartition the drive, meaning I’d lost everything ! ARGH !…it took a piece of software nearly 3 days to recover the content !
So onto plan D, a NAS drive with redundancy….so a forked out a lot of money for a 2TB NAS drive with that hard RAID so if the worse case happens, I just plonk in a new drive, and I’m back up and running again. I went with the Acer Aspire easyStore, which at the time was perfect, I had multiple RAID options, gigabit network, wireless, iTunes server, and media server. I went with RAID5, as I felt this would give a decent amount of performance and would only lose 500Gb to redundancy.
As hard drive do die, I set up a piece of software on both mine and Cs machines called SyncBack. This would mirror our chosen folder to the NAS drive, to ensure we could recover our data. This worked great on the PC’s and can highly recommend it, however when we moved to Mac, I planned on using the Time Machine software build into the OS.
Now for plan E, No matter what I tried, I couldn’t get the Macs to see the NAS drive as a Time Capsule, so went with the real deal. I bought the 1TB Time Capsule back in March of this year, and does the job perfect !. Currently I have 2 x iMacs (with 1TB hard drives), 2 x MacBook Pros (with 250GB hard drives) and a MacMini with a 160GB hard drive. Now I know that if you add all that up, that is a lot more than a terabyte, however I was happy that I only had around 500GB of data across all machines at the time, and would address the space issues at a later date when it became an issue.
So about a month ago, the space became an issue, and I bought an external caddy to house a couple of drives I had kicking around. This external caddy allowed 2 drives to be plugged in via USB giving the Time Capsule an additional 750GB to play with.
So early this month, I got the new Apple TV, and got into my head, that I should digitise my entire DVD collection. As it stands, I’ve ripped 72 movies, and 7 boxsets….guess what ?…I’m running out of space on the 2TB NAS drive ! ARGH !…so onto plan F !
I was in 2 minds, I could either upgrade the hard drives in the NAS drive, or get another NAS drive, or get an external hard drive and plug this directly into the MacMini. As you can probably tell from the above, redundancy is key, so the drive would have to have some kind of RAID to ensure the data was safe.
I spend the weekend looking around, and found a decent little 4 drive caddy which had USB, Firewire 400/800 and eSATA connectors, and a variety of RAID options !. After spending what seemed like hours looking, I found a site which seemed to do them for £60 less than everyone else. The model they were selling didn’t have the firewire, however I thought “For £60, I don’t really need firewire”. I ordered this on Wednesday, as well as 4 x Samsung 1TB hard drives, knowing I would lose 1TB with RAID5.
On Thursday, all turned up, I went to the PDF manual I’d downloaded in preparation, but couldn’t find the RAID dip switches ?!?……then it occurred to me, for £60 you don’t only get Firewire, you also get RAID !!! ARGH ! I’d ordered the StarTech SAT3540U2E instead of the S354UFER I’d been looking at and downloaded the manual for !
So Thursday in a panic, I ordered the S354UFER, so now I have both. I could have sent the original one back, but thought I’d keep it and plug this into the back of the Time Capsule giving me the option of having another 2 drives as additional storage. Currently the Time Capsule has it’s own 1TB drive, plus a 500GB, and 3 x 250GB, giving it a total of 2.25TB
Now for the final fail….the S354UFER turned up yesterday, plugged it in via firewire, but I was getting a red light on one of the drive (suggesting it was broken), I moved it up and down the bays, but still got the same !. So….in a panic at 5pm yesterday, I rang the place where the hard drives came from and ordered another drive on Saturday delivery so I could finally build this box.
Today, as expected, the 2nd drive turned up, I put it in the caddy, to only be told another drive had failed !….NO !!!…..I went, had a coffee, double checked the manual, only to find that I hadn’t set the dip switches correctly, and the box was only expecting 3 drives. I flicked them to the right position, and both the old, and the new hard drives work fine ! DOH !
However, all is not bad, it does mean if the worse case happens, I have a spare 1TB drive to slot straight in.
This gives me my total of 8.75TB of storage, the Startech S354UFER with 4 x 1TB hard drives, 2.25TB on the Time Caspule, a 2TB NAS drive, and finally my 500GB MyBook World. Now granted I lose 1.5TB to redundancy however it’s a small price to pay knowing my data is safe
Well, I’m honored to say, that I have finally seen the one of my most anticipated films of this year. This film is brought to you by the guys over at the Suckcast podcast. Just a little history before we start on the film, I was made aware of the Suckcast podcast when they tweeted the RedDwarfForum twitter account saying they were liking the ScutterCast podcast, back then we were getting quite a lot of flak due to poor editing, poor preparation, and just generally doing a poor podcast. I initially assumed that it was somebody else taking the piss out of us, especially with the name of Suckcast, and our podcast being called Scuttercast (there was method in my madness).
