Articles

I can't tell you how many times I have scoured the web looking for WordPress Plugins to add to my ring of web sites. There are so many to choose from that it is can seem incredibly daunting. Well fear not fellow WordPress enthusiast, we are here to help. All of the WordPress Plugins you find in this list are in use on many of the sites that I create and have proven to be invaluable.

Sharing your WiFi with friends and family can quickly become a major annoyance. In my household, my son's friends are constantly asking for me to enter the WiFi details so they can hop on and suck the life out of my wireless network. Grabbing each device or phone, navigating the menus, and then typing in my very complex WiFi password is a pain. With a little help from a QR Code, you can sit back, relax, and just point to a QR Code hanging on the wall.

With the recent migration to Windows 10, there have been a lot of little things that people either can't find or can't seem to figure out. With my recent transition to Windows 10 on all computers in the COD household, these little annoyances keep popping up. The first one that popped up was on my Home Theater PC. The system had previously been running Windows Media Center on Windows 7 and now runs Kodi exclusively on Windows 10. With that said, having Kodi startup automatically under Windows 7 was easy. All I had to do was copy a shortcut to the startup folder and force it to delay so Kodi wouldn't start before networking did.

Nothing has bothered me more about Windows 10 than when I come back to my laptop from the gym to find all the tabs I had open lost to a reboot. Out of the box, Windows 10 will reboot once an update is installed... this leads to me having to scan my browsing history trying to find all the tabs I had open or have Microsoft Office prompt me to restore a file I had open and not saved recently.

While conducting the overview of Windows Storage Server 2012 R2 Essentials, I ran into a few errors while configuring the "Set up Client Restore Service". It seems that no matter what I did, I couldn't get the service to start. Then, a little digging, a quick copy & paste; all was resolved.

ASUSTOR has been hard at work. Not only have they been releasing some very impressive NAS lately, but they are also hard at work in the development labs to try and make ADM (ASUSTOR Data Master) the best operating system they can. ADM is intuitive, impressive, and fast.

Just when I thought I had it all figured out, Microsoft drops another one on my lap. I had already covered what I thought was Windows Storage Server 2012 R2 and its functions and flavors when I learned about Essentials. Essentials is still built for a NAS device, but it adds some fantastic functionality to the platform. Some of these include Active Directory Services, Computer Backups, and IIS.

In 2013, we published an article on building your own NAS for an affordable storage solution.  Well, there was such a positive reaction and such demand for an updated NAS build, I decided that it is high-time I revisit this article with a parts list relevant to 2015.

QNAP recently released an update to their QTS Operating System, QTS 4.1.3, that implements a couple of enhancements and a slew of bug fixes. Although the list of Enhancements is short, it does include things like: VPN Client/Server, NAS over HDMI, Block-Based LUN Backup, and Storage Pool support for X51 and X53 models.

Windows Storage Server is an exciting development in the storage platform. It can run on nearly any spec'd hardware and allows for simple management of storage appliances across a wide variety of manufacturers. Unlike customized NAS OS from other platforms, you get similar features and functions across an array of manufacturers. It is offered in two flavors, provides simple management, and runs like a champ. Additionally, having familiarity with Windows Server operating systems allows administrators to dive right in.