Playing With the Pogoplug
I purchased a Pogoplug device last week. I have been playing with it for a couple of days. Being a tinkerer, I kept it in it’s out of the box configuration for nearly an hour. I unboxed it (sorry, no unboxing video, although it is packaged quite nicely), plugged it into my router, power, and a spare USB drive sitting on my desk. I logged into my.pogoplug.com, created a username/password and it found my pogoplug and I was able to access the drive and it’s files from my browser. I was expecting to be able to see a mountable drive like a typical NAS device like the Linksys NSLU2 device. But, the Pogoplug requires downloading client software to be able to mount the drives. Not a big deal, but it limits it usefulness in some ways.
But, there is a way to make the Pogoplug play other roles in your home IT infrastructure. OpenPogo is the place to stop to unleash your Pogoplug. The Pogoplug is a small Linux server running a very small OS configuration. It resides on a small partition in flash memory. There is a larger, unused partition on the flash memory. Following the instructions I have made my Pogoplug a bit torrent client, a TOR server, a media server, and a DynDNS update client. I can now offload bit torrent downloads to the Pogoplug, share my iTunes library, and access it by a domain name rather than IP address.
There have been a few hitches, nothing worth describing. It took a little work to set up the Transmission client daemon to add enough security to allow access from outside of my network. The TOR server setup was pretty quick and seems to work well. Firefly install and setup was very quick and seems to work great. There is a danger of overtaxing the small server with too many torrent downloads.
If you have some basic Linux skills and can manage to use Google, there is a lot you can do with this unit. I’m just getting started.
UPDATE: OpenPogo is giving away a Pogoplug go here: http://openpogo.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=212. Or follow them on Twitter, @openpogo for more info.
No More Sad Mac!
Two and a half years ago I popped into the Apple store in Des Moines and walked out with a 1.5ghz G4 Mac Mini. It wasn’t a rash purchase. I had planned on buying that particular model. It took over desktop duties from my SUSE 9.x Linux box I had built a couple of years prior. I needed something that could run the photography software I wanted to run, and I wasn’t willing to go back to Windows. It has served me well for two years. It has been run hard and put away wet frequently. A memory upgrade to the max 1Gb in the first year gave it some breathing room, and two external Firewire drives provided backup and archive space. I had been weighing the idea of replacing the mini with a new Intel Mac for many months. I was torn between a MacBook Pro and a low-end Mac Pro. Finally, in December ’07 I purchased a 15.4″ 2.2Ghz MacBook Pro. Portability won out over raw power. The day after I brought the MBR home, my mini died. Unwilling or unable to boot up. I took it to the local Kansas City Apple store and they confirmed my worst-case scenario: dead logic board, $450. I couldn’t justify spending that much money to fix a $600 computer. So, I took it home, still dead, and starting looking for alternatives. I found a company, DT&T Computer Service, that advertised $225 logic board repairs. I boxed up the mini and off it went. Weeks passed. And finally, 5 weeks and $240 (with shipping) later, my mini is back and running! In over 26 years of owning a large variety of computers, this was the first time I have ever paid to have one of them repaired. That alone was a strange feeling. But, stranger still was how much I missed having my mini on my desk. I had backups of everything on it, so there was no danger of data loss. I had a new Mac that was faster, portable, and sleeker looking. I guess I just wasn’t quite ready to give up on the mini. Now it’s home, getting a Leopard upgrade, preparing to become my wife’s ‘new’ computer, replacing her worn out HP laptop. Hopefully, it will live a long life and serve as force for good against Windows.l
Hand cart on the (Ruby on) Rails
In my previous post I detailed my problems getting NetBeans 6.0 to use the native Ruby installation on OS X Leopard. So, we pick up the story with that issue resolved.
Ok, time to create a new Rails project and get started. I go through the standard steps in NetBeans and am informed that there is a problem with my gems directory, and NetBeans thinks I am using Rails 1.2.6, instead of the 2.0.2 I installed. The error message sends me off the NetBeans wiki for details. So, off I go to figure out how to add GEM_HOME and GEM_PATH to my environment, so NB will recognize my gems directory. After about 30 minutes of surfing for answers I find the right combination of pages that allow me to piece together the answer.
I’m now running with a freshly created Rails project, complete with a database, with tables.
NOW, I can start coding. So far, the NetBeans/OS X combination has been more frustrating than it should be. Hopefully, I’ve completed all of the initiation rites.