using the sata drives here allows one to easily create a software RAID5 yielding a redundant and massive amount of storage for an incredibly low price per gig.

A little history on my previous storage setups:

March 9th, 2005 

• 4x 250G Maxtor IDE drives ( $139.00 ea. )
• 2x Promise PDC20269 Ultra 133 ATA (PCI) controller cards ( $50.00 ea. )

Raw Storage 1000G
Sub Total of $656.00

Cost per Gig $0.65

September 5th, 2007

•  Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 ST3500641AS 500GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive – OEM, Price: $149.95 ea. x5

Raw Storage  2500G

Sub Total of $749.95, $804.32 total

Cost per Gig is $0.32

Current Prices

• SEAGATE 1tb ST31000340NS stat2 7200rpm 32mb (bare drive) priced $319.90

So using  the same seutp (5 1TB drives ) will give you raw storage of 5TB. Once you put that into a RAID5 you’ll be sitting pretty at 4TB. Once formatted you lose roughly 10% of your space for file tables. This will leave you at 3.6TB

Still pretty expensive, but that’s $1595.00 for 5 of these suckers, or $0.31 per gig

Prices should be dropping when more of these hit the market (and there is a demand ). But it’s still on par for price per gig.

Review of 3 terabyte drives at http://www.barefeats.com/hard94.html

Man Rides Lawn Mower to Liquor Store

 

(01-29) 09:49 PST Adrian, Mich. (AP) –

A man was charged with drunken driving after going through two bottles of wine, cutting through a snowstorm on his lawn mower and riding down the center of the street to reach a liquor store, authorities said.

Police found Frank Kozumplik, 49, homeward bound on a John Deere tractor Saturday night, toting four bottles of wine in a paper bag, officials said.

He told officers that his wife had taken their car to work, and that the mower was the only way he could reach the store, two miles from home.

His blood alcohol level was 2 1/2 times Michigan’s legal driving limit of 0.08 percent, police told WLEN-FM. They arrested him and confiscated the mower.

Kozumplik declined to comment Monday night.

Posted from http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2008/01/28/national/a195200S56.DTL

Where are these things!?

http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/us/2008/01/26/sahib.ca.marijuana.vending.kcal

The Sudden Motion Sensor is a built-in protection for the hard disk designed to protect your data by parking the hard drive head if the computer is dropped or undergoes severe vibration. The Sudden Motion Sensor is designed to detect unusually strong vibrations, sudden changes in position or accelerated movement.

The sudden motion sensor feature was first available in 2005 to the PowerBook G4 and then to the iBook G4 (mid-2005). The SMS feature is also available to the MacBook and MacBook Pro computers. For more information, read this article by Amith Singh on Sudden Motion Sensor.

Programmers have found ways to take advantage of the Sudden Motion Sensor to create some cool applications. Here are some cool apps that uses the Sudden Motion Sensor:

iAlertU

iAlertU, is a car alarm system for your MacBook/Pro computers. It uses the built-in sudden motion sensor to detect movement of the MacBook computer and trigger an audible alarm and visual alarm. I wrote about iAlertU in the past.

MacSaber

MacSaber will turn your Mac into a jedi weapon. MacSaber uses the sudden motion sensor to create a lightsabre sound effect. Check out this cool video of MacBook Man.

SmackBook Pro

SmackBook Pro is a hack to Desktop Manager by Richard Wareham, a virtual desktop utility for Mac OS X.

By patching Desktop Manager and installing some other applications, you can use the Sudden Motion Sensor to switch between one virtual desktop to another. You can watch the demo video at YouTube.

Carpenter’s Level Dashboard Widget

Carpenter’s Level is a dashboad widget that will turn your Mac into a Carpenter’s level tool. When you tilt the notebook left or right the bubble will move from left/right. Useful to find out if your desk is level or not.

BubbleGym

BubbleGym by Balooba Software is a tilt-sensitive game taking advantage of the Sudden Motion Sensor. The game lets you control an object by tilting your PowerBook left/right.

I tested BubbleGym on my MacBook Pro and it couldn’t detect the Sudden Motion Sensor because Apple made some changes to the sudden motion sensor on MacBook and MacBook Pro. The application hasn’t been updated to Universal Application, which will require Rosetta to run on Mac with Intel processor.

