The Life Of A LittlBUGer

So, though my family really has no money, my wife and I are freaking out as we have 3 kids and never enough time to do anything of anything.  So she really wanted to go on a ‘vacation’ for the weekend, which means to leave my 2 sons at home with with the grandparents and we go somewhere with our 8 month old.   Yippee…

So we go to a bed and breakfast about 1 hour away in another ‘city’ and had a decent time there in the small town of Red Lodge, Montana.  Food was good, shops were fun to look around, and bed and breakfast was nice.

But then I noticed something on the morning of Sunday when we woke up in the bed and breakfast… my throat hurt like hell.  But I didn’t sleep with my mouth open, nor did I do anything to cause this.  So I ignored it until later that night and then guess what?  I’m dog sick and today, being Monday, it’s much worse.  So now instead of being at work, which is actually where I long to go a lot, I’m stuck at home with 3 crazy screaming kids and a wife who constantly wants my help (how does she do anything WITHOUT me during the normal work week?), and I feel like my head is going to explode…

Anyway, all I want to say is, “Thanks for the sickness Jeff and Brook, you guys suck!” (Jeff and Brook being co-workers who went to work all week last week being sick themselves).  Oh well I guess, I got to play a couple extra hours of gaming and slept in another hour than usual eh?  :-\

Oh, and kudos to Xfire and their website April Fools joke.  I love the 1337-speak throughout.  Very funny. 

Oh Jewlzk, my old, good and faithful host, where have you gone?  You were so great to me for that entire year I was with you, especially you Roland, and now it seems you have nearly disappeared from the planet.  I usually blame myself mostly as I know, at the time, I was one of your largest clients and it was because of the help of me you were getting an investor.  Everything was looking up and you were definitely growing.

Then, at least from your perspective, I was all of a sudden leaving with no prior warning.  I couldn’t afford the near $1000 a month for my servers anymore and found another hosting company, of similar size, who not only could give me something better and cheaper, but whose support seemed to actually exist.  Yes, that’s right Jewlzk.  Though you were so good to me for so long and one of the best hosts I’ve ever had, support response times diminished over the last few months while I was there and other issues kept cropping up when they shouldn’t.

So I decided to move, right at the same time the new investors were coming to kind of audit you and assess the situation, I’m assuming to see if you did actually have all of the clients and cashflow you said you had.  And I had to screw that all up and just leave without a trace.  I’ve always felt extremely terrible for doing this as I know you’re a good guy Roland and just always wanted to help.  And, being as I’m a host myself, I know it’s hard to find and keep good paying clients.  But sometimes enough is enough and for more professional reasons than personal, I had to move.  I had to do what I had to do in order to survive.  I couldn’t pay that high price anymore (at the time, nearly all of my revenue to pay for my servers came solely from advertisements) and I couldn’t sit and wait for answers like that.

So Jewlzk, I’m sorry I had to leave, I’m sorry I had to screw it all up for you, but you promised you said all was OK anyway.  You said that you understood and that you would continue on and help out others in need including your still current clients.  But it seems you may have lied to me there… I don’t know.  I still trust you and think you’re a good guy Roland, so I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt.  I just want to know, where art thou gone Jewlzk?  Please come back in all of your previous splendor… or at least stop by and say hello like the good old times…  Please?

As I mentioned yesterday, I had TWO stories, so here’s the second.

A few months back I thought it would be cool to try and get a Nintendo Wii for my family as my oldest son is just now getting old enough to understand and play games and so it’s fun enough to play with him.  But I also wanted to get my wife, the non-computer-literate and non-gaming person that she is, somehow back into gaming if I could.  I figured, what better way than the Wii?  Obviously after only a bit of research, I found it was impossible to get a Wii locally and nearly all stores online were out of stock unless I got it on eBay if I decided to pay nearly twice as much.

So after a while I began to lose hope until I noticed an ad (on my own website even) about getting a Wii.  I clicked it and it brought me to a site called Online Reward Center ( http://www.onlinerewardcenter.com ).  It described something by signing up for free and then completing a certain numbers of offers from their website, if all went well, they’d send me a new Nintendo Wii.  Instantly my first thought was that it was a scam, like most of these types of things are, especially when I noticed that if I went to the main website (without going through the ad), there wasn’t even a way to get the Wii through their own menus.

But alas, I wanted a damn Wii, I wanted to try something new, and at that time, I didn’t care what consequences may occur.  So I joined and began browsing through all of their ‘offers’ which were spread out between 3 different categories (like Bronze, Silver, and Gold or something).  Before I even got to those offers though, they tried to trick me into signing up for a truck load of other offers that had nothing to do with me getting my Wii… I mean pages and pages of offers that I had to say No Thanks to before I finally got to the main offers I needed to complete.  It said I needed to fully complete 8 offers (4 from the lowest category, 2 from the middle, and 2 from the highest) and then continue from there.

