as of late i’ve been more focused on using $ for eating food rather than buying playthings. ahh i miss the days when i had surplus income to buy things to experiment with every few months. i suppose in a way it’s a good thing…because now i focus on getting items that i need (or think i need), instead of just accumulating a lot of stuff.

anyways, due to a christmas gift i was able to purchase a few items that i’d wanted for quite sometime. #1 a usb2.0 hi-speed hub (powered). i hooked this up to the slug and then connected two more drives to the hub. my slug now has 4 drives hooked to it :). this should make using rsync much quicker too. so now there’s a huge amount of my personal data available to me 24/7. that makes me very happy. sometime in 2010 or 2011 i’d like to get some larger external drives. something like 1 or 1.5TB. 500GB doesn’t seem to cut it anymore.

at the time of researching usb hubs that definitely work with linux i found that some people also hook usb audio adapters to their slugs. to play music of course. i looked into getting one because the idea intrigued me. there’s several on amazon for under $10. i got a $3 one and i figured if it doesn’t work big deal..it’s 3 bucks. it does indeed work. i’ve found out from this site – http://www.hermann-uwe.de/blog/playing-audio-on-the-nslu2, that you need to play files with madplay because the slug lacks floating-point hardware. the bad news is that i can hear noise in the playback. i’m not sure if that’s because the adapter is so cheap or because i have so many powered devices nearby. it’s acceptable though and does work.

the audio adapter is very cheap looking and has “3d sound” printed on it. model#: PUSBSCXXAD01 [J 82]
in debian it’s detected as: Bus 001 Device 009: ID 0c76:1607 JMTek, LLC.

the usb hub is a belkin 7-port mobile hub (F5U701-BLK)