I have a love-hate relationship with my home server. I’m on my second, the current being the HP Mediasmart 495ex. There’s a lot to love about this system, it’s flexible, mostly reliable, simple to maintain and easy to expand. It gives me lots of space on the network to backup files and serve media to the internal network.

There’s also a few major blind spots that I hate. One became very apparent recently when the server stopped responding. Rebooting the server would bring it back up on the network and everything would work fine for a little while. A bit of searching around led me to the excellent (and free) Home Server SMART add-in. This handy add in provides functionality that really should have shipped with Windows Home Server, it reads the SMART information off of your hard drives and provides warnings if a drive seems likely to fail soon.

As soon as I had installed the WHS Smart add in, the health light on my server turned red and it threw up a warning that the system drive had multiple read errors. Uh-oh.

At least this helped to narrow down the problem, my system drive was failing and needed to be replaced. OK, but how do you do that? On any additional data drive you can simply swap it out, but here’s a giant blind spot in the design of the original WHS os: The system drive is included in the drive pool, but can not be swapped out.

If your system drive has problems you’re pretty much screwed. Or at least that’s what it looks like. In fact you can fix this problem, cloning the system drive and with a little extra effort get it back to life. Why they never provided a simple way to do this is beyond me, it’s not a simple process, but here’s how I got my server back to life:

1. DIAGNOSIS

First step, make sure it’s your system drive that’s failing. The WHS Smart add-in is indispensible here and you should have it running on your system BEFORE you run into any problems. This will let you know of any potential problems as soon as they pop up.

2. BACKUP YOUR DATA

You’ll probably want to try to rescue any important files before you try this. If your server is running grab what you can off it. If you’ve got duplication running on every shared folder you should be fine anyways since anything on the system drive is held on another drive as well.

3. CLONING YOUR DRIVE

Here’s where it gets tricky. You can clone a drive using all sorts of software, but WHS will not recognize it if it has a different unique disk ID and your system will throw up all sorts of errors and be unreliable. This handy post tells how to work around that, and here are the specific steps that worked for me:

In that post Acronis is the recommended software to clone your system drive. There are multiple versions of that software, some paid and a couple of free version for seagate and WD drives. I was cloning from a Seagate to a WD drive, so I thought one of those would work. I was wrong. After multiple attempts I had no cloned drive and I didn’t want to buy more software in the hope that it would work, so I did a bit more research.

Then I found Clonezilla. This is brilliant free software that works a treat. I used Tuxboot to automatically download the latest version of Clonezilla and create a bootable USB drive with this software on it. I then set the bios in my second PC to boot off the USB drive and plugged the failing system drive and the new blank drive into external USB enclosures.

Clonezilla is not terribly pretty and its interface can be kind of intimidating. The important thing is to make sure which is your source and which is your target drive. If you do this wrong you can overwrite your failing system drive with the blank drive and then you’ve really lost everything you wanted to pull off of it. For me this was easy since my source and target drives were two different brands, but be extra carefull with this step. Here’s a walk through with screen grabs on how to clone a drive.

I first tried the automatic no error correction version of cloning and it failed. Not suprising since my source drive is failing. I then tried the repair errors option and though it threw up some errors for lots of dead sectors the cloning completed. I then took the new clone drive, put it in my server and booted up. One nice thing about this method of cloning (asides from being free) is that it clones the unique disk ID as well so that’s one less step you have to do manually.

As you can imagine, I was quite happy to see my system boot up with the new drive. Not only did it boot up, it was more responsive – the console loaded up quicker and everything felt faster. I’m guessing the system disk errors were slowing everything down.

4. EDIT REGISTRY

Here’s the final tricky step outlined in the original post by YMBOC. We don’t have to change the unique disk ID since Clonezilla takes care of that and if you used a drive that’s the same size you wont have to edit the start and offset data. The one thing you will have to edit is the manufacturer data if you’re using a different brand of HD like I am. Here’s how to do that:

24) Go to the Start Menu. Select Run. Type “regedit”. Press OK.

