RE: Re: [OT] External Hard Disk

["Phil Harris" <phil@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

> I know about the "safely remove" thing, but I thought
that it's only
> needed to prevent problems if you pull the plug while writing to the
> disk.  Since this is to be used as a media source, I should only ever
> be
> reading (unless doing maintenance), in which case a powering off
should
> be safe.
>
> However, I'm moving away from this idea now.  I had been thinking of
> saving power by going to the mini-itx route, but it's just a load of
> hassle and all the nice rackmount cases I planned to use would wipe
out
> any electicity savings.  I've seen that Abit do motherboards with 10
> sata connectors, so that plus a low-end Core2Duo in a full tower case
> should do the trick and sort the spin-down issue at the same time.

If I could be sure that Microsoft had sorted the infamous "Delayed
Write
Failure" bug of old on Vista / XP or even better Windows Home Server
then
I'd have no qualms about defecting back to Windows but the simple fact is
that the Mac Mini just does the damn job so bloody well!

> As for Pearl and Dean - I thought of doing that to add to the home
> cinema "experience", but I could do with some of those
classic cinema
> adds too - anyone know if any are available?

Problem is, the only "Pearl And Dean" clips I've been able to
find have been
pretty crap quality - certainly nothing I would want blown up 6ft wide and
looking even grainier than ever!

For the classic cinema ads I just borrowed a CD of royalty free jingles and
used that as backing music to a PowerPoint presentation of cheesy looking
lurid stills of crappy looking shops with a very dodgy voiceover (at the
time I got some of the translators that I worked with to voice them as a
laugh)...

Phil