This can't be overstated: Setting up and managing your own mail system is hard.

I just ubscribed to Plex Pass and started using this feature. I didn't like the idea of my photos (often geo-tagged) being stored by third parties and this was the best solution for me.

OpenVPN is great. I switched over from IPSEC because OpenVPN seems to be gettin more prevalent than IPSEC is a lot of consumer/small business devices and I'd rather not use aging and insecure standards (PPTP, I'm looking at you!)

I would assume the container wouldn't make too much of a difference. In the end the video on the inside will be using one of the codecs in these tests (h.264, xvid, etc) and that is what causes processing cycles to be used.

I'm feeling a lot of vindication for encoding all of my video in h.264. It is cross compatible with mobile/low profile devices, gives decent performance at a quality bitrate, and now looks like it is a bit easier on the battery life.

Another option is Outlook.com. They allow you to use 1 e-mail address for free with your own domain. I really like it because you also get limited* Exchange Active Sync capabilities which I have been spoiled on and intensely dislike going without.

The do not call list i nice and all, but there are exceptions beyond non-profits. I received calls nightly from a company that wasn't directly selling anything and jut called on behalf of other companies to gather information. I wish I could remember their name now, but further research into them showed they were…

Voted for this too. Personally, I have its big brother, the AC68U, but that is typically overkill unless you have bleeding edge AC1900 equipment. his is a bit better priced for a negligible dip in performance.

Funny this should pop up. I started cleaning my lampshades with a sticky buddy (surprisingly good product for an "As Seen on TV" item). Does a really good job of clearing off the dust.

This is my recommendation too. I keep my main iTunes library on my Macbook Pro, but it pushes any changes to my home server running Windows and works pretty seamlessly. It also acts as a de facto backup for my iTunes library (including apps and iDevice backups)

Jut make sure they are not glass bottles. Nothing says fun like forgetting a case of beer in the trunk when the temperature dips well below zero and they start popping and shattering.

I don't believe this applies to discounted memberships such as for students, however.

Not yet, but I've been giving it a lot of consideration lately. This may push me over the edge.

Damn, I may actually use my Chromecast now that Plex is supported.

Me too. Part of it is gaming, but part of is I like to test in virtual machines. Assigning a few cores from my i7 and a bunch of ram helps test real world conditions in different operating systems without dragging the entire computer down.

Even if that worked, it still does not guarantee the computer will turn back on. For example, the UPS hits the 20% mark and sends a shutdown command. A few minutes later the power to the area is restored. The computer never lost power and just knows it was told to shut down.

In this case that won't work. That BIOS function only works when the PC detects a sudden power loss, not after a clean shutdown is initiated by a UPS.

I've been looking into this myself. I don't know if a USB interface will power a PC on after a shut down, so I looked into WoL options. If you have a router using third party firmware such as Tomato or DD-WRT, you can add a command to the init (startup) script that sends a magic packet to power a computer on:

I believe they bumped it up to 32gb for external storage not too long ago.

I should stress, it was her explanation for the frequent lightning strikes. I have never verified if that is a cause or not.