...stuff I do and things I like...

I already assembled a list of hardware I'm going to buy this year. Of course the list is not complete :-) I really like to get hints for all hardware on my list, thanks!

1) NAS Box (or multiple)

I bought a NAS-4220 in March last year. I wanted to run it as a backup device with raid-1 and crypto. But it turned out that not all of the required software works good enough to be used for backup (a unstable backup system is useless in my opinion). So I'm going to sell it (the actual hardware and default software works just fine).

So I'm looking for a nice NAS box that runs Linux (or can be made to run Linux). The devices based on the Orion SoC look nice. See here. Unfortunately the crypto acceleration is not yet supported. Crypto is thing I really need in hardware as raid-1 works just fine in software on Linux.

2) 802.11n Wifi router that runs OpenWRT

No research done yet besides a brief check on the OpenWRT site. Seems some routers are supported but with out supporting the 802.11n part itself.

3) Internet Radio device for the kitchen

I want something that just works, runs Linux, and is hackable. Needs WiFi. Good looking hardware that is not too big.

4) Gaming Computer

Since 2004 I only own laptops (besides my media center/home server). From time to time I think about playing/buying some games but since non of my laptops can handle current games I will go and buy a gaming computer.

It will need to cost less then 1K Euro (without screen). I'll probably go for a intel E8400 with 4GB ram and a nVidea GTX+ with 512MB. Is this OK for most games this year? I mainly like real-time strategy C&C, WarCraft, StarCraft style games.

5) Android-based mobile phone

I ordered a Kogan Agora Pro in December.

I mainly ordered this one because it is really cheap in comparison with the G1. Looking forward to play with it. It will be interesting to see how the whole android thing goes this year.

6) Media streaming device (something like Apple TV)

I want a device to put audio/video into my living room without the need for a computer (my media center is too noisy after all). I have a Zenega/S100 in my bed room which is really great but can't play high bit rate content.

I recently bought a T-Online S100 for about 45 Euros on eBay. The S100 is the name for T-Online's version of the Zenega VOD (Video One Demand) box. Actually I bought the thing to build a FAT wireless access point but I discovered that some guy had build a real nice video player distribution for it called zenslack (obviously based on slackware). The distribution is made to be run from a harddisk/usb-stick/usb-disk attached to the box but since I already had a Debian based system running it via NFS I wanted to go this way. This way I can just switch the box off with out worrying about filesystem corruption and such.

By the way the NFS server is my MythBox, so I really only use the Zenega as a viewing client in another room.

Setting up this thing is quite easy once you can get over your self and read the Zenega User Forum (I hate forums!). Also you need to get a user account since you need to request a download password for zenslack, which is kind of stupid since it is all free/open source software.

So far I'm pretty happy with the whole thing. The IR remote works, the S-VHS and SCART connectors both work. I was able to play all of my test content (mplayer really really rulez).