Category: Technology

I’ve had the pleasure of using a 27″ iMac at work since about mid-December, but that time has come to an end. As such, I’m moving back to one main development computer both at work and at home (my trusty 13″ MacBook Pro … I really think Apple is going to kill off this model this year).

Here are some thoughts on using the two computers:

• The 27″ iMac screen is AMAZING, it is most useful when you are working with more than a single webpage open (side-by-side) or any documents open. It’s also beautiful.
• Keeping two computers in-sync, file and document-wise, is not much of an issue with iTunes Match and Dropbox.
• Keeping two computers in-sync as far as development environment goes is still a nightmare. You can get by with hosting some stuff on GitHub and just pulling and pushing between the two, but it is still a hassle.
• One thing I didn’t think about is how jaded you get with the huge monitor. It is hard to keep in mind that people will be looking at your stuff with monitors A LOT smaller than you. Something to always keep in mind.
• The Mac App Store is a savior when it comes to software licenses. Purchase and install on one, open up the App Store on the other and install away. Say what you want about Apple’s policies, but the App Store really is the model both of the present and for the future.
• iOS 5 makes it a lot easier to take your iOS devices with you and have multiple Macs. I really don’t sync anything between a “normal” computer and my iOS devices anymore. That is all handled through iCloud and iTunes Match.
• You can never have enough RAM.
• I need to get an SSD.

Overall, the 27″ iMac is one of the best machines I’ve ever used. Can I really go back to having a desktop-only Mac? Probably not. The closest I will possibly get would be a Mac mini … but even that is different than a 27″ behemoth taking up most of your desk.

I finally took stock of the old computer parts I had sitting in my basement office this past week and decided that maybe I should just throw together a box and see if FreeNAS 8 would work for my needs.

So this is the box I have running FreeNAS at the moment:

• AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+ processor
• ASUS M2A-VM motherboard
• 1 GB DDR2 RAM
• 80 GB Western Digital hard drive (for FreeNAS)
• 250 GB Western Digital hard drive (for storage)

So far, it works really well. I’m having some issues with the machine not booting properly every time, but I think that it might be a bad stick of RAM or some other issues. I have a single ZFS volume setup on the 250 GB drive with a single ZFS dataset being used for Time Machine backups from my wife’s MacBook.

I’m going to run with this for a little while and see if it fits my needs. Next thing is to find another drive to use for just generic storage and see if that will work well. I also need to transfer it over to my gigabit switch so that I’m not being limited by the 10/100 switch I have on my workbench.