Categories
Technology

How Drive Prices Change Perception

It is no secret that hard drive (the spinning disk variety) prices are crazy at the moment and that the floods in Thailand are the majority of the cause. It was just a little over two months ago that I was looking at terabyte drives to maybe fill out a simple NAS at my house. At that time, drives were sitting around $80 for a terabyte drive.

However, today, this is what I have to pay for a terabyte drive.

Current HDD pricesYeah, prices have doubled and now we have news of manufacturers running out of high-capacity (2TB+) drives and pushing custom machine build dates in the future (from Ars Technica).

That change in price makes a custom-built NAS a little bit less desirable at the moment.

So two things change in my perception at the moment because of the price increase:

  1. SSDs look far more desirable, not because they’ve come down in price, but because hard drive prices are going up. A 128GB Samsung SSD sits around $200 and you get the massive speed increase.
  2. That Time Capsule I was talking about before looks a lot better when 2TB of traditional storage can cost me $320 for just the drives. A refurbished one costs $250 from Apple and comes with the same warranty. That’s cheaper than plain drives at the moment.

Now, you can get a 2TB drive for less, but you still need to get the rest of the hardware to support your NAS. I know that. You also still are locked into a single size for your Time Capsule. Understood. However, it does look far more desirable with prices where they are right now.

With Christmas coming, maybe I’ll look into getting one just to have another layer of backups available at home. Right now I’m using SuperDuper! to make clones of my wife’s MacBook just in case something happens, but having Time Machine always sitting vigilant would make me feel much better.

Just an interesting side effect of the rising hard drive prices.

Categories
Life

Getting a start on New Years

Yeah, it’s December, but I was waxing nostalgic this morning as I rocked my 4 month-old son at 5:15 in the morning. I thought back to what I was hoping to accomplish this year and taking stock in whether I had achieved any of those goals or, more likely, did they change.

From there, I really just stopped thinking for a moment, tried to doze off for a little bit, and then woke up again to a different thought. This time, what do I want to accomplish in the next 90 days, which happens to contain the New Year?

Mainly, it is a similar goal to most years for me: learn how to program. I still haven’t achieved this goal, so I refined it down a little bit more for myself. What do I, SPECIFICALLY, want to accomplish in the next 90 days. After playing around with some lofty goals, I decided to force myself into a reality check … let’s set a really small goal and accomplish that first before we get ahead of ourselves (that was myself talking to … myself).

“Alright, self,” my self said, “so where do we want to go from here?”

That’s when it hit me: I had a goal sitting right there, started but never finished, which would work very nicely to get the ball rolling.

Enter Learn Ruby The Hard Way.

I am a few exercises in, started and then aborted maybe a month back, and the kind of goal I need to achieve to get some momentum going for myself. It is very simple (in concept) and something that I can achieve if I just put myself to it.

So there you have it: in the next 90 days I aim to finish Learn Ruby the Hard Way. After that, my selves shall reconvene to figure out what is next.

Categories
Technology

How To Deal With New Technology

You can read about the Swiss and their government findings about piracy on TorrentFreak (they also link to the Swiss news article). This is the killer quote for me:

“Every time a new media technology has been made available, it has always been ‘abused’. This is the price we pay for progress. Winners will be those who are able to use the new technology to their advantages and losers those who missed this development and continue to follow old business models,” the report notes.

So clear, so easy to understand, and so true. This should be how any company approaches a new technology, as an opportunity to provide something new for customers, and not as a nuisance they need to try and squash so that they can keep their old business model around for as long as they can.

Is this pie-in-the-sky-unicorns-and-rainbows? Perhaps, but it is how I wish things were approached. Find value for new customers, not new ways to force customers to not give you money.

Categories
Life

A Local Wiki for a Town Near You

I stumbled upon LocalWiki today and then took a look at their sample site, Denton Wiki, serving Denton, Texas.

Basically, it is a wiki dedicated to a community where community members (read: anyone) can edit the pages about the community. It is meant to be a collective gathering of information about the said community, much like Wikipedia is the gathering of “all human knowledge” (or something grandiose like that).

The idea really hits me in a soft spot. I’m thinking that maybe such a wiki setup for small communities might help to foster a collective knowledge in the area along with giving some visibility to the many places, people, activities, and just ideas that are sometimes hidden in smaller communities.

I’m contemplating maybe trying to get something for New Ulm off the ground. If anything, it would be fun to take a look at the platform itself.

Categories
Technology

Declaring Tech News Bankruptcy

I think I have to declare tech news bankruptcy.

I’ve always tried to keep up with the latest information flowing from the tech arena, and it is part of my job, but I think I need to change some bad habits and get things under control again.

I could spend hours reading all of the articles that are published every day, keeping track of all of the latest technology being tossed about and following every juicy detail of every tech story. However, I can’t. I have a life and better things to do with it (having a family will do that to you).

So, starting tomorrow, I’m giving up on Hacker News. That’s where I’m starting. I spend too much time getting upset by commentators there, and not enough time actually doing stuff. That’s it, cold turkey, and removing it from my Top Sites screen in Safari right now. I’m done.

I’ll be cleaning out RSS pretty soon as well, but this is where I am starting.