No more hiding in the server room

Favourite bit of tech

With us all being geeks and techies of various levels, I was wondering what your favourite piece of tech was at the moment. This can be work or home use, something you've got or are trying to get or even something you've seen and want just oh so badly!

Yes, it's a bit of fun on a Friday. :) lol

Here's mine:

Work
Two jump to mind VMware and FreeNAS.
VMware is pretty obvious but I'm always impressed with it and can't wait to expand it further and start playing with the cool bells and whistles.
FreeNAS is something we used to create a quick storage box with FTP access for the IT group. Gonzo, as it is called, is an old PC with two 500Gb drives out of a dead server and the OS running on a USB pen drive. This thing is incredibly quick, easy to look after and resilient! The motherboard on Gonzo 1 died so we simply moved it into a new box with completely different hardware and fired it up. Gonzo 2.0 lives and breathes still going strong.

Home
Got to be my MacBook. Tough, versitile, powerful and all round good egg. I might be adding an iPad at some point but that's still open to debate.

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Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Jeff Hengesbach on September 17, 2010 at 5:19pm

Home
Android based Droid X phone. Saw a tweet the other day: "Android is for geeks and iPhones are for cool people". Guess I'm a geek. I've seen / used both and the Android based devices have a ton of flexibility (due to software) and I'm not a fan of vendor lock in.

Work
I'm a huge VMware / virtualization fan, but I feel like it is common enough now that going on about it almost a waste of keystrokes ;) I've recently really enjoyed working with Dell Equallogic iSCSI - I don't think there is a SAN that is easier to use and they somehow squeeze almost magical performance out of SATA drives.

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Permalink Reply by Robert Chipperfield on September 21, 2010 at 10:31am

Home
Definitely my Nexus One at the moment! Fully agree with Jeff, Android is just awesome, in terms of flexibility, ease of use, and general ability to do Just About Anything I Can Think Of!

Work
Avoiding the usual suspects, I'm going to say my DisplayLink USB graphics card. The ability to just throw more and more monitors at a single machine at random is wonderful. I think it supports up to six, though the most I've had is three (on a laptop, plus its internal monitor).

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Permalink Reply by Andrew Egan on October 1, 2010 at 10:49am

Definitely would have to be my laptop - Dell Latitude E4300. It was a gift from an employer, and I find it hard to see how I could manage life without it. I used to have a larger 15" laptop, and though this one took a little while to adjust to, It's much much better.

workwise, I'm between roles at the minute, however in my last role I was really loving virtualisation -we keep making faster, larger hardware, but in so many physical servers, it's underutilised. Being able to sell a solution to a client that needs less hardware (and thus less capex for their budget) is excellent.

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Permalink Reply by Stefan Pynappels on January 5, 2011 at 2:17pm

My HTC Desire HD and VMware ESXi.

Android rocks and ESXi makes my life easier as I can get more out of my hardware budget.

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Permalink Reply by Stefan Pynappels on January 5, 2011 at 2:19pm

My HTC Desire HD and VMware ESXi.

Android rocks and ESXi makes my life easier as I can get more out of my hardware budget.

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Permalink Reply by Stefan Pynappels on January 5, 2011 at 2:22pm

My HTC Desire HD and VMware ESXi.

Android rocks and ESXi makes my life easier as I can get more out of my hardware budget.

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Permalink Reply by Stefan Pynappels on January 5, 2011 at 2:29pm

Sorry for triple posting, would not let me delete the extra posts.

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Permalink Reply by Paul Stoklosa on January 11, 2011 at 4:09am

For Home, I love my new PopCorn Hour device. It plays every media format under the sun, over wireless N, paired with my Tonido Plug, there's nothing that compares...