Electron Hut: Kyle Bedell’s Blog

I’ve found that over the course of my videogaming history (which, as some of my older readers may chuckle at, has not been that long), I keep coming back to a lot of the older titles in my library. It seems that I’m not alone in my preferences; a new start-up company called Good Old Games has taken to selling old Interplay (that means Black Isle Studios folks, which means games like Fallout!) and Codemasters titles for $5.99 a pop. No DRM, all sorts of cool extras, infinite redownloads, and an extremely snazzy account interface (pictured below):

(or, just look at the native resolution version)

I’m especially fond of the small extras (the complete soundtrack, the high-res wallpapers, etc.) that come with most of the titles on the service. Plus, the installers are all nicely repackaged and the games have been modified to support XP and Vista (where applicable). I’m extremely satisfied with my purchasing experience! All in all, GOG is a worthy entrant into the field! The site is in beta right now, but you’re likely to get an access key pretty quickly if you sign up on the front page of the site. Enjoy your semi-retro gaming!

My Dad’s computer finally decided to commit suicide last Sunday. This didn’t come as much of a surprise to anyone, as the machine had been running at a speed roughly equivalent to that of a bug attempting to escape from a molasses flood. Further investigation revealed that not only had a stick of RAM in the machine gone bad, the power supply had died from heat exposure and there were some solder joints on the motherboard that obviously weren’t performing their duties properly. Since the machine was a late-era Pentium 4 box that was hot, inefficient, and noisy, we decided to set him up with a Shuttle SD39P2 barebones with a 2.4Ghz Core 2 Duo. It’s running Vista Home Premium now, and has been surprisingly stable thus far, not to mention much faster than the old machine.

Now, this brings me to the reason for the title of said post. My dad is a bit paranoid when it comes to backing up his photos, and recent ran out of room on his smallish external hard drive to back them up to. It was never big enough to hold everything to begin with, you see. So, because his PC died, he decided to invest in a BuffaloTech TerraStation Live, two terrabytes (well, really 1.46TB, because the drives are in a RAID 5 (parity) configuration) of gigabit Ethernet-linked network storage. Needless to say, it now serves as the data repository of the household. It’s plenty fast, runs on Linux with an awesome web interface, and had a multitude of multimedia-broadcasting and FTP features to boot.

If you need a lot of networked storage, this is a great solution.

-Kyle