My NAS is arrived: now what next ?

My NAS is finally arrived now I haven't decided which approach to follow next.
I am the happy owner of a MP101 and I always found that the key problem is actually not it's fault: the need to keep a PC on all the time. For this reason, after having read a lot of forums I have just bough a Linksys NSLU2 and a 250 Gbyte Hard Disk to use as a UpNP server with Twonkyvision. There are only two annoyance I can see:

- installing unslug (I have some experience in Linux but a long time ago)
- not being able to use FAT32 and thus just take my hard disk and laptop with me when travelling

The latest Linksys firmware (V23R63 not mounted in my unit) allows FAT32 access but I don't think that Unslug, that is based on an older version, is doing the same. The other insteresting thing is that if you look at the firmware update notes you can see that in a previous unreleased release they enabled UPnP AV than they took it out for some unknown reason. Maybe it was reliability or just because they have started selling a media server recently...

Anyway at this point in time my understanding is that if I want both UPnP and I need to do a lot manual work. Useful Technology but unuseful marketing approach...

If everything goes well I'm thinking of buying another MP101 and a video adapter (not decided yet but I like Kiss DP-600) for the living room. Any views ?

I have ordered my NAS solution

A NAS is really the vital component of any home network. Basically it's a place to store all of your files: documents, pictures and possibly audio and video. But a NAS is not limited to that, as recently they started to look more like servers. They can be configured as Web ot FTP servers or, more interestingly, as UPnP servers which basically means that they can serve media content to all the media clients around your network: PCs but also Media Adapters for Audio and Video.
I already have a Netgear MP101 that I like a lot to listen to my MP3 music at home but the problem is that it always require a switched-on PC to work. It doesn't really make sense when all you are using of it is basically its Hard Disk.
That's exactly where a NAS fits into the picture: they are cheap (compared to a PC) and efficient. In my case I plan to use a Linksys NSLU2 a small and neat diskless unit with two USB port that you can connet to external storage. I'm also going to buy a Buffalo HD-HB250U2-1 USB 2.0 Drivestation 250 Gb to have enough space to store my music and a lot of videos in the future (but that's a future project). All of this is only around £130.
Unfrtunately today setting up a NAS with extended functionality still requires a little bit of hacking that will probably keep me busy in the next weeks (see http://www.nslu2-linux.org/). my plan is initially to install Twonkyvision as UPnP media server.

Accenture study on consumer adoption of digital home solutions

This news is again coming from eHomeUpgrade but source is actually...my company ! yes, Accenture has delivered a comprehensive study on consumer adoption of digital home solutions.

MyLife Bits: how to store and recover a complete life of information

The original link to this interesting project has been provided by eHomeUpgrade one of the best Blogs on prosonal home network technology (with a very good useful vs. hype ratio). MyLifeBits is what you get when you are able to digitize every bit of content happening in your life (photos, music, documents, voice mails, meetings ...) and put it in a single searchable repository. The weak points are: how do I input in a time effective way all of this stuff in my repository and how to label and organise knowledge without spending too much time on it. Maybe Google with his Desktop search engine might have an interesting solution to the last point.

This blog is starting from my pda...

That's were I can get some free time to deal with my thougts: doing my commuting every day on the Tube. I can do this just because I'm using a piece of useful technology my hp 4150 iPAQ pda. Why it's useful ? Because it's actually amplifying my life expanding my ability to be productive or even simply to do something funny in a location like the London Underground that is not supposed to be like that. So we found a definition of useful technology: something that expand the range of things you can do. My station ... Tomorrow we will consider another dimension of simplification and maybe what are my plans for the future of this Blog