There are a lot of network attached storage options out there now but they are a bit expensive and have arbitrary limitation mixtures in the software. Plus Lindsey was not keen on me spending more money on gadgets.

Instead I looked at the random gear I had around the house and was able to quickly get raided network storage setup for no cost that is more flexible than most of what you can buy. Nothing new here, this is a pretty familiar setup. It just worked out well for me so wanted to share.

I had the following to work with:

• An old Dell laptop purchased about 4-5 years ago. 2GB of ram, I don’t know any of the other specs.
• The cheap WRT54GS Linksys router I was already using at the house.
• A couple 500 GB external hard drives.

That isn’t much but I imagine many people have a similar combination just lying around. Most of my extra gear (including the last desktop I owned) got absorbed when the company was starting up.

Here’s the steps to set this up for yourself.

[1] Put DD-WRT on the router

The big items I wanted were reserved DHCP (so I could reserve an IP for the new “server”) and VPN (so I could connect remotely to my home network). DD-WRT offers both of these along with loads of additional features. It makes the stock Linksys firmware look like garbage in comparison.

My WRT54GS is an especially cheap router with a tiny amount of memory so I had to install the pared down “micro” version of DD-WRT but it still works great.

For help and information on DD-WRT go visit their site. You can enter your specific router model number and get the exact files you need along with specific instructions. Its really easy to do.

[2] Put Arch Linux on the laptop

Arch Linux is a preference thing but I do believe it is the best Linux distribution. I use it on all of our servers at work now and am glad Sean told me about it. Since in this setup I am creating a dedicated server out of the old laptop and don’t plan to ever use it directly Arch is a perfect fit – just do a base install. No need for x windows or any of that cruft. Arch makes installing things so incredibly easy. In 95% of the cases the steps are to grab the software with pacman, add it to the DAEMONS array in rc.conf (if its something that should start on its own on reboot), and then start it.

Obviously you can use a different Linux distribution if you would prefer but subsequent content below assumes Arch.

To get Arch or to view their fantastic wiki and documentation go to archlinux.org.

At this point I gave the Arch server’s mac address an IP reservation in DD-WRT. That’s optional but I would highly recommend either doing that or using a static IP.

[3] Connect external drives to laptop and raid them

SSH into the Arch server and plug the drives in. The faster the hard drive connection the better but honestly for stuff you are going over a network for it doesn’t really matter. Your laptop hard drive is probably going to be /dev/sda and your plugged in external drives are probably going to be /dev/sdb and /dev/sdc. I am making that assumption in the following, you can ls -l /dev/sd* to verify what is showing up. On my machine the external drives showed up as “storage” (for the group permission) while the laptop drive was “disk”.

Install mdadm with pacman -Sy mdadm. This is for the software raid. Also install parted with pacman -Sy parted. This is what I use for partitioning instead of fdisk. For more information about mdadm read the wikipedia page which has good tutorials and more information in the external links section.

Now, assuming /dev/sdb and /dev/sdc for the external drives as mentioned above do the following. This is all done as root.

• Partition the first drive. Type parted /dev/sdb and you will get the parted prompt.
• From the parted prompt type mklabel gpt.
• Type mkpart primary 0 100%.
• Type quit to leave the parted prompt.
• Now partition the second external drive in the same way (just do parted /dev/sdc and repeat the steps).
• Create your raid array with mdadm --create --verbose /dev/md0 --level=raid1 --raid-devices=2 /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdc1. This is creating a raid 1 with 2 drives.
• Now format your new raid array with mkfs.ext3 -b 4096 /dev/md0. This will format with the ext3 file system but you could use whatever you wanted instead just as well.
• Create a directory wherever you want for mounting the new raided disk. I used /var/raid_array. That would be cd var and mkdir raid_array.
• Mount the new disk with mount /dev/md0 /var/raid_array. The raided disk should be usable now. Do a df -h to make sure it mounted and verify the usable space is what you expected.
• Edit /etc/fstab and add a line containing /dev/md0 /var/raid_array auto defaults 0 1 to ensure the new disk gets mounted on reboot. You can obviously change those mount parameters to whatever values you prefer.
• If you want, do some benchmarking and consider bumping up readahead on your new raid array. See my last post for information about that and how important it can be. BUT, if these are USB-connected external drives no need to waste time tuning. With software raid at least the OS knows there are two drives involved and so will tune up your readhead to 512. Just wanted to mention it as generally when setting up a raid array (or any decent hard drive) you want to be aware of that setting.

