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.

For years I’ve declined the insurance coverage offered by rental car companies. It isn’t because I feel they’re gouging me for something bogus rather my own auto insurance (State Farm) tells me that rental car incidents are fully covered in my policy.

Just to be sure I call my agent before any trips and reconfirm this to be true. Well, it’s not, and I learned it the hard way.

Last July a tree fell on my Thirfty rental car due to a storm in southeastern Pennsylvania. To make a long story short, Thrifty gave me a replacement vehicle and State Farm handled all of the repairs to the vehicle. I was out $0 and very happy.

It was not to last.

A few months later I received a phone call from Thrifty seeking payment for items my insurance didn’t cover. My first thought was how crooked of Thrifty until I called back and got a glimpse at the underbelly of the rental car industry.

When a vehicle is involved in an accident it’s off the road for a couple of weeks and can’t be rented. Thus ushers in the concept of “loss of use” followed quickly by “administrative fees” the latter being a fancy term to cover photocopies and typing on keyboards.

It turns out that local law dictates what rental car companies can charge for Loss of Use and Admin Fees. In my case, Pennsylvania at the time, allows both. After some phone calls I learned that State Farm covers neither - ever.

How much was Thrifty seeking? $450. I had already spent over $300 to rent the car. I kept my cool and talked down the fees to $225 realizing I had no (apparent) legal way out of it.

Thrifty has every right to seek the Loss of Use fee and I accept that. What irks me is my insurance agent’s historical responses that “everything is covered” when it’s clearly not. I shouldn’t have to become an expert in the seedy details of auto insurance just to rent a car.

What I’ve learned is to pay the extra insurance offered by the rental car company because it covers everything: damange, loss of use, admin fees, etc. The $15 a day would have cost me $105 instead of $225 or the whole $450 had I not negotiated.

Chances are there will be no rental car accidents in my future to justify the added insurance but I’ll gladly pay the fee to avoid future financial surprises.

I’m sorry we have to part ways but I’m all grown up now. Your peculiar randomness of tantrums resulting in hours of frustrating troubleshooting has no more room in my life. Your cute ways of prompting me to install updates, warn me of security vulnerabilities, and asking to validate has grown old.

It’s time for me, old friend, to move on and find a computer system with consistency and won’t let me down when I need it the most…maybe even one with a bit of style. Don’t worry, you’ll find friends who don’t mind lavishing you with the attention you need to stay happy and safe.

I’ve found a computer who chose to grow up with copious amounts of common sense and high self-esteem. He doesn’t nag me with tedious chores and never lets me down when I need him the most. Apple works hard for me because that’s his job: to make my life easier, not the other way around.

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Yesterday, my PC decided that USB ports were no longer important thus making a USB keyboard and mouse impossible to use. Last month it was a new BIOS and RAM…now this. I’d be willing to devote (more) time and money to fix the machine if it were a vintage sportscar but it’s not.

Hello Parallels to run my needed (and Mac-unfriendly) Quicken and QuickBooks. Everything else including photos, music, and video is going on external hard drives linked to a brand-new copy of Connect360 for my Xbox 360. At some point I’ll figure out what to do with my Windows-only PhatBox and Navman GPS but for now I’ve had enough of Windows and the PC it runs on.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention the DVD-R/RW drive will no longer boot DVD media. Good times.

A reader and contributor to Divester sent an off-topic news item in recognition of Veteran’s Day. I couldn’t post it there since it had nothing to do with scuba diving so I’m taking a moment to note it here.

Marshall’s father served in WWII and had the (mis)fortune of being at Pearl Harbor the day it was sneak-attacked by the Japanese. He has compiled a 24-minute video (a la Google Video) of interviews with his father Harry including still and video footage from 1941.

View photos of the the attack.

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.