So I began browsing and picking the offers I wanted that I thought would be the easiest and cheapest to do.  Examples were signing up for the Blockbuster Online movie rental thing (even though I’ve been a huge fan and long time member of Netflix), signing up for a small PayDay Loan (which I just immediately pay back right after I got it), signing up for a trial offer on a certain electronic device, or signing up for a trial offer on some software.  I knew that whatever I signed up for, as long as I met the full requirements of each offer, that I would promptly cancel each offer/subscription before a full month was up.

So I did the offers which took an hour or so to initially do, including the actually finding of the offers themselves.  All offers obviously required some sort of initial payment.  I estimated in total that my payments were around $125, which was fine.  Then over the next few weeks, as I waited and made sure I fully met all the requirements, I slowly canceled each offer as needed and kept checking back to the Online Reward Center site to see which offers have been ‘Reported’, meaning the company who does the offer reported to them I successfully did the offer and met the requirements.  After about 3 weeks, all buy one were successfully reported.  The damn Blockbuster one was the only one which didn’t want to report.  So I had to end up waiting for another week or so before I could finally contact the Online Reward Center company and manually report it.  This also forced me to pay another month of the Blockbuster rental, so now I was getting near $150 total thus far.

Now, it wasn’t really all fun and games in doing the offers and then canceling them.  Some of the companies made it difficult to cancel and 3 of them charged me again even though I did already cancel.  So I had to call them back, along with my bank, to get it all sorted out and get my money back.  Luckily this really wasn’t an issue, it was just time consuming and whatnot. Once those were taken care of and the Blockbuster offer was finally reported, I checked back on the site and it said that I successfully met all of the requirements, so now I had to fill out a ‘Gift Voucher Form’ and send it to them.  Meaning I had to print a form out, fill out the information, get it notarized (yes, notarized!.. you know, getting the official county seal of approval on the damn thing), and then send it back to them via standard mail.  So obviously, I knew this would take a good week in itself to get done and get back to them.

Well, it finally did get back to them and the status on their site changed and now said all was good and they were sending out a Gift Shipping Note or something to whomever needed it so that my Wii would be ordered and shipped to me.  At this point, I was both excited and scared/anxious at the same time.  I thought, what if this works and I get a Wii… though it required a bit of time and effort, I spent almost half as much as if I could have bought it in a store.  Then again, what if this whole thing was a scam and now I’m out $150 with time wasted for nothing?  What if the package I receive is not a Wii at all, but a fricken NES or something in its place?

So the worrying began when around 2 weeks or so later I still had nothing and no updates were posted for my account on the site.  That was until the next day, I finally got an email with a shipping notice and tracking number from UPS!  Whoohoo I thought!  So I waited another week for it to arrive and guess what!  The box was empty!  I was totally scammed!

No, not really, actually I was just lying right there.  Ha ha, gotcha!  Seriously though, it did arrive, fully intact and brand new in the box.  All parts a standard Wii package would come with and it works great.  I would have never thought that something like this would actually work and I would actually get my Wii for paying less than at a retail store.  Now my wife, kids, and I are having some good fun, though still learning too.

So I just wanted to thank Online Reward Center for their efforts and hope they continue in their ways and continue allowing people like me to get new technology and products for cheap (though through lots of time and effort).  I’m enjoying my new Wii, after almost exactly two months since I first signed up for the site, and I couldn’t be happier.  Now, if I could just get a nice new laptop for only completing the same 8 offers…

Man, has it seriously been nearly 3 weeks since I posted here?  Damn me… damn me to hell!

Anyway, I have a couple of things to share today.  First off, one of my new projects at home was to setup a system where I could backup all of my music, photos, and DVDs/movies to a home server or some external HD even and then be able to play those directly on my TV.  I mainly wanted this because of my DVDs.  When you have kids, you end either losing DVDs, getting them ruined or broken, etc.  So by backing them up electronically and then playing them directly to the TV, nothing is lost and it’s easier and faster to actually get the movie started.

The first thing that happened that allowed this ‘dream’ to come to reality was when the company I work for was going to throw out some ‘old’ computers.  I said, hell, I’ll take one home.  So I did.  It is very basic, Celeron 2.4 Ghz CPU with 256 MB RAM, 80 GB HD, etc. but still, probably powerful enough to eventually stream some media to my TV.

So I began research a month or so ago into media players that would be some sort of set top box that I’d put under my TV along with my DVD player and whatnot.   I searched left and right to try and find the best deal and best band for the buck.  Everything kept pointing to the Apple TV, but since I loath Apple and it really wasn’t quite what I wanted anyway (as it required iTunes and whatnot other crap) I had to find the next best thing.  It seemed that next best thing was the DLink DSM-520.  So I ordered it, it came, I installed it relatively easy enough.  Then I read up on it some more.

