This is where I lay out my aspi­ra­tions, dreams, and plans for our home com­put­ing setup.  Var­i­ous edi­tions of the Plan have existed over the years, but I have finally decided to keep one cen­tral page with the most up-to-date ver­sion of the Plan.  Maybe it’ll help some­one.  Mostly it will help me.

TOC

Needs Assess­ment
Pre­cious Data
Per­sonal Pro­cess­ing
Access Any­where
Next Steps

Needs Assess­ment

The Home Com­put­ing Mas­ter Plan has sev­eral com­po­nents that fill basic needs in our dig­i­tal life. Those needs include keep­ing our data safe, hav­ing decent com­put­ers to work on, and being able to get to our dig­i­tal life from anywhere.

1. Pre­cious Data: We have a lot of data that only exists in dig­i­tal form. Pic­tures, movies, music, doc­u­ments, etc. Much of that (the pho­tos espe­cially) is price­less and irre­place­able. In 2007, we spent upwards of $2,000 recov­er­ing that data from two failed hard dri­ves, and I don’t care to do that again. Our data should be secure and backed-up.
2. Per­sonal Pro­cess­ing: The orig­i­nal plan called for “Pow­er­house Pro­cess­ing,” a tower-grade com­puter some­where in the house that could really crunch. At the time, I was com­ing off of a job where I had that kind of power, and I thought it was a required item in the Plan. Well, it isn’t. We just need com­pe­tent com­put­ers. But we each need our own, that much is clear.
3. Access Any­where: To best enjoy our dig­i­tal life, we need to be able to get to it from where we are: the TV room, the kitchen, the car, the store, school, vaca­tion, wherever.

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Pre­cious Data

Sta­tus

In June of 2008 we upgraded this sys­tem exten­sively. Right now we have a Mac mini with an attached 1TB disk (one of those footprint-matching jobs from Newer) and that whole combo con­tains all of our data. That is backed up hourly (via Apple’s Time Machine) to a 1.5TB NAS device (Infrant’s, nee Netgear’s Rea­dy­NAS NV+). So our data is backed up hourly to a redun­dant RAID stor­age device. Pretty sweet. We have one slot left on the four slot NAS, if we really end up need­ing more stor­age space. I can’t imag­ine that.

For off­site backup, I’m cur­rently sub­scrib­ing to Back­blaze. I don’t backup every­thing (unlike the Time Machine backup) but just the Pre­cious Data. I have yet to try recov­er­ing any­thing from them, and I hope I never have to.

Thoughts

I really like hav­ing a redun­dant backup that I can recover from with the flex­i­bil­ity of Time Machine. I’ve already done that with a cou­ple of files. Really nice. What’s miss­ing from this sys­tem? When are holo­graphic discs com­ing out? I’m not sure what I’ll do when/if it comes time to replace the NAS. I used to think I’d get a Drobo, but I’m start­ing to hear mixed things about them and their sup­port, so.

Some­day I’m going to have to address the backup of remote devices, if we get any. The iPod backs up to the mini, so good. But the wife’s lap­top isn’t backed up any­where, and if I ever get a lap­top of my own, that one has to play, too. Not a prob­lem we have right now, though.

Then there’s the hard­copy route. I could pro­duce (the much desired and often started) photo books. That would be one way to pre­serve some of our pre­cious data in case of dis­as­ter. It is actu­ally how we have any wed­ding pho­tos at all, as we kept our photographer’s proofs after she some­how destroyed all our wed­ding pho­tos. Noth­ing say “backed up” like a stack of CDs in the closet!

The Plan

It all works pretty well right now, and I am com­fort­able with the set up, so I don’t have any plans. Hav­ing the mini pull dou­ble duty as main com­puter and cpu brains behind the backup sys­tem seems to be work­ing, and I don’t envi­sion a server-only approach any­time soon. The Newer disk has unmounted itself a cou­ple of times, so I have a con­tin­gency plan that involves an Apple Time Cap­sule, but hope­fully it won’t come to that.

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Per­sonal Processing

Sta­tus

Right now the adults have their own com­put­ers, and the kids share one. I’m using the Mac mini men­tioned above as my main machine, cou­pled to a 24″ Dell widescreen LCD. My wife has a Win­dows lap­top. The kids are cur­rently shar­ing our old swing-arm iMac. We also have an iPod touch (which I Love, Love, Love), and an old iBook that hasn’t been pow­ered on since I got the iPod.

Thoughts

The pent up need for a new com­puter was quenched with the mini (but wow was I hurt­ing before that). My use of the iBook fell off a cliff when I got the iPod touch, and so too my desire for a lap­top. Just look­ing at the cost of a lap­top, plus all the dock­ing sta­tion stuff I’d want… I could just wait and buy a faster mini in a cou­ple of years (assum­ing Apple keeps mak­ing the mini), and a cou­ple of iPads, for the same price. And that time is com­ing, as the cur­rent mini is start­ing to chunk on some of the video and image stuff I am doing.

The wife will be stick­ing with her Win­dows lap­tops for the fore­see­able future. Plus, she gets them from work. More power to her.

