A quick-and-dirty reference to things that I’d like to have. Sorted arbitrarily by category. I should probably add a disclaimer that this may be out of date, even if updated recently.
Computer / Network Gear
Music
I normally purchase my music from Tower.com and encourage you to do so also.
- Swoon by Silversun Pickups
- Breath From Another by Esthero
- Don’t Look Now by Way Out West
- Numero Deux by The Dining Rooms
- Death by Chocolate by De-Phazz
- Splinter by Sneaker Pimps
- Becoming X by Sneaker Pimps
- Saturday Teenage Kick by Junkie XL
- Night Is The New Day by Katatonia
- Better Late Than Never by Lange
- Any Anjunabeats or Anjunadeep albums.
Everything Else
- PUR Water Dispenser (for my ‘fridge at work).
Network Storage: I’m examining options for a 1-2TB portable NAS for “game storage”. Game storage encompasses patches, add-ons and modifications, etc. for games enough to ensure that I can re-install any game on the fly and be up-to-date enough to play it. This is the bulk of the storage consumption on my desktop gaming box right now. I estimate at least 150GB consumed currently, but this is artificially limited by a desire to conserve capacity. The drive that holds this stuff is a 465GB (actual capacity) drive.
The requirements are:
- Portable, more compact than my Shuttle PC.
- At least 100MBit LAN interface, preferably 1GBit
- At least 500GB of storage
- At least RAID-1 redundancy
For the Gaming storage, I’ve noticed that Maxtor makes a NAS appliance that’s the size of an external HDD which would likely meet my requirements. I haven’t had the time to look up specific details yet.
Maxtor was bought by Seagate (this actually happened some time ago but more recently Seagate has retired the brand). The newer Seagate NAS appliances are all marketed towards SoHo / backup uses and come with extra crapware that I don’t want to have anything to do with.