25) Updating the Name of the System Drive as it appears in the WHS Console “Server Storage” Tab:
In Regedit, navigate to HKEY_Local_Machine\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows Home Server\Storage Manager\Disks.

There you will see a key (looks like a folder) for each drive that’s normally a part of your WHS system. Find the key that has “System” as its FriendlyName (in the right-hand pane). You can identify it by the key’s name which will begin with the same DiskID you set in part 2 of the instructions.

Navigate to the Attributes sub-key of the key you just identified.

Double-Click on ManufactureName in the right-hand pane and Enter the name of your new System Drive as it appears in the WHS Server’s Device Manager under the disks heading.

FYI: You can quickly access the Device Manager by going to the Start Menu, Right-Clicking on ‘My Computer’ and selecting ‘Manage’.

Check out the original post for more info.

5. DONE! (NOW WAIT)

Now you should be done! It’s time to reboot your server and try it out. When I rebooted my system it was still doing a few weird things. When I went to server storage in the console the ‘calculating size’ green bar seemed to run forever and the shared folders tab showed ‘unknown size’ for many of the folders. Uh-oh.

But here’s where the interruptions of real life came in handy. I had to leave for a few hours and when I came back all of the folder were showing their size and the server storage tab showed the pie chart. So give your server lots of time to incorporate the new drive before you get too concerned about storage display problems.

As of this writing the server has been running for few days with no signs of any more problems. All of my data appears to be intact and this little scare has served as a reminder: use duplication on any folders that are important to you.

Offsite backups can be trickier, especially if you have a lot of data. Most services have limits to the data and monthly fees can add up. After looking around and comparing a few different options I settled on Crashplan. There are a few things that I really like about their service. First of all the software is robust and free. You can use it locally, or even across a network with a friends machine for free without any service subscription. If you do opt to use the crash plan servers the cost structure is very competitive and they offer a discount for prepaying up to four years in advance which I really like. If I’m going to use a backup system I’m going to use it for more than a year. They also offer web access to your backed up files and you can create backup sets to prioritize your files and schedule the backups.

I’ve been using crash plan for about a year now. I’m writing about it today because they just added a new feature that changes it from a great backup service to an indispensable daily tool – Crashplan has just released a mobile app for iOS and android. I’ve just tested the iPhone and iPad version and am blown away by the quick access to all of my files. It may be because the tool has just been release and not many people are using it, but navigating my backup file structure is zippy- it’s like browsing a local directory. To view a file you click it once and it downloads the file, then click it again to view it.

I can see this app being a huge lifesaver. Huge kudos to the Crashplan team for their service and this fantastic new app!

Obviously I’m posting this via the Blogsy app.

The interface is decent, I could see it taking a bit of time to get used to. My favorite feature so far is the two sided editor. You swipe the main screen to flip between the HTML code side and the media formatting side.

My least favorite thing about it is that there appears to be no way to upload photos from the app. You can insert photos from your flickr or picasa account, but you’d have to plan ahead and have your images already uploaded, or leave the app to add new images from your iPad.

It does have an in app browser and google image search tool, which would be nice for finding stock images to add to posts.

I’ve added my flickr account and am adding a photo from that here to test image embedding:

You can also add a YouTube account link, but for whatever reason that does not appear to working right now. I get to the ‘approve access for this app’ screen, but granting access never seems to stick. It would be nice if there were other online services that you could add, as I prefer vimeo for hosting my video work.

For certain kinds of blogging I can see this app being very nice. If you’re syncing your photo library with flickr or picasa and want to use them in an online diary, this app will work well for you. For me it feels to limited without in-app photo uploading and no way to set the wordpress feature image for the post.

Whoa. The killer photo app for the iPhone is made by.. Microsoft?!?

If you’ve got an iPhone and want a simple way to make panoramic photos check out the new Photosynth app for iOS.  It’s dead simple to use, very effective at stitching images in the phone and completely free.

Microsoft Photosynth has been available as a windows desktop app for a while and if you want to do huge HDR gigapixel pano images that’s still the way to go, but as a simple portable way to capture scenes without any extra gear this iOS app is pretty fantastic.

