The Porsche Arrived Today!
Well, ok, it’s not a car, more’s the pity, it’s only an external USB hard drive that I can now use to transfer files between the superbox and the faster computer upstairs so I can edit the recordings and burn them to DVD there. But it apparently was designed by Porsche. Made by LaCie. I have to say I can’t quite see all the design work has come in. It’s pretty basic, and was cheap, but seems to do the job.
One small thing about it is that the drive activity LED is orange for idle, and, errrr, yet another orange for working. It would be a little more helpful if they were a little more different. Maybe that’s was the design feature.
Waiting for a 2 gig recording to come across a 14Mbs network was doing my head in. Let alone what it would be like to wait for 5 of them! Life’s too short. A 160 gig drive means I can fit all the recordings to transfer on if I want to. I can see that one day I’m going to have to upgrade the drive in the superbox too.
Setting it up on Linux was a doddle, with the help of several web pages. How did we ever do this stuff without the friendly web?!
Setting it up on the box upstairs was a pain in the butt though, as it just would not work. I tried (almost) everything, but it just would not connect properly. After about an hour I finally decided to try using the USB connections on the back of the box, rather than the front. And guess what? It worked first time. So now I know not to bother with the front ones… Hey ho. Who knows why.
That was almost as bad as trying to put printable DVDs through the printer. I was trying for about an hour, and nothing was working. Even reinstalled the printer driver and everything. No luck. The printer would error every time.
And then I worked it out. The printer was too close to the wall, and the DVD tray could not go back far enough for the printer to get to the front of the disk. Did I feel stupid?! Well yes. Quite. But now I know…