When I ditched my Windows box I lost my centralized location for sharing music and photos with the computersMacs in my house. I was going to convert my PC’s hard drive (250 GB) for use with an external Firewire drive enclosure and share it via my PowerBook but I discovered the old ADS Technology enclosure can’t use hard disks over 132 GB in size.

This gave me an opportunity to find a new enclosure with USB 2.0 support, more ports for FireWire and USB, and small form factor. I was also hoping to find a quiet unit as the power supply on my old enclosure sounds like a jet ready for take-off.

I remembered seeing Mac mini-style enclosures that might do the trick and could lead the way to a small form factor for a future media center. A quick Google search and later I ordered the miniStack v2 made by Newer Technology. You can find other reviews all over the web so I’ll just describe my main observations.

The miniStack v2 looks just a like Mac mini device should. Build quality is good although the case is all plastic with aluminum colored sides and white top.

Gone is the jet engine-like roar in my home office. The miniStack v2 enclosure is quiet and the fan has yet to kick in. I barely hear the whir of the 7,200 RPM drive which eventually spins down when not in use. With that is a device which throws off very little heat. I should probably mention the enclosure isn’t stacked so heat/noise may arise when a Mac mini or another enclosure is added.

My Western Digital 250 GB drive installed easily and included taping a heat sensor to its top. The USB 2.0 and FireWire 400 hub also works, giving me the means to stack FireWire drives, use my iSight, and an array of USB devices such as keyboard, mouse, and flash drives without adding another gadget to my (now shrinking) tangle of wires. The power supply included with the miniStack v2 is power-strip friendly, using a small power brick with two-prong A/C cord.

All of my media content has been moved onto the miniStack v2 and hooked to my PowerBook and served across the network. Works as it should: quiet and unobtrusive. The enclosure, sans drive, is $75 from Other World Computing and a 500 GB version can be had for super cheap at $259.

The title is overly dramatic but a follow-up to my experience hacking my Linksys wireless router. I got to thinking about the other pieces of technology sitting around my house and their respective deficiencies. You’ve got to admit that so many good gadgets could be great if they asked users what they want, have focus groups, fix bugs, and innovate.

Case in point is the Nokia E61. It’s a great smartphone and I haven’t regretted the purchase because there is so much it can do and I’ve hardly tapped the features. But the basic ones, like the built-in email client, are marginal. Support for three email accounts is laughable and the annoying “bug” of turning off automatic email retrieval if no connection is available.

Where does the hacking come in? I bought a (fine) piece of shareware called ProfiMail because a smartphone with full keyboard should have a capable email client. This got me thinking about those two major annoyances from Nokia and do I really need 5+ email accounts let alone buy an extra piece of software to handle it? Maybe I should consider some email account consolidation.

People have this fascination with watching movies on their mobile devices. That’s OK if, like the iPod, it’s an automated process from iTunes. However, the E61 requires (yet more) software to make the conversion and no one seems to know the right combination of codec and settings to get it working right. Strangely enough, Apple’s $30 QuickTime Pro handles it with ease.

And there is the E61’s built-in, and much maligned, calendar. Whose calendar is so complex that Nokia’s offering requires replacement with Papyrus? Maybe it’s time to read GTD and devise a simpler system.

The ability to hack my gadgets is wonderful but I must allude to the 17-year-old with nothing but time on his hands. At 36 I have no such free time to dabble with tools to handle my self-imposed over-complicated life. In rebellion to my own instinct I will defy hacking my gadgets and when I feel the urge and ask myself “is there something in my life I can simplify instead?”

I’m not alone. Shaun McGill at the E61 Blog did something similar by discontinuing use of his PDA because he was devoting more resources to managing it rather than it managing his tasks. I’m happy to hear Shaun reaching this conclusion because I had difficulty understanding why anyone would rely on their PDA to manage their finances.

One of the things I love about technology is experimentation with new products. When I discovered I could hack my Linksys router firmware with a better version, I did. What was better about it? More features for port forwarding, VPN, wireless settings & security, QoS, the list goes on.

First I tried Sveasoft which worked fine but I shifted to DD-WRT when the development slowed down at Sveasoft. For the last year I’ve run DD-WRT on two Linksys WRT54G routers with success but not satisfaction.

DD-WRT has an excellent feature set, bar none. You can’t beat the price: free. For the most part it works fine but over time I was discouraged that common network applications wouldn’t work. I couldn’t get iChat A/V working with my parents. My Nokia E61 using Truphone (VoIP via SIP) wouldn’t work without tweaking the phone and browsing the web required three attempts before achieving a connection. Factor in poor signal strength on the Linksys units, even with after-market antennas and two-router WDS setup which would consistently lose connection, and I finally had enough.

After some deliberation I bought a Buffalo WHR-HP-G54 because it could be hacked should I choose to and it includes a high-power radio with MIMO antennas. The stock firmware is rather full-featured for 95% of users and within a short time it was up and running in a contest with the DD-WRT Linksys.

The Buffalo’s range is better (without WDS no less) which means my Xbox 360 and laptops can connect with robustness and speed better than the WDS Linksys configuration. The ISP throughput of the Buffalo is 3.0 Mpbs compared to 1.5 of DD-WRT. My E61 connects on the first try to the router and registers a SIP profile immediately. To top it off, iChat A/V works like a champ.

All this without hacked firmware and fancy antennas. Out-of-the-box goodness.

What’s interesting in all of this is the iChat issue. I feel that freeware/open-source products provide a better level of support than retail because of the user community. In the case of DD-WRT and iChat, no one had a solution. In old forum threads the developer claimed there was no problem with port forwarding and UDP traffic (required by iChat). Even stranger, the DMZ function of DD-WRT didn’t help which tells me that iChat doesn’t work because of some (unacknowleged) bug in DD-WRT.

There are other router firmware hacks to be found on the ‘net like HyperWRT but I’ll pass. When I was younger I’d waste hour upon hour trying to reach equipment configuration Utopia but, today, I have better things to do with my time.

As the expression goes, “your mileage may vary.” In my case I’ve found that using an out-of-the-box wireless router is better than any hack could ever be.