I have been looking for a good storage solution for some time now. My addiction to music and the need to have reliable backups has left my current storage devices with meager resources. Then I read about DROBO. You have to watch the video, it is truly amazing what this device can do. I received my drobo last week and was already in love with it and the company when I received this email today:
Due to the incredibly high level of interest and sales from people like yourselves (did we say “Thank You!†yet?), we are significantly increasing Drobo production volume. This will allow us to realize production cost savings much earlier than anticipated. We feel the best thing to do is pass those savings on to our customers who made this possible. Therefore, effective immediately, Drobo storage robots offered through the friends & family pre-launch program will be at $499.00. Anyone who purchased a Drobo storage robot at a price above $499 will be rebated a check for the difference (including pro-rata sales tax if applicable). We want to thank this enthusiastic community who have embraced Drobo and made this possible. – Data Robotics, Inc.
How can you beat that!
[tags]Drobo[/tags]
HT: TUAW
This is a call to all self respecting backyard grillers out there who just have to have access to their tunes while standing over a hot grill. How can you resist the George Foreman 
VmWare
more challenging than Windows. I began by trying to download a pre-installed version from the 
Want your screen saver to turn off when you walk in the room? What about having 
Kernel panics caused by new airport extreme???
Shortly after rearranging my new network I began getting kernel panics on my iMac. I had never had one before on this machine and was very dismayed at seeing one. For those of you Mac users out there who have never seen one, it is enough to strike the fear in the heart of the most ardent Mac Addict. Though prettier than the blue screen of death on a Windows machine, they still indicate that something is terribly wrong. At first the issue was intermittent, happening maybe once a week. This went on for several weeks until one Saturday morning when I get received 4 of them within an hour, 2 on reboot. The day after that I had 8 of them, 4 on attempting to reboot. Something was wrong! Very wrong! I immediately suspected a hardware problem, which is the usual cause of these issues.
To start my trouble shooting I turned off my airport card. My thinking was that having two paths to the network and two ip addresses was causing a conflict. After another half-dozen kernel panics I figured this was not the issue. I next did a hardware test from the install cd’s provided with my iMac. I ran the test three different times and there were no hardware issues located. I felt for certain that there would be a memory problem with the machine, but none. In my reading on the issue I came across a more complete memory test than the one included with my iMac and so $1.99 later I was running memtest. I felt certain that I would find my problem, buy some new memory, and move on with my life. No such luck. I ran memtest a total of fifteen times over three nights in single user mode and could find no problems. So now what?
I am now a month into my kernel panic issue which is steadily getting worse. I took a deep breath and decided to try and remember what I had done just before the issue started. I had installed no new software. There was no new hardware in the machine. The only change I had made was plugging an ethernet cable into the machine. I decided to unplug the cable and work from the airport card again. “Holy pile of silicone Batman,” the problem went away. I worked for two weeks with no kernel panics. Whew! But you know, I really did want to speed up my connection. I wonder what would happen if I plugged the iMac into a dumb switch instead of my Airport Extreme. Taking an old switch that I had laying around I inserted it into the mix. One week later I have had no kernel panics.
I feel that I have been as fair as possible is assessing this issue and have looked at every possibility to not blame this beautiful new piece of hardware on my network. But, I have to say that I believe that there must be some issue with my Airport Extreme. I have not taken it to the genius bar because, quite frankly, I believe they will tell me I am crazy. Kernel panics are difficult issues to trace and never happen when you need them to. It is sort of like taking your car into the shop because it is making a noise. As soon as you let the mechanic listen, it stops.
I am open to any suggestions and comments from Apple but something is fishy here.
[tags]Mac, OsX, Apple, Kernel Panic, memtest, Aiport Extreme, hardware failure[/tags]