With the advent of first grade (and more impor­tantly, after school care) the boys are now using our old swing-arm iMac to play online games. We have it locked down (as much as OS X Leop­ard allows, since Snow Leop­ard won’t run on the G4), so it is fine, but it really strug­gles with some of the Flash con­tent. Still, the boys don’t need their own per­sonal machines (yet), although that time is com­ing. Last time I updated this doc­u­ment, I was imag­in­ing them each with an iPod touch… but now I think we could put that off a bit by get­ting an iPad. Ini­tially, we’d just get one for the house­hold, with no 3G and not a lot of mem­ory. That could be our test mule for how practical/useful/ohmyGodIhavetohaveone they are in real­ity. The exis­tence (or lack) of parental con­trols in the iPod/iPad remains a stick­ing point, however.

The Plan

I’m in a very com­fort­able wait­ing mode right now. The boys are a lit­tle frus­trated by the slow­ness of their iMac, and I get a lit­tle frus­trated by the slow­ness of my mini, but we can abide. Prob­a­bly the next pur­chase will be an iPhone (this sum­mer?) and then my iPod will be free for the wife and/or kids to play around with. At that point we’ll con­sider an iPad. And maybe a new com­puter down the road.

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Access Any­where

Sta­tus

An incon­ve­nient grem­lin in our Air­Port Express caused us to have to buy a new wire­less net­work early, so we are rock­ing the 802.11n via new Air­Port hard­ware. That has very lit­tle effect on our setup right now (mostly because we’re still rock­ing 802.11g, as the TiVo and the iPod touch can’t do n, and I’m not about to buy a new new Air­port to get the dual band fea­ture, sigh), but paves the way for large data files, like movies, in the future. Also, we’ve gone to a more secure WPA2 encryp­tion on our wire­less system.

Our music lis­ten­ing sys­tem is just about per­fect. iTunes runs on the desk­top, sends the sig­nal to the Air­Port Express, which sends it to a hobby-built (by some­one else) FM trans­mit­ter, which is received on our house­hold radios. Which already exist in every room. To change tracks remotely, we use Apple’s awe­some Remote app for iTunes. Hell, we can even lis­ten out­side, just by bring­ing a radio out­side with us.

Other media is sort of at a stand­still. Our TV is not hooked up to our iLife ecosys­tem, so we don’t watch movies or slideshows or any­thing like. We still have our HD TiVo, which I still love, and that sates a lot of my boob tube desire.

And it has always been way too com­pli­cated for me to fig­ure out reli­able ways to access our data remotely from out­side the home.

Thoughts

I keep wait­ing for Apple to get off the stick and update the Apple TV into some­thing really use­ful. Or at least use­ful enough that I might ditch my TiVo. Though Apple’s 1.0 edi­tions are not known for their exten­sive fea­ture sets. Still wait­ing, sev­eral years later.

I’d like to work with our pho­tos wher­ever I am in the house. I’d like to be able to get to my Pre­cious Data when I am away from home. I want to show off my pho­tos, or watch my movies, or play games on the biggest mon­i­tor in the house, the 46″ TV. The iPad is still announced unob­ta­nium (it is cur­rently Feb 2010 as I write this) so there’s no telling what it might do for me in this regard.

The Plan

Leopard’s “Back to My Mac” fea­ture (requir­ing a MobileMe sub­scrip­tion) worked pretty well for me (at least until my work tight­ened their fire­wall secu­rity and I grew too cheap to pay for Mobile Me any­more). An Apple TV would work with our ecosys­tem to make our TV part of it all, though again, I am not sure I really want to screw with that part of our dig­i­tal life right now. So we’re not doing any­thing about this right now.

Our TiVo is get­ting a lit­tle long in the tooth, we have a new Wii, and a brand new Blu-Ray player, and they all can access Net­flix, but not much else. If we did get a new Time Cap­sule (see above) the old 802.11n Air­port would come down to the TV room, and all this would get a faster and more direct con­nec­tion. But I won’t do it just for that. (Note to self, encour­age kids to play with Newer drive, per­haps as frisbee.)

Finally, to really get the most out of our dig­i­tal life, I really need to make more pic­ture books. I’ve made a few, but they are a lit­tle expen­sive, so the incen­tive is not there. I could also make some DVDs, but I am peren­ni­ally wait­ing for the next ver­sion of iDVD to make the process eas­ier. I wait still.

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Next Steps

This is where I pri­or­i­tize the plan, where I can come and look and know what to buy next. Sur­pris­ingly, I don’t really have any­thing tar­geted right now. Maybe an iPhone, though I am pretty com­mit­ted to Ver­i­zon at the moment, and we all know how that seems to be going. I know the iPad is the new hot­ness, but it really doesn’t fac­tor into our ecosys­tem right now. When stuff gets too old, and we have to get some­thing newer/faster, we’ll con­sider it along with every­thing else.

• Other items. There are a few items that don’t fit neatly into the sched­ule. Fun things, or future things. They could be bought any­time. iPod touches for the boys. iPhones for every­one! The Apple TV. And while I got a Pana­sonic GF1, I really want their 14-140mm zoom. Pre­vi­ously on this list: a Blu-Ray player, a Wii, and a nice dig­i­tal cam­era. It would appear that we are busy ful­fill­ing the “other items” moreso than the home com­put­ing core. Interesting.

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P.S., We’re tak­ing donations!