Born on the Web

After I learned how to use PHP to move files to S3. I was looking for a way to do this in a transparant way, so you'll still be able to use your own domain name when storing your files on S3. Twitter uses S3 for storing its user avatars, try loading the timeline and you'll see the amazonaws.com url coming up in your browser status bar. While this is just a small and visual annoyance, it becomes an issue when people start linking directly to your files stored on Amazon S3. The direct link to a file on S3 will look something like http://aws.amazonaws.com/your_bucket_name/your_file_name . This is not exactly pretty and you're missing out on a lot of Google juice. In this post I'll show you how to avoid this in a few simple steps. Only thing you need is an S3 account and access to your DNS config file.

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The times of crappy-mostly-failing web uploads seem to be completely gone. I've made some screens of the best examples I use:

1. Vimeo, great how you can add metadata to the video while uploading.

2. Flickr, Jay!, multiple file upload. Incredible valuable for a photo sharing site.

3. Facebook, the max file size on facebook is 300 MB, that's a lot !!

2 months ago I bought a Lacie Ethernet Big Disk, I needed some extra storage for  backups, to store movies, music, ... The biggest problem is that I'm constantly using a laptop in the couch, in the kitchen, in the train station, at work, ... It's not really handy if you need to carry an external HD with you all the time, just to listen to your music.  

But this wasn't the only problem. My roommate has a desktop computer and of course he also needed easy access to the external storage. It became clear to me that I needed some flexible network storage or NAS (Network Attached Storage). The more, the better. So after some surfing I've found that the LaCie of 1 TB would be my best match. It wasn't the cheapest storage available but certainly the most flexible.

And now I can't imagine a home without some decent network storage. These are the things I like most:

• This is definatelly the web interface. The LaCie has an easy to use web interface. You can access all your files trough your browser but also perform all kinds of administrative tasks.
  
• I configured my router so I can access my hard drive from the internet. I just type in the no-ip.com webadress and I can access all my files. Some greasemonkey scripting let's you even listen to all your music from your harddisk. Pretty nice huh !
  
• The software of the hard drive contains a small version of linux which also holds a UPnP media server. My Xbox 360 flawlesly detected the harddrive as a computer. The embedded media server can stream all your photos, music, videos (off course only WMV's) to your television screen.
  
• Gigabit network access... well this means it should be as fast as a regular USB 2.0 external HD. Currently I haven't got a gigabit network in place, so I haven't tested this yet. But for now 100 Mbit is a pretty decent speed.
  
• A lot of my friends can access the hard drive. Via the FTP access they can easily sent photos to us without the need for us to be online. The hard drive has a comprehensive user rights system, everything customizable through the admin interface.
  
• The LaCie has an USB interface. So it's possible to extend your HD with an extra USB external disk. My old external HD is now connected to it. This means I can also access that one from my browser. Which gives me around 1.25 TB of networked storage !!
  
• Off course it supports regular samba shares. So you can easily add it as a extra disk in the My Computer window.

It would be a nice extra if you could alter the web templates that display the files. If the directory contains a lot of MP3's for example it would be nice to automatically integrate the songs in a flash player. Now you need greasemonkey if you want to stream mp3's, which is pretty limited.

My second feature request is pretty obvious for people who want full flexibility: SSH access. I'm not sure this lays within the capabilities of this device, but it would be great if you could run small programs on your mini-server. Or have the capability to extend the functionalities of your administration panel, so a kind of plugin interface for the device would be ideal.

Conclusion

For me this was the solution I was looking for. Mainly because you can have access to all your data from anywhere and you keep the speed and functionalities of your local area network.

On the right you see the LaCie and the expansion USB harddrive from Medion. It can stream via my ethernet hub(below) media to my Xbox 360 (top), and it is connected to the internet via a cable modem(below left).