I live in an OS agnostic house, and the ability to back up Mac OS X via Time Machine along with the PC was a definite selling point.
But something happened on the way from concept to delivery. The HP home server is fairly well integrated with the Mac (it includes a handy media collector program that grabs photos, music and movie files from your computers to your home server) but I couldn’t get the time machine to function properly.

I kept getting network errors when I’d go to create my time machine backup disc via the preferences pane. It would always fail partway through. Now to be fair, my MacBook Pro is not standard – it’s got an internal raid and I was trying to create a 1.2 terabyte time capsule, but a quick web search showed that I certainly wasn’t the only person having this problem. Many people cant create a Time Machine disk bigger than 75 gigs. Many are reporting problems with the Time Machine function in the most recent version of the HP mediasmart software.
If you’re having this problem, here’s what worked for me.

WARNING: The following steps involve editing the registry on your server. You can mess things up if you do it wrong.
Time Machine seems to have a problem with the IRP stack size default on the Windows Home Server. Fixing it is relatively simple, though not without risk (you did read that warning above right?). Make sure your media smart software is up to date and reboot both your server and your Mac to see if that fixes the problem before you try the following.

First you’ll need desktop access to your server, this can be done with an external mouse and keyboard, but the easiest way is with an add-in. If you have Advance Admin Console installed you can use it’s built in show desktop feature, or if you want a basic add-in try To Desktop. Either of these will give you easy access to the server desktop from the console.

Once you’ve got desktop access you can do the following steps. These are from this Microsoft technical bulletin, with the addition of the specific number I used to get my system to work properly:

1. Click Start, click Run, type regedit, and then click OK.
2. Locate and then click the following registry subkey:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanServer\Parameters
3. Click Edit, point to New, and then click DWORD Value.
4. Type IRPStackSize, and then press ENTER to name the value.
Note Type IRPStackSize exactly as it is displayed. The value name is case sensitive.
5. Click Edit, and then click Modify.
6. In the Data Value box, type the value that is appropriate for the network.

The value I used was 27 decimal. Type in 27 in the data box and click the button for decimal. Then click OK Close the registry editor and reboot the server. Then try to set up your Time Machine disk in the OS X media smart preferences panel again. Hopefully it’s now working for you like it is for me!

If you came from an all PC background and used an old windows smart phone you know this isn’t too complicated. You could use outlook and sync it with your phone.

But what if you’re a switcher, a turncoat, a technical wanderer? Apples iPhone is a great combination of hardware and software, but they left some pretty basic stuff out, one of which is a to-do list.

For the last year I’ve looked around for a solution to this lack, never really finding the right combination of iPhone and desktop software that would work together flawlessly.

The closest solution looked like it was Things by cultured code. Things is an elegant task management program that is very flexible and has an iPhone app that works with it. Problem solved right?

Well, not exactly. Things is Mac only and I’m platform agnostic. The iPhone app can only sync manually over wi-fi, and worse than that is the price. The desktop app is 60 bucks and the iPhone app is $10.

$70 bucks for a task list? Really? I guess Apple users are willing to pay more for everything.

So after all my searching and complaining and being cheap, what’s the point of all this?

The point is I found the dream solution I was looking for.

Wunderlist runs on Mac, PC & iPhone and they say an Android app will be released soon. Wunderlist does wireless cloud syncing and is the right combination of simple, powerful and pretty. And how much does this elegance cost?

Nothing.

Nada. Zip. Not a penny charged for the desktop or iPhone version. There isn’t even any advertising in the various app versions.

WTF? How can they do that? I have no idea, but after just a few days of using it I can highly recommend it.

Is there a software package out there that can help you tag, sort and organize a collection of PDF files? Yep.

Ironic Software makes a few different tools for sorting, organizing and searching for information on OSX.  Yep is their PDF catalog tool, and is the only one of their products I’ve tried, but I can vouch for its usefulness and sensible design.  I’m using it with a Fujitsu ScanSnap to convert old paper to new digital files that are organized and searchable.

