Saturday, December 15, 2012

Carrying case for a dual-bay USB drive enclosure

I wrote in a previous post about upgrading my off-site backup hard drives from a standard, single-bay enclosure to a dual-bay USB enclosure.  The down side of that upgrade is that, being twice as wide, the enclosure no longer fit into the padded carrying case that I used to use when transporting the drives.  I searched high and low for a pre-made carrying case that would fit the new enclosure without being grossly oversized or horribly expensive, but to no avail.  What I ended up doing was buying a hard-sided lunch box for $10 and padding it myself with foam packing material from an LCD monitor carton.  The result works better than any pre-made option I could find.

Tuesday, December 4, 2012

Setting up MiniDLNA on Ubuntu

I've been wanting for some time now to setup a DLNA server on my primary desktop computer (running Ubuntu Linux) so that the songs and videos stored there would be available to all of the other devices in our home, including the blu-ray player in our entertainment center.  When I finally got around to doing it, it took only a few minutes.  I wish I'd done it sooner!