I have yet to find a reliable 802.11N access point. If anyone has recommendations, I’d love to know.

Recommended

Western Digital 3TB NAS – $199.99

Despite a slow web ui, this is the best performing direct connect NAS I’ve tested. I regularly see 65-80Mb/sec when moving large files over Gigabit Ethernet. This drive is simple to setup, just requiring power and Ethernet. Once plugged in, setting up shares, iTunes, and movie streaming was a snap. I’d turn off the “sleep/inactivity” mode, because waking up can occasionally be a several minute process.

Dlink 8 port Gigabit switch – $39.99

This 10/100/1000 switch has been an excellent performer. I’ve had no stability issues, it stays cool, and has informative status lights. One minor downside is that it’s not stackable. Otherwise, I’d highly recommend it for connecting all of your devices (I’m using 7 ports atm).

Netgear WGR614 802.11 b/g router – $34.99

This router has been a solid performer for me. I’ve never had any downtime, the range covers the house and yard well, and it never drops connections.

Hitachi 2TB SATA 6Gb/s internal hard drive – $79.99

This drive is a quiet, but well performing 3.5” hard drive that works well in both SATA 6Gb/s and SATA 3Gb/s modes.

Western Digital 1TB Caviar Black SATA 6Gb/s internal hard drive – $89.99

While not quite as quiet as the Hitachi, this drive has amazing performance thanks to the 7200RPM spin rate and 64MB cache. It works well in RAID, and has been very reliable to date.

Rosewill B/G/N USB adapter – $24.99

Of all of the 802.11x adapters I own, this is my favorite. A rigid USB cable makes it easy to place, and it also comes with a longer flexible cable. The dual antennas keep it well connected at the farthest reaches. I’ve plugged it into systems running Vista, Win7, Ubuntu, and Mac OS X. All (!) have recognized it instantly without drivers.  Installing the included drivers did improve performance a bit, especially with 802.11N, on Windows 7. Highly recommended.

Thermaltake external HDD/SSD enclosures

Fitting all 2.5” and 3.5” drives, these enclosures have been very reliable and easy to use. Multiple versions exist, so you would need to pick on based on your connectivity options. It also comes in dual drive configurations.

USB 2.0 – $39.99

USB 3.0 – $47.99

USB 2.0/eSATA – $36.63

Gear Head keyboard/trackpad combination (wired/wireless) – $28.99/$49.99

Avoid

Belkin N600 – $99.99

While the firmware could be replaced with DD-WRT, the default firmware is buggy. I experienced poor connectivity, a failing NTP service (the router thought it was 1970), and a very slow (12Mb/s) USB shared storage. For some odd reason, despite being “Apple certified”, Bonjour is completely blocked on this router. No amount of firewall exceptions, DMZ setup, or firmware upgrades would allow iTunes streaming to pass through to anything connected to this router. Any remotely advanced features require software to be installed on a computer that is wired to the router. The web interface is usable, but the installed software is required for anything other than consumer level configuration. The installed software was buggy and crash prone in Win7 x64. I’m not sure that the developers had much confidence in their hardware either. By default, it was set to reboot itself daily.

Netgear WNR3500L-100NAS – $69.99

Mediocre connectivity, constant dropped connections requiring reboots, and dismal USB NAS performance made this a non starter for me. USB drives were required to be FAT32 and the list of officially supported drives was small.

Western Digital 2TB Green internal hard drive (EADS/EARS versions)

Both versions of this drive have been very problematic for me. I’ve owned four of them and two of them have failed within a year. The two remaining drives are plagued by slow performance, and erroneous SMART errors. The power saving head parking technology is so slow to startup that it causes boot errors on my desktops. The drive is reported as failed to startup by the SMART checks, so disabling boot time SMART checks is the only reliable way to get to the desktop. A custom firmware hack for the brave of heart can be attempted, but occasionally results in bricked drives.

Newsweek (1995): The Internet? Bah!

Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.

Try reading a book on disc. At best, it’s an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book. And you can’t tote that laptop to the beach. Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we’ll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure.

So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month?