Unlike iTunes, iPhoto or Calibre, Yep doesn’t move files into its own structure.  Instead you sent directories you want it to monitor (I have one for scans) and as soon as new PDFs show up there they’ll be added to Yep.  You can also drag files into the program from other locations, and add tags to make finding stuff later easier.

I’m finding this to be a very useful program in my effort to move away from paper.  Combined with the ScanSnap I’m slowly converting old nostalgic paperwork into digital form and getting rid of mass.  Yep strikes the right balance between simple and powerful to do exactly what I need it to do.

During my dayjob I design and direct animation for tv series and commercials.  Like anyone else who works in graphics or design there are a surprising number of times when I’m called upon to match a font.  In this case the client isn’t sure what font they are using for their identity, but it’s important that it remains the same.  Now you could run through the list of fonts on your machine trying to find the right match, but that can be time consuming and not always successful.  So what’s a poor designer to do?

Enter What the Font, the brilliant online tool to compare and match fonts.  If you have an image of the font you need matched (tif, jpg or gif) you can upload it and quickly get possible matches displayed for you.  This works best if your source image is a greyscale tiff with a letter height of about 100 pixels, but even if your submission doesn’t match those parameters this utility is surprisingly effective.

And if the automated process doesn’t work they have a forum filled with helpful typography enthusiast that can help you identify the correct typeface.  Quick, free and easy to use.  What’s not to like?

Media Browser is an absolutely excellent addition to Media Center for anyone with a large library of fims and television shows.  It automatically grabs meta data for the contents of your library and then presents it in very configurable custom views that are far superior to the standard media center browser.

There are other plugins that handle metadata for movies, like MyMovies, but I got tired of reminders to update versions and login for metadata scraping, and it’s not a one stop solution for managing TV.  For TV shows Mediabrowser is a godsend as long as your library of shows is set up in directories by show name, with subdirectories for season (even if you only have one season of a show, you must have it in a season subdirectory).

The install process for me (one Windows 7 64 bit and x86 versions) was quick, painless and had no problems.  After running it for a couple of months I have not experience a single crash or problem.  Just in case I haven’t made it clear by now this software is highly recommended.  You can download the MediaBrowser beta for free at mediabrowser.tv

I’ve been using eWallet to store sensitive data for years, originally on a PC and a windows smart phone.  When I switched over to the iPhone I was very happy to find that eWallet was available for the iPhone and bought a license to try it out.  Unfortunately at that time there was no OS X version for the desktop which meant I had nothing on my shiny new MacBook to enter data into my eWallet.  This turned out to be a huge drag.  Entering data bit by bit via the iPhone screen is no fun at all, so I started using eWallet less and less.

Recently a coworker introduced me to 1Password as a solution to a different problem: web password management.  I started using this to manage my web logins and then noticed that the functionality doesn’t stop there.  1Password duplicates most of the functionality of eWallet enabling you to securely store credit card and banking info, software install licenses, notes and membership login information.  1Password also has an iPhone app that will sync via wifi to the desktop app, so I’ve regained the convenience of being able to enter information on a proper keyboard and have it available on my laptop and my phone.

Illium did finally release an OS X version of eWallet, or at least a beta of it.  I downloaded it and was underwhelmed, now preferring the 1Password interface.  In the end my decision to switch from eWallet to 1Password was based on just a few factors: Completeness of support, interface aesthetics and price.  I already had the desktop version of 1Password and the iPhone version of eWallet.  It looks like it will only be $10 to upgrade to the Mac OSX version of eWallet when it’s released, but it’s even cheaper to buy the iPhone version of 1Password: $5 bucks for the standard version and $8 for the ‘pro’ version which adds a few extra features.

Of course price alone shouldn’t be the main determining factor when buying digital wallet software.  Data security and support are important issues.  eWallet has been well supported on the PC platform, but they haven’t been quick to support the Mac.  I feel more comfortable with the level of support and security updates from Agile right now, so 1Password is the winner for me.  Of course on the PC I suspect eWallet is still one of your best choices for a secure digital wallet.

One more alternative for the windows world is the open source KeePass, which I haven’t tried, but I’ve heard good things about.