Van Gils Blogs

This week Google released a browser of its own. This awesome new toy is called Chrome. It seems to be a fast, clean, and usable browser… at first sight. Some of the things that I’ve grown attached to seem to be missing. Or at least I can’t find ‘m. The feature I miss most is a way to couple to bookmarks bar (control-b) to the bookmarks that I have stored in my Google Bookmarks. Other features that would be nice are new mail notification (from my GMail) and integration with GTalk. Does anyone have more info on these?

As of today, our weblog has a new layout. I thought the old one was getting rather boring, especially the colors that were used. I found a really nice new theme with fresh colors that we’ll use for now. I’ve also added a section in the sidebar which shows my recommended news items (this is actually a plugin for GoogleReader).

After 6 years of service our computer died this morning. Damn. It was a pretty nice box despite its age. We mostly ran linux on it, even though Windows was installed on it too (nice for Koen’s games, tax  stuff and so on). We had recently bought a big widescreen for it which is now doing nothing for a while.

We’ve been considering how to replace this machine, if at all. There’s several options:

• the obvious : get a new pc and stick it somewhere in the network
• forget about the pc, get an extra notebook (the HP notebook will run windows, the new Eee 1000 notebook will run eee-ubuntu linux) and either
  • get a spare 500Gb usb disk for backups (cheap solution)
  • get a NAS (network applied storage) with 2 500Gb disks (expensive) \

I’m not a big fan of the new pc option. PCs only eat up a lot of space and ard hard to move around. Besides, all pcs are ugly. A much better option in my opinion is to slowly migrate to a situation where Eva and myself have a notebook of our own (not counting the notebook that I have for work, I don’t want to put my own stuff on that one).

I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s best to grow via the extra notebook with extra external usb-disk option to a situation with a NAS. That is, get one Eee + disk now, get another Eee somewhere in the future (perhaps buy one after I’ve tought the course at the HU?) and the NAS somewhere next year.

Does anyone have experience with such set-up? Am I missing something?

Update: looks like we’re going for the incremental scenario. I’m currently shopping (figuring out where Ican get things cheapeast) for these items:

• Eee pc 1000 with ssd, possibly with 2Gb of ram (if it’s not too expensive)
• Lacie portable DVD burner
• Either a cheap 500Gb external drive from MediaMarkt or a pretty Lacie external disk of the same size