Rodrigo y Gabriela Tickets

Saturday, February 9, 2008 at 8:00 PM at The Warfield in San Francisco, CA

StubHub guarantees you get your tickets in time for the event.

Gogol Bordello Tickets Thursday, March 13, 2008 at 8:00 PM at The Warfield in San Francisco, CA

StubHub guarantees you get your tickets in time for the event.

Tickets Wednesday, April 2, 2008 at 8:00 PM at The Warfield in San Francisco, CA

Danger Ranger (pictured here) recently uploaded a bunch of great photos from Burning Man 1990, the first year the event took place in the Black Rock Desert. There’s even a photo of Laughing Squid’s own John Law dressed as sheik. For more on Burning Man 1990, see my previous posts “Bad Day At Black Rock (Cacophony Society Zone Trip #4)” and “Burning Man 1990-1995 Photos, The Birth of Black Rock City”. photos by Danger Ranger

Related Posts

• Burning Man 1990-1995 Photos, The Birth of Black Rock City
• 1200 Bikes Donated To Burning Man’s Yellow Bike Program
• Lawyers For Burners, Helping To Flight Unwarranted BLM Citations
• Bad Day At Black Rock (Cacophony Society Zone Trip #4)
• Burners Without Borders

ShareThis

Speaking of Etsy promos and cool things on Etsy, Bre Pettis came across this fantastic animated promo for Etsy made by ALSO. I want the soundtrack, it rocks!

ShareThis

NeedleNoodles has created an awesome crochet twenty-sided die (d20) that they are selling on Etsy, perfect for your next craft-themed D&D game.

They also made three really cool Amigurumi Octopus.

via Bre Pettis on Twitter

photo by NeedleNoodles

ShareThis

Michael Biven, our Chief Technical Tentacle of Laughing Squid, recently wrote an excellent post on “Optimizing Performance for WordPress”, where he explores various ways to improve the performance of WordPress by keeping it updated, installing a caching plugin, decreasing comment & pingback spam, outsourcing media & javascript and a bunch of other great tips.

We use almost all of these recommendations on Laughing Squid (the above graph shows Laughing Squid’s blog traffic the last 30 days), which has helped to keep server loads low and things running smoothly when it comes to front page Diggs and ongoing high traffic from sources like Google search and StumbleUpon.

ShareThis

“Meet the Laugh-Out-Loud Cats” is a new book published through Lulu by Adam Koford (aka Ape Lad) featuring over 250 comics from his wonderful Laugh-Out-Loud Cats comic strip series (see my previous post). Both signed and unsigned copies are now available.

ShareThis

The New Yorker recently hosted a contest asking artists to come up with their interpretation of Eustace Tilley, the mystery man viewing a butterfly through his monocle created by Rea Irvin that appeared on the cover of their very first issue in 1925 and every anniversary cover since.

Here are all of the entries that were submitted, the winners will be announced on February 4th. There are some really great entries, including a bunch from Ape Lad.

In 1994 Robert Crumb created a fantastic Eustace Tilley cover for The New Yorker.

illustrations by Ape Lad & Robert Crumb

ShareThis

You Suck at Photoshop #4 (Paths and Masks) is the latest in the series hilarious Photoshop tutorials by Donnie Hoyle.

For the full experience and backstory, you should watch them all in order.

ShareThis

Improv Everywhere has just launched the new site Improv Everywhere Global to help agents connect with each other, as well as plan and organize Improv Everywhere events around the world.

ShareThis

Seattle based book and comics publisher Fantagraphics Books recently launched their re-designed website with a bunch of new features, including membership registration, new-and-improved FLOG! blog, event listings, artist bios, integration with their Twitter and Flickr accounts, a wide selection of RSS feeds, avatars and some really cool desktop & mobile wallpapers.

illustration by Daniel Clowes for Fantagraphics Books

ShareThis

Carsonified, our friends who produce the excellent series of “Future of…” conferences, are interested in finding out what people’s favorite web applications are for their Web App Charts. So cast your vote for your favorite web app and be entered in a chance to win a Nintendo Wii.

While researching potential speakers for our next event, Future of Web Apps Miami, we were frustrated by the lack of quality information about popular and successful web apps. The Web App Charts are here to change all that!

ShareThis

“Safe Baby Handling Tips”, by Wry Baby founders David Sopp and Kelly Sopp, features a series of hilarious visual baby instructions for new parents.

Thanks to Christopher for the tip!

ShareThis