The Microsoft Valued Professional (MVP) awards for 2010 will be announced on 2 January 2010 so wishing luck to all members that are up for award.

We here at GeekPill are hoping that you all had a great Christmas day and if you did get a WHS as a gift we hope you are having fun setting it up

Kentdome has a new beta coming soon and it’s an addin that lists all addins in one place via the Console. A bit like iTunes etc and you can download and install new addins and have updates installed which wasting your time. Go to homeserverland.com for more information.

We here at GeekPill are wishing everyone a very Merry Christmas and a happy new year

Tranquil PC has announced that all of their range of Home Servers will now come with free CD ripping software, which is AVA Media which costs £49 or £25 for Tranquil WHS customers. There is an option to the DVD ripping software. HomeServerLand did a review on the AVA Media DVD/CD that can be found at http://www.homeserverland.com/blogs/hslblog/archive/2009/04/28/ava-media-v1-5-0-1-add-in-evaluation.aspx.

If you head over to HomeServerLand.com you can be the first to try out new betas from Kentdome such as GirdBurn (a DVD/CD burning addin) places are limited so sign up fast. Also there are more things to do over at HomeServerLand such as a great forum and prizes to win every so often.

We are happy to announce the availability of limited Kentdome beta slots.

The Kentdome Beta Program is valuable because “real world” users (you) may find bugs that are difficult or impossible to locate in a development environment. Furthermore, it creates a way to contribute directly with a lot of hands on: help improve existing or add new product features and be a key player when we create new add-ins from scratch!

What does that mean? It means that this is not the usual shout-out for some brave souls to passively download software; instead we are looking for a limited number of active individuals (max 10 people) who are excited about the program and are willing to provide useful feedback and participation throughout the entire period. Technical expertise is not a requirement to participate in the beta program and there are some perks to entice you.

Admission to the Kentdome beta group will be based on correlation to our beta requirements.

How to make the cut? Simple – leave a comment below with your WHS hardware configuration and please answer:

Does your WHS have an internal or external CD/DVD burner?
Does your WHS have an internal or external POTS or VoIP telephony device?
Do you have a UPS? (Make, model #, interface (USB, RS232))
Why do you want to participate?
Thank you

Currently if you accessing this site from any ISP within the UK (UK IP address) then it will be blocked or timed out this is due to the IWF listing the shared server/ip address where this site is hosted on as “illegal” such as:-
* Child sexual abuse content* hosted anywhere in the world
* Criminally obscene images hosted in the UK
* Incitement to racial hatred content hosted in the UK
Source: http://www.iwf.org.uk/police/page.22.htm

If you can please use a proxy until either my host or I can get this block lifted from our domain.

The IWF may have found “illegal” files on another account(s) and put the block on the server. I am sure that my web host has already took action against the user(s). Hopefully the block will be lefted in due course (am hoping within the next day – if not it could be next week sometime).

UPDATE: it appears to just be some ISP and I have email IWF and they said that geekpill.co.uk was not on any list.
So sorry goes to IWF for me blaming them, when it was issues with ISPs within the UK.

One thing that I really hate is buying a DVD then have to sit and watch the warnings how downloading movies and TV shows is stealing and how stealing is against the law.  And you would think to yourself, “Hello I bought the DVD, I have not interest in download when its better on DVD and the fact that I have no interest in breaking the law’.

They are telling you off for doing the right thing like some people do in real life.  Telling you that there should be more people in and yet they tell this to the same people that come into the place day in day out.

This way of doing things gets peoples backs up.  I know I bought the DVDs to watch the show/film not to sit and get told that downloading films/shows is illegally.

Example of the crap you have to watch (yes you can skip it in some cases but you get a place that you cant skip [the contact details of the FACT, UK]).

Then might as well have the IT Crowd version.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALZZx1xmAzg

Someone has created a parody of it:

I was not alive 40 years ago when the Americans humans landed on the moon, but I am a geek that loves space.

Carina Software is giving away “free” astronomy apps (well one cent/ one pence – for the admin side of things).  This offer is just available today (20th July 2009) and is only for the download only versions of the products.  Go to http://www.carinasoft.com/products/index.html for more information and to “buy” the product.

So to those that died during the Apollo missions and those that landed on the moon and returned safely to Earth, you made it possible for this planet to have its first steps into space and the technology that has been created because of Apollo has changed so many peoples lifes.

If you want the backup to be better then you could buy a Drobo and install as much or as little storage as you wish.  To get this working and to have the abililty to upgrade the storage without the problems of USB, you need to use the network abilitiy.  This means that your WHS must have two Network cards, and your Drobo must have the Droboshare if your Drobo is not the DroboPro.

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