MediaSmartHome have a guide on how to convert and stream your home movies with the HP MediaSmart Server.
The 4 page guide explains how to firstly get your home movies on to your PC and how to create conversion folders for simplicity. You are then shown how to use the HP Video Converter to do the business to your home movies.
You can read the guide here.
The Home Server Show podcast #45 is out, and this episode is all about add-in’s that host David McCabe would like to see. David is also joined by Jim Collison with the latest news and views.
Show 45 is available from here.
For those of you wishing to build your own Windows Home Server, Tranquil PC are now selling the new Intel D945GSEJT mini-itx main board.
The low profile, low power consumption main board is powered by the multi thread Atom N270 CPU which consumes only 12W when fully operational.
The Atom N270 CPU used on this board is a 1.6GHz model, with 512K of L2 cache, based on Intel’s latest 45nM process. The supporting chipset, the Intel 945GSE + ICH7M provides desktop connectivity and performance. Intel high definition audio, 10/100/1000 LAN, PCI, MiniPCIe, SATA2 (3GB/s) , SODIMM RAM etc are all there to ensure connectivity, expandability, performance and ease of build.
More details are available from here.
Fellow MVP and friend Donavon West has started to manufacture a unique Windows Home Server into a working cigar humidor which can hold a dozen of your finest cigars.
Called the Home Servidor, the top of the humidor holds the cigars whilst the bottom chamber contains a powerful yet “green powered” home server.
Donavon West added:
Why settle for an ugly grey box? I designed the Home Servidor for the person who wants more. The Home Servidor looks great on the desk of your home office. No one even suspects that there is a server hidden away inside.
Care should be taken to store cigars in a cool dry place. Most experts recommend a temperature of about 70 degrees Fahrenheit and a relative humidity of around 70%. With that, we have taken great measures to thermally isolate the cigar storage area of the Home Servidor from the warmer computer equipment below. The Home Servidor incorporates an air gap between the compartments as well as a special insulating foam strip that forms an air tight seal.
The handcrafted Home Servidor start at $799 and is available in both 1TB and 2TB models. Using Intel’s Atom processor and “green” hard drives, both are energy efficient, a feature that is a must for an “always on” appliance such as a home server. A welcome side effect of these low power technologies is that very little heat is emitted, which is desirable for use in a humidor.
More information is available from here.
If you are using JungleDisk Windows Home Server Edition to backup your shared folders to Amazon’s S3 service, you would have heard of buckets which is a folder where your backup files reside.
The following list of S3 utilities enable you to delete buckets and to search through S3 buckets for files. You can view them here.
With a backlog of hardware and software waiting to be reviewed we are after some talented Windows Home Server enthusiasts who are passionate about their Home Servers but do not necessary have any writing experience to write reviews.
A software reviewer can be based in any country worldwide whilst the hardware reviewer needs to be based in the South East of England (UK).
Both positions are (The position is) unpaid although any expenses will be paid, but more importantly the perks of being a part of the team include press-pass entry to conferences, software freebies and of course name recognition for writing for the web’s largest dedicated Windows Home Server resource.
If you are interested please email Philip Churchill @ mswhs.com (deleting the spaces) with the subject line of “Reviewer”. Remember apart from a knowledge of Home Server writing skills are not essential BUT enthusiasm is.
UPDATE: Thanks to all 30 of all who applied for the software reviewer position, over the course of the next week we will be getting back in contact with you all. In the meantime we are still after a hardware reviewer who resides in the South East of England, so if that’s you get in contact!
Small Business Server MVP Kevin Weilbacher has a quick look at the Acer Aspire easyStore H340 and tells us what’s new or different with the unit compared to the HP units, which you can read here.
jkOnTheRun is a mobile technology blog by James Kendrick who has just published 2 blog posts on Windows Home Server.
The first details his setup experience and first impressions including a look at MacBook support and the second details getting remote access to work correctly.
As you are aware all week we have had a KeepVault for Windows Home Server competition, giving away a 40GB account every day Monday through to Thursday. Whilst over the weekend giving away a 100GB to one lucky person.
Well the results are in, we have read your comments, answers to our question and stories and here are the list of winners.
Monday we asked you why you would like to win a 40GB account and congrats to Carl Tyler who answered:
I’d like to win one, at the moment all the important information about my poodle farming business is not being backed up, and I would hate to lose all that hard work.
Tuesday we asked you why you visit us here at mswhs.com, and well done to 40GB account winner michael f who answered:
This site is a great way to keep current on the latest of everything WHS-related. A wealth of knowledge.
For day 3 of the KeepVault giveaway we asked you for the main 2 things that you use Windows Home Server for apart from backing up. And another 40GB account goes to Sean who wrote:
I serve up a large music collection with iTunes installed on the WHS connecting to an Airport Express downstairs hooked up to a receiver wired to speakers throughout the kitchen, dining room and living room, and driven by the Remote app on an iPod Touch. (Whew!) I also store all our families important documents which have been scanned and PDF’d.
Thursday we asked you to explain explain a scenario where KeepVault would save the day and Lood, our final 40GB account winner wrote:
Your beloved domestic Cat, treasure to the family, menace to the computer user!
Beloved moggy insists on wandering across your desk and keyboard when you are trying to work (you know they do it, it’s one of their favorite pastimes). In the process of it’s “wandering”, beloved moggy accidentally knocks your cup of tea off your desk onto your brand spanking new single drive HP LX195, the tea seaps through the gaps before you can react and frys the server and hard disk in the process. Nooooooo!!!!!!
As it only has a single drive there is no multiple disk redundancy set up and you haven’t got round to setting up that external Home Server shares backup which you’ve meaning to do, oh hec…….hang on, thank god the server was backing up to Keep Vault on a daily bais…….Keep Vault saves the day! Phew!
Only issue to solve now is the dead server and that darn Cat! :O)
And finally for Friday and Saturday we asked you how many (average) mp3 songs could you fit into a 100GB account, our own estimate was 20,000 and the nearest was Heaphus with his answer of 20920.
Congratulations to all 5 winners whose emails have been passed along to KeepVault, who will be in contact with you shortly. Also a big thanks to everyone who replied and don’t forget even if you didn’t win, with their reasonable pricing plans you could still purchase one, and be safe in the knowledge Home Server is backed up onsite and online.
The Home Server Show #44 is out and has the usual news and updates as well as details on how to add Google Analytics to your Windows Home Server web pages.
You can listen or download it from here.
