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I had been bashed pretty hard for not update my blog frequently, sorry about that. Kind of “busy” attending/ finalizing some stuffs that had been lingering around my folk’s house. You name it, renovation, household cleaning, reposition few furnitures, clean up unwanted materials, entertaining my distanced cousins and etc.

2010 is here, so here is the summary of the my 2009:

2009 is a blessing year, I managed to secure a job from a reputable semi-government sector, excellent working environment and best of all, free parking 24/7. Hahahahaha.

Also, I managed to obtain all of my 2009 wishlist’s items. They are:

1. Motorola RAZR v9
2. Wireless N router
3. Network Attached Storage (NAS)
4. Eee netbook
5. PS3 slim
6. Network printer

With this items, I am able to execute my plan of redesign the home’s network, minus the handphone and netbook that is. Some might wonder, why is these stuffs has got to do with redesign home’s network? Simple, centralizing.

When the Internet is getting more blooming than ever, so does the bandwidth consumption and power usage. And to make matter worst, my brothers will leave their computer on 24/7 just to download their favorite TV show and etc. Anyone will scream whenever they experience sluggish connection, even I myself will curse all the way to my old modem + router to restart it.

Also, I have notice there are redundancy of downloading the same materials and the inabilities to share within the same goddamn house! Not to mention the needing of extra storage just to store those stuffs!

This is where you need a superior router to manage those kind of excessive activities, and a centralized mini-server or set-top box to manage the download and store it.

I bought a Linksys wireless N router and a Buffalo NAS 500GB storage (this should be plenty enough to store crap). Both have been customized to cater what I need. The router original firmware had been upgraded to an alternative open source firmware (dd-wrt), and the NAS had also been hacked and installed extra packages.

I have set up torrent application at NAS and disabled all p2p wise connection except NAS at the router.

You might want check out the posts at:

1. http://granite.my/?tag=linksys-wrt310n
2. http://granite.my/?tag=ls-chl

Then, I could concentrate on setting up media center and bridging two different “continent” wirelessly. PS3 will do just fine to be functioned as media center. When I said PS3 as media center, I meant it. Some may not know that PS3 can seamlessly stream any media server that support DLNA standard. In other words, you download any TV show (DivX format of course) at your NAS that support DLNA and play it using PS3. No more hooking up your laptop to LCD TV with VGA/ HDMI cable. Pretty neat huh?

An extra router is needed to bridge between the network printer and the main router, eliminating the way-too-long LAN cable (yeah, you guessed it, this router firmware also been upgraded to dd-wrt).

There shouldn’t be much of connectivity problem by now. Thus, chapter “Network” is closed and moving on with others.

So my 2010 wishlist?

1. Razer Mako 2.1 speaker to functioned as home theater system
2. Superior desktop which going to cost me up to RM8k
3. Android based smartphone
4. Punching bag, yes, I need one
5. DSLR camera

Oh, happy new year btw!