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Geek Tech

Things to do with Technology and other Geeky stuff

Amishgeek.com now with more Cloud Power

Sep 27th, 2011
by Amish_Geek.
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I recently decided to migrate some of my sites to the amazon ec2 cloud.  Now this site (www.amishgeek.com) is hosted entirely on Amazon’s EC2.  I’m using a triplet of micro instances behind an Elastic Load balancer to serve up this site and a couple others.  I’m using GlusterFS as a distributed filesystem to keep files synced between my instances.

I also enabled w3-total-cache which greatly speeds up pageload times and caching, as well as using S3 + cloudfront as a content delivery network (cdn) for delivering static content.

Look forward for another post with greater in-depth details on how I accomplished this.

Amazon is becoming my new favorite company

May 18th, 2011
by Amish_Geek.
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I’ve been a long time customer of Amazon.com, going way back into the mid-90′s when all they sold was books.  But lately, I’ve found myself using their products and services more and more often, and I am very impressed!

Since buying my Roku XD I have since become an Amazon Prime member to gain access to the unlimited streaming of movies and TV shows that Amazon Prime has to offer.  While the interface of the Amazon On Demand channel for Roku needs much improvement (their customer service dept was happy to hear my suggestions about creating a queue/playlist/subscription), it gets the job done, and it has a good selection of content to watch.  I’ve also puchased a couple season of TV shows to watch On Demand, and their HD movie rental rates are cheaper than what I get direct from Charter (my cable provider).

Moving on from their video services, I’ve been very impressed with their new cloud storage and MP3 cloud player service.  I’ve purchased several albums from Amazon that I would have previously purchased from iTunes because they were a few dollars cheaper.  And with the Cloud Player on my Android phone, it makes having my music with me wherever I go as simple as a click of a button. (I just wish there was a native cloud player app for my iPhone/iPad2).

I’m also an avid book reader and enthusiast, and the fact that the Amazon Kindle app works on my EVO, my iPhone, and my iPad2 means that I can take my whole library with me wherever I go.  Granted, I also have the Barnes & Noble Nook app on all 3 devices as well, but the Kindles whispersync is so much nicer to keep my books synced between devices.  With the Nook, it’s annoying to have to figure out where I was in the book when I want to read a quick chapter on my EVO after reading for a bit on my iPad2 before bed the previous night.

Amazon’s seller marketplace also makes it easy for me to convert my old collection of physical books into money, which in-turn helps me expand my Kindle library.  I’d love it if they had a book exchange program where you can send in physical books and receive discounts on the kindle versions of those same books.

All in all, I’m a very happy Amazon customer!

Roku XD first impressions

Apr 5th, 2011
by Amish_Geek.
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I’m always trying to improve my home media experiences, and until now, I’ve been happy with my Original Xbox running XBMC and my 1st Gen Apple TV running XBMC & Boxee.   I keep most of my media on a 1TB network storage device, and it works great.

But yesterday, I was at Best Buy picking up some accessories for my iPad2, and I ended up buying a Roku XD.   I have a Hulu+ subscription which I enjoy with my iPad, and a co-worker clued me into Amazon’s instant on-demand videos which are actually cheaper than the Charter on Demand videos I get through my cable service, and since the Roku XD supports both of those, I thought I would give it a spin.

So far, I am very impressed.  With Hulu+ I have access to more TV shows than I could possibly watch, and a subscription to Amazon Prime will give me even more, including movies.  I was also pleasantly surprised with some other channels available on the Roku device, like Crackle.com which has free movies on demand.

The UI on the Roku is a little meh.  It’s functional and thats about it.  I really like the remote, and performance wise, while the menu changes are a bit sluggish, the video playback on my TV is excellent.

For a $79 device, the Roku XD gets my approval.  I actually am considering getting a 2nd Roku for another TV in the house, and I’ll play around with a server software called Chaneru which should let me play/stream my current media library off the network to the roku devices, eliminating the need for a 2nd XBMC/Boxee device for downloaded media.

As much as I love apple products, I cannot forsee or justify spending the prices Appple demands for media in iTunes.  Why buy a TV season for $36 in iTunes, when I can get the same thing from Amazon for $19?  Or included in a monthly subscription from Hulu+ or Amazon Prime?

Site back online!

Oct 26th, 2010
by Amish_Geek.
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After over a month offline, I finally got my sites moved to a new server. yay!   I’m trying something new this time, so my site is now running on nginx instead of apache.  I’m interested to see if I get any performance gains from nginx. :)

Playing with the WordPress app for Android.

Jun 10th, 2010
by Amish_Geek.
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I just installed the WordPress app for Android on my HTC evo. This is a test post from the app.

So far this seems like a pretty sweet app! I’m still not used to the Android/evo keyboard… I think the spacebar needs to be a bit bigger as I’m trying to type as fast as I do on my iPhone but my words blend together, so its either the auto spell correction or I’m missing the spacebar as I type.

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