Upgraded from a Synology DS213 Air - Synology makes it very easy to do so!!

My review on Synology DiskStation Diskless Attached DS412

This NAS box is a great product. Well-designed interface, easy to get around, but does require a little bit of geek knowledge. This thing can be your DHCP or DNS server or both. If you're not a geek, plan to call one or spend hours on youtube figuring it out. It can be your fileserver for Mac or PC or FTP or even iSCSI LUN. It can do radius or LDAP. Has a bunch of other apps you can download and try (like iTunes server, plex server, mail server, web server, vpn etc etc etc). It does have an application for camera surveillance for one single camera (and you can buy other licenses for additional cameras). Bear in mind that the camera licenses for the surveillance product are around $50 per camera starting with your 2nd camera (first is free), but hopefully synology will get smart and price it more reasonably in the near future. For those that have been using dropbox, cloud station software on this diskstation does a reasonably good job as a dropbox alternative. While the cloud station devices (aka your laptop, your computer, the disk station) are all on the same local area network, synchronization is a bit slower than you would otherwise get on dropbox - but it does the job. Warning- do not buy regular cheapo SATA drives, this thing needs NAS quality SATA drives! Go to's synology.com and check the drive compatibility matrix before you buy SATA drives for this device. Raid-5 or SHR raid both allow you to recover from one drive failure out of four. Since this is a 4-drive box, expect around three drives worth of storage capability. One other note, it does not read Mac HFS drives! Do not expect to attach a Mac drive via USB and be recognizable. For Mac users, if you are moving large chunks of data to your disk station for initial move, you must reformat a usb drive as NTFS on your mac and copy the files over. So plan to buy paragon's NTFS for mac. You can do FAT if the files are small in size and short in name. the plex server - don't expect to copy MKV files and have the disk station be a plex server for MKV files (25GB in size for 1080p/2hrs). If you can compress you HDX 1080p movie files down to about 5GB-8GB per 2-hour video on mp4 or m4v, then you'll be fine using plex on diskstation. One other thing that's cool - you can do static LAG on the gig-e ports of the diskstation to double the ethernet bandwidth to 2Gb/s- but make sure the switch can be configured for LAG first or you'll lose the diskstation's connectivity.

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Micro

My review on Micro A Novel Michael Crichton

While the range of horrific antagonists ranges from person to person, I'm freaked out by a very subtle and insidious threat: nanotechnology. That is, I'm freaked out by a microscopic bug designed by some mad scientist to crawl into my ear and change my gray matter. Forget snakes on a plane, I'm freaked out by bugs in my brain.

The same sentiment must have struck Crichton before he died because his posthumous "Micro" takes that same technology among other threats. Not only are readers faced with insidious microorganisms but also very maturely present Honey-I-Shrunk-the-Kids-esque miniatures. In the violent and adult storyline, our band of scientists work to defend humanity from a scientist-gone-wild in a quest for power and money.

I wasn't completely in love or interested with any of the characters (very Crichton-esque) but the premise and plot are compelling (also very Crichton-esque). In this way, Preston, the co-author was great at making the book a unified package. Better than the last two titles with Crichton's name on it, "Micro" makes for an excellent read. I also recommend--along the same lines--the intriguing medical/economic thriller Chaos and Kingdom, which Crichton enthusiasts will love.

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My review on AGPtek%C2%AE CC308 Anti Spy Signal Detector

There are some security and spy shops that have similar products and you can learn how to use them properly from someone like CCTV Girl - see YouTube.

The device works but because so many things use the 1 GHz range and 2 GHz is it sometimes hard to figure out whether its a real spy device or not. Amazingly I've actually found many things that set off this device. I did find hidden cameras from the reflective RED LEDs using the scope. The lenses of the hidden camera reflects the light. Somehow the scope helps see that. Go figure.

The vibrating mode to find hidden wall devices works as well. Kind of like a metal detector. You hold it to a wall and swipe back and forth the vibrating is steady until a signal is detected where your device will begin signalling you with a stronger vibration and light meter all lit up.

Kind of creepy too because a few times when ghosts were being announced as being present the meter shot up and beeped like crazy. Of course we took it like some rogue signal pass by. We couldn't get that same signal later, in the same area.

Cool device to have though.

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Just purchased

My review on 2 5 inch Vehicle Recorder Dashboard Camcorder

Really easy to operate without reading the instructions. It came with English and Chinese leaflet.
Two push-button on the back of the main body.
Left one is power ON with ON symbol.
Right one push to start/stop Recording also function as "select" on the menu. Should silkscreen it RED.
Four push-button on the flip down TFT screen, all silkscreen from Left to Right on the bottom of the screen as Menu, Down, Up, Mode.
By default, record time set to two minutes, I set mine to the longest > 15 minutes.
It even record sound! Make sure you watch your language in case of in an accident :p
The battery cover kind of flimsy. If you don't open it too often would probably be okay.
The battery use BL-5C 3.7V 1050 mAh Lithium-Ion rechargeable.
The device fail to install on my Windows 7 x64 Bit. It's okay I just take the SD card plug in to the Desktop PC.

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