Blog Archives: Articles

The Home Server

The home server has finally made sense to me recently, both logically and financially.  As the collection of devices that my wife and I use grows, I find more and more need for “cloud-like” storage for my media.

I used to have a very powerful desktop at home that was the center of my computer universe. It was great– always on, remote desktop enabled, I could get access to my data one way or another anytime I needed it. With a shift to a laptop last year I decided that in order to maintain some of that connectivity, I’d need to have some kind of cloud storage (Dropbox ended up being that tool) and also a centralized NAS for household media (movies, music, photos, etc.). This worked somewhat well, but had some issues. Like iTunes not playing nice with a “brainless” central storage device. And that media not being easily available from outside of my house. And TV boxes that could use network accessible storage really didn’t stream very well from a dumb unit.

Entering The Cloud

I attended a short seminar this week on cloud-based technology offerings, and came away with a lot of things to chew on. According to this speaker, quoting some Gartner research, it only makes cost-savings sense for around 20% of companies today to move to cloud-based desktops/phones/software services, whereas in the year 2015 it’s estimated that it will make sense for 90%.

A great analogy for this trend is website hosting. 10 years ago the decision between self-hosting small websites and having them hosted “in the cloud” was actually a decision, whereas now it makes no sense to self-host when you can get unlimited space, unlimited bandwidth, a free domain and nearly unlimited redundancy with a hosting company like BlueHost for a mere $80/year. It’s only a matter of time before PCs, Servers, and Phone Systems make financial sense for everyone to adopt them.

Review: Handcrafted CSS

I just finished reading Dan Cederholm’s “Handcrafted CSS”.  Great book, simply excellent.  The way that the book is written gives the reader ample opportunity to understand some of the advanced stuff that Dan is teaching, but at the same time not skipping over a lot of the essential skills and structure that makes great web design.  After finishing the book I immediately looked up some CSS frameworks and began to customize my own, based on Dan’s advice and examples.