It seems the best way for me to go about things was to use their media software on my ‘new’ home server to share the folders I wanted to share which had my movies and such and to also first re-encode all of my movies to mp4 format.  I figured this would be OK as I could still get the main movie at good quality with OK file size.  So I did this so several test movies, installed the software, poked holes in my firewall and such and then did some tests.  Took me a while to realize that the DSM-520, though it had built in wireless capability, just wasn’t going to cut it wirelessly.  not because of any slow downs in movie playing or anything, but just because I couldn’t really ever get anything to work.

So I decided, since my TV is upstairs in the living room and my home server is downstairs in my office, I should try the powerline ethernet adapters to allow an ethernet connection through my power lines in the house.  I bought a pair of 200 Mbps Adaptec ones and after a very easy setup, I could see the wired connectivity was there and working fine.  So I wired it to my router and then to the DSM-520 and hoped for the best.  Though things were slightly better, it was still a 50/50 chance that any movie would even start playing and the DSM-520 was still just generally slow and sluggish on the menu.  When it did actually play, it may skip every now and then during the movie and I found out the remote was absolutely horrible at doing any chapter skipping or fast forwarding and rewinding.

So I thought about upgrading the home server a bit (such as adding more RAM, adding in a dedicated sound and video card, new power supply, etc.) to see if that was the issue.  I ordered the parts, got them installed, tried everything again, and absolutely no change.  So I began posting on the DLink forums and whatnot and no one was of any help as I’ve already tried all of their suggestions software-wise and hardware-wise.  So now I’m fed up.

Being pissed off and frustrated at the same time, I decide to think things over a bit.  My setup was maybe a bit unique.  Though I had the home server, the actual media I was sharing was on a 500 GB external drive connected via USB to the home server.  It was stored, actually, on a Klegg 500 GB NetDisk.  So I thought… hmm… maybe it’s the Klegg drive, or maybe I need something from Klegg to make it work?  So I began looking at Klegg…

Soon I found what seemed to be quite a little and amazing device, the Klegg MediaShare.  It could do everything the DSM-520 could and then some.  It could even act as an enclosure, meaning I could put a HD directly into the device so I wouldn’t even need a server to stream media from.  So after more research, though I found the main website to contain barely any information and it was supposively sold at only one location, reviews were fairly good and I noticed it could potentially play .iso files directly!  This means that I could do a full backup (menus, extras, and all) of a DVD to a .iso file and it would play directly through that.  The other bonus was that it didn’t require any software, it just looked for any open shares or shared folders on the network.

So again, I put my faith in this new unit, purchased it, set it up replacing the DSM-520 and low and behold, though it could see my server, it didn’t see any shared folders though I explicitly shared them for this purpose.  I was instantly frustrated until I actually looked at the manual and noticed something.  When talking about sharing folders, it didn’t say anything about using Windows XP Pro and having Simple Sharing disabled, it went through instructions with Simple File Sharing ENABLED.  So I did just that, re-shared my folders, and voila, it can see them!  So I navigated through it’s menu and clicked on one of my .iso movies and viola, it starts playing immediately!

I was so overjoyed at this moment, I didn’t know what to do.  So I just watched the movie for a while to make sure all was OK, even tried the remote out which actually works as it should and was impressed.   So this basically helped conclude my overall project as I knew I had a working solution for what I wanted.  Sure, I would have to have larger files for the DVD backups and such, but hell, space is cheap these days.  I just wish I would have bought the Klegg MediaShare right off the bat!

So in conclusion, I’m going to give a nice big THUMBS UP to Klegg and a nice big THUMBS DOWN to DLink for comparable media sharing capabilities (who knew this post would turn into a review!).  I’ll also state some pros and cons for you that were the main points I looked into:

 DLink DSM-520

Pros:

• Lots of information and active updates and support from main website
• Comes from a huge and widely known company
• Somewhat large userbase
• Has a large menu and the ability to view YouTube and other videos from online
• Wireless and wired capabilities
• Basically silent operation

Cons:

• Can’t play directly from .iso files or other DVD file formats (such as .vob, etc.)
• Remote is just plain horrible
• Menus and loading times are quite slow
• The device itself is overly large
• Can’t act like an enclosure
• USB interface can’t handle larger external hard drives

Klegg MediaShare

Pros:

• Menus looks great and easy to navigate
• No slowness or sluggishness in menus
• Remote works as it should
• Can play directly from .iso or .vob files
• The device itself is quite small
• Is an enclosure so a HD can be added directly to the device thus bypassing the need for a server at all
• USB interface can handle larger external drives
• Wireless and wired capabilities

Cons:

• Comes with a fan to help cool internal HD (if you put one in) and thus is a bit nosier than I’d like
• Relatively no information or updates from main website
• Small userbase
• Pretty much unknown company (other than the fact they bought Ximeta I think)
• Can’t play YouTube or other videos directly from the internet

And of course, links to both products:

DLink DSM-520: http://www.dlink.com/products/?pid=438

Klegg MedisShare: http://www.kleggusa.com/product_mediashare.html