Local news report (KRON, 1981) on reading the newspaper on your computer:

… Imagine if you will…

[…] It takes over two hours to receive the entire text of the newspaper over the phone, and with an hourly usage charge of $5, the new tele-paper won’t be much competition for the twenty-cent street edition.

• 11″ MacBook Air Disassembled
• Zotac Zbox HD-ID34 Blu-ray playing nettop reviewed, scores well for non-audiophiles
• NextComputing Vigor Evo rugged PC shipping with three displays, 11TB storage
• Sixty million ThinkPads sold to date, Lenovo updates the T Series with NVIDIA Optimus in celebration
• Seagate tosses 3TB hard drives into BlackArmor NAS, stores a digital boatload
• SSD with New HSDL Interface Boasts Gobs of Bandwidth
• Because Everyone Needs a Router
• Intel Graciously Unlocks the Processing Power Your PC Already Has for $50 Fee [Upgrades]
• LaCie’s Wireless Space is a WiFi Storage Triple Threat [Wireless]
• Lenovo’s Thoughtful ThinkPad Is a Near-Perfect Machine
• Revisiting Solid State Hard Drives
• Lenovo’s Brilliant New Laptop Charger Has Four USB Ports Built In [Lenovo]
• QNAP pops Intel’s 1.8GHz Atom D525 into refreshed Turbo NAS family
• Budget Sub-$150 Solid State Drive Round-up [PC]
• MSI WindBox III gets a bit more oomph, still lives on your LCD
• Viking Modular’s SATADIMM jacks an SSD into your memory slot

Software

• There Will Be No More PCs Preloaded With Windows XP
• Google Releases New Image Format Called WebP
• Join.me Is a Free One-Click Screen Sharing and Conferencing Tool
• SlimDrivers Offers Easy Windows Driver Updating, Scheduling, and Restoration
• How to Make Windows Choose Between Wired and Wi-Fi Networks
• Without a Trace: Turn Your Flash Drive into a Portable Privacy Toolkit
• Gotchas to getting started in Titanium
• Windows 95 Turns 15
• The Compound Case of the Outlook Hangs
• Mozilla Wants You to Build Your Own Browser
• FreeApps Bundles Popular Free Applications for Easy Downloading

Javascript/CSS

• Parent Selectors in CSS
• Rethinking JavaScript for-loops
• Here’s what we’ve learned about doing UI for mobile web apps with HTML5
• Yo Yo, develop killer cross platform mobile Web apps with Jo
• Bugaboo for iPhone Aims To Make Web App Debugging A Bit Less Painful
• jNotify – A Light-weight Notification System for jQuery
• UI Pattern Ideas: List with Functions
• Zepto.js: jQuery-esque JavaScript library for mobile WebKit from Thomas Fuchs
• Turning HTML Tables Into Advanced Editable Components
• John Resig on Advanced Javascript to Improve your Web App
• Using jQuery and node.js to scrape html pages in 5 lines
• Want to pack JS and CSS really well? Convert it to a PNG and unpack it via Canvas
• Touch “slide to unlock” in Mobile Safari
• Javascript Parameter Patterns with $.extend and Beyond
• Performance of CSS Selectors
• On jQuery & Large Applications

Python

• PyPy gets faster
• Instant-press – WordPress-Clone written with Web2py
• Using Python to Setup a Simple Server
• Python Generator Tricks
• Oursql – a better mysql binding for python
• Popular Python recipes by Raymond Hettinger
• Understanding Python decorators
• Python Cryptography Toolkit
• Python for Fun
• Python logging 101

Security

• New Crypto Attack Affects Millions of ASP.NET Apps
• New Malware Imitates Browser Warning Pages
• SSL certificate authorities unknowingly inviting man-in-the-middle attacks
• Many Hackers Accidentally Send Their Code To Microsoft
• Intel Buys McAfee
• Un-killable ‘Evercookie’ Killed … Sometimes

In this update:

Back end

• Store and view peak memory usage
• Added ‘Clear all records’ button

You can learn more on the announcement page or download it from the WordPress plugin directory.