After doing a little bit of googling, I found that they also did a podcast, named “The Suckcast“, and decided to give it a listen, What a podcast !….I’ve downloaded every episode since and each episode makes me laugh out loud, a number of times.
The podcasts hosts are Man Guy (Dan Guy), The Herman (William Stendeback) and Cory (Cory Eskkridge Okouchi), each week they discuss their week, and discuss a movie they have watched that week and just generally have a laugh while doing it, you can tell by their synergy, they enjoy each others company, and enjoy doing the podcast.
At the beginning and end of each podcast they mention their sponsors, Ninjas Vs Zombies. Again after a little googling, I found that the movie is their own baby ! How awesome !, unfortunately they are still waiting for a publisher to take them on, so the chances of me ever getting to see their creation was starting to look bleak. Out of the blue a couple of episodes ago, Cory said that if anybody wanted a copy of the movie, to email in and he’s try to sort something out, so obviously I emailed in.
Anyway that’s the back story out of the way, now lets get to the film itself !
Is this film going to win any Oscars ? Nope.
Does this film have mindblowing visuals that make Avatar look like the first episode of the Simpsons ? Nope.
Does this film have martial arts that would show Bruce Lee a thing or two ? Nope.
Is this a fun, easy watching, laddish film ? Hell Yeah !!!
How do I know ? Because my other half sat playing on her Blackberry all the way through it, asking how long it had left, because she was bored
The basic movie plot is that Randall (Dan Guy), is interrupted while attempting to bring his brother Eric (PJ Megaw) back from the dead by Herman (William Stendeback), who is banging on the comic book stores (assume that Randall works their), as he’s want to play their weekly game of Dungeons and Dragons. This results in a botched resurrection that does brings back his brother, however he suck the souls of the living to survive. Each person he sucks a soul from, turns into a flesh eating zombie.
As the film goes on, Eric gets a taste for the soul sucking, hence resulting in an army of flesh eating zombie terrorizing the neighbourhood. With no way, and no hope of defeating Eric and the zombies, Cole (Cory Eskridge Okouchi), Kyle (Daniel Ross), Fitz (Daniel Mascarello), and Randell are granted super ninja powers to help defeat Eric, and rid the world of the zombies.
From this point on, (and without spoiling the film for anyone) it’s essentially a fight between Ninjas and Zombie !
So how was it ?…well it was a fun movie, when I initially saw the trailer, the first thing that came to my head was one of Peter Jacksons first films “Bad Taste“, an overly gory film with just so much heart and soul, it’s one of those films you just don’t get bored of. I’m glad to say that Ninjas Vs Zombies didn’t disappoint, the film had a decent story, decent acting, and to be honest really good special effects as this seems to have been made on a shoe string budget. The “soul sucking” scenes, and the fireballs that Randell can conjure really wouldn’t look out of place in a Hollywood blockbuster !
Was the film predictable ?…well it was a good guys vs bad guy film, and there are very few where the good guys lose
I have to say, the homages to the great films out there were amazing, it felt like a little game after a while, every few minutes I was turning to the missus and saying “ooooo, look, that’s the Turtles”, or one of the other films they paid homage too. I’m not 100%, but I seem to remember thinking a lot of the fighting moves were either from Mortal Kombat, or Street Fighter…I may be totally wrong, but that what they reminded me of.
Did it have any nudity ?…Yeah, but only for a split second, if anybody has listened to the Suckcast, you’ll know why I was a little shocked to only see a split second of nudity
Would I watch it again ? Already have, and it gets more enjoyable with each watch, it’s going to be one of “those films” I think ?
Would I have changed anything ? No, not really, there were a few points in the film where the comedy timing was a little out, apart from that much fighting, much gore, loved it.
All in all a great movie, if your looking for Hollywood blockbuster, with great depth and millions of pounds of special effects, then this movie isn’t for you, if you are looking for a low budget, gory, fun moving, then this is the film for you.
I think the current score on IMDB of 6.7/10 is totally justified, I just hope a publisher takes them on, so the rest of the world can see this great movie.
As some of you may know, back in October I got a Xbox 360 Elite for my birthday, with Halo 3. Now before I could play Halo 3, I had to complete Halo 2 on the PC, as I’d done the first, but needed complete the play and complete the 2nd, to fill in the story arc.
The 2nd problem I had was that I’ve been a PC gamer for a long as I can remember, and playing a FPS (First Person Shooter) with a controller, it’s just not natural.
Over Christmas I spent a fair amount of time playing FarCry2 on the Xbox 360 and Resistance on the PS3. After many hours of practice I was able to take out my enemies without dying all the time.
This weekend, thought it was about time I got my butt in gear and played Halo 3. I’ve heard a lot of mixed reviews, some people hated it, some loved it….me….I really enjoyed it !
It took me about 10 hours to beat on Normal setting, and that’s with me being a controller amateur, loved the story, the vehicles, and especially loved the way you can snap a gun turret off it’s stand, and go on a rampage with it
