This is a guide to creating a setup which keeps a master copy of media stored on your laptop in sync with a media computer using NAS-based storage. This guide deals with Macs, but I expect it would be easy to adapt. Indeed, I post this more for inspiration rather than concrete instructions.

I have a Media mac attached to my TV to play music, movies and iPlayer. It runs Plex, which allows you to scan a folder into it’s music and movie libraries. The catch: Plex needs to be restarted to pick up new files and add them into its library. The Media mac always runs as the “mediacentre” user.

An Indictment Against Ourselves

Sean Sperte collects two articles about “how we geeks have used complex technology that we understand but the common man doesn’t to ensure our value in the world”: first, an article saying we do and we shouldn’t; second, an almost satirical article proving the point.

When I got my first MacBook a few years ago, I opened Safari and didn’t look back. It’s slick, fast, fits the OS like a glove and renders websites well. So why am I now back with Firefox? Two things: Tree Style Tab and the awesome bar.

The awesome bar I’ve spoken of before, and it’s still just as great, so lets talk about Tree Style Tab.

First, a little bit about how I use a browser. I’m a bit of a tab addict. Before tree style tab, I would group my tabs into different windows. Each window would have a group or two of related tabs. A Twitter tab and a few links opened from tweets. A newspaper’s homepage and several stories open. The website I’m designing and several sites full of reference material. The tabs often stay open for days or weeks before I get around to reading them. It soon adds up to several windows containing several tabs. The total number of tabs spirals.

I was suddenly curious about why I start to crave trashy food when I’m at the pub. I’m sure you know what I mean: when you first walk into the pub, the sea bass looks great, but after a beer I just want something filling, preferably with chips.

People appeal to chemistry, evolution, inhibitions and desires when they try to explain why this happens.

When people appeal to chemistry for justification for their beer-fueled desires, conversation turns to the loss of water and electrolytes during the many toilet breaks—alcohol induces urine flow as chemcases charmingly puts it—as causes for the munchies. The loss of water causes blood to become more concentrated, causing the dehydration symptoms. Several online sources, including chemcases, agree that the loss of electrolytes cause a craving for salt to redress the balance.

I read a lot of longer-form content on my computer, like the articles in the Atlantic, so I’m always on the look out for ways to make this reading experience easier. My current weapon of choice is readability, which is a valiant attempt to strip out the dross around the content and to set the content in a way more comfortable to read.

I’m still stuck with a heavy, bulky device though. So we come to the tablet which all sources indicate will be unveiled later today by Apple. The tablets I’ve used in the past have tried hard to replace desktop computers, leading to heavy, bulky devices which are no better than a laptop for reading and worse for everything else. So I hope the tablet: