Google releases SketchUp free, with pro version

Google SketchUp has just been released for free, with a more powerful Pro version available for $495. SketchUp also introduces new 3D Warehouse to share sketchup models other people have made.

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Google Calendar is Live - A really good features review!

An interesting tour of the newly released Google Calendar with screenshots. Gmail integration, multiple calendars, sharing, imports, search and more...

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How To Make a TicTac flashlight

This person built a very handy flashlight out of an old TicTac mint box. It consists of an empty TicTac box (duh!), three batteries (that fits perfect), a small switch, a resistor and a bright LED.

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Additional Disk Storage

(UPDATE) Looks like the performance of this drive is pretty slow. I now have everything up and running and pushing video from the device to the home theater creates stuttering in the video. Looks like I'm going to continue to push video content from the DVR to the home theater. This device should allow me to move less demanding content to it freeing up space for videos on the other systems I'm using.

I've purchased a new SAN (storage area network) device as I've been fighting disk space issues with my home network lately and I'm thinking that this will allow me to shut off the Proliant server I have running which should save on the electric bill!

The Netgear DC101 device allows you to pop in two IDE based drives (I picked two 250 gig drives) and span or mirror them for increased storage or security. I've decided to span them as I need the disk space and now have a single 500 gig drive. The plan is to copy all my music, movies, pictures, and documents to the device.

The DC101 does use a proprietary drive format (not NTFS) so you need to follow the documentation to the letter to get everything up and running. You also need to install drivers on each machine that will access it over the network (it's not SMB compliant). The plus side of this is that the drive is then mounted as a local partition on each system.

Drivers aren't available yet for Linux or Mac OS/X so I'm going to share the drive on my DVR system which is always running and those systems can access it through the SMB share.