In the above I was assuming the external drives were the same size. If they are not then in the “mkpart” command use a fixed MB amount or smaller percentage for the second number instead of 100%. You could then separately partition any remaining space so it is at least usable if not in the raid.

The above uses raid 1 but mdadm can handle a lot of different configurations, just tweak the “–level” and “–raid-devices” parameters as needed.

At this point you have a raid array usable at /var/raid_array on the laptop “server”.

[4] Setup samba

Your new raid array wouldn’t be much use if you couldn’t easily access it. Use samba to set it up as a network share that all of your home computers can see or use. I’d recommend checking out the consistently awesome Arch Wiki for samba instructions. As with all things Arch, installation and configuration is very straight forward and cruft free. Your mileage may vary on other distributions.

[5] Finish up

From here you can setup whatever you like. Here is what I did.

• Setup an iTunes share so my music on the network just shows up when I am at home. You can do this by setting up a daapd server, check out the wikipedia article about daap for an overview of what it is. There is unfortunately not an Arch Wiki article for this so here are the steps if interested.
• Grab the needed software with pacman -Sy mt-daapd and pacman -Sy dbus.
• Edit /etc/mt-daapd/mt-daapd.conf. Set the “mp3_dir” to the root location of your music and the “servername” to your server name. You will probably want to add more extensions to “extensions”. I added “.m4a,.m4p,.aac”.
• Add dbus, avahi-daemon, and mt-daapd (in that specific order) to the DAEMONS array in rc.conf.
• Start them up in that order with /etc/rc.d/dbus start, /etc/rc.d/avahi-daemon start, and /etc/rc.d/mt-daapd start.
• That is it. Your music should show up in iTunes as a shared library with whatever name you set as “servername” in mt-daapd.conf.
• Setup a backup script that pushes select important items up to s3 each week. I used s3sync to do this but you can use whatever you like. s3sync is straight forward and easy to use in command line scripts. Here is the s3sync site and here is a blog post that describes usage well.
• Setup a basic monitoring script, particularly to watch the status of your raid. You can use mdadm --detail /dev/md0 to get the status of your drives and write a script to parse out the pieces you want. Since this is software raid with random external hard drives you aren’t going to get a nice red LED telling you when a drive is dead. Have it check each morning and email you if things are busted up. If you are sending email in your scripts do a pacman -Sy postfix first.

Conclusion

The above may look like a lot of steps but it really is more straight forward than it seems. With Arch especially, getting things setup is a snap. This is a cheap solution and isn’t going to be a screamer on performance but it offers a lot of advantages:

• Cost $0 if you have an old laptop and a couple hard drives.
• Even though its a cheap solution you still have complete features (raid, networked, iTunes share, plus whatever else you install on the server).
• Can be easily expanded with additional drives, software raid in general offers a lot of flexibility and easy monitoring.
• Laptops actually make decent home servers because they have batteries in them – power outtages aren’t a big deal. On the other hand, your external hard drives will still die so maybe not a huge advantage.
• You have a actual machine on top of the drives so you can easily add whatever server software you want. You can use it as an SSH tunnel, web server, whatever.

They’ve got a cool unibody aluminum enclosure, a glass buttonless trackpad, environmentally friendly material adjustments, and a video praising it all.

I absolutely love OSX and do not see myself moving to another OS anytime soon but it does feel as though the “Pro” version of Apple’s laptops need to be competitive at a hardware level with other high end laptops that are out now.

Things I would have liked to see, at least as options. All of these are easy to find in other high end laptops.

• A Quad-Core CPU.
• 8GB of RAM.
• There are two GPUs in the case, why no SLI?
• Raided disks.
• A new 17″ MacBook Pro. Why no refresh of the big fella? I realize I may be in the minority, but like large screens with huge resolution in my laptop.

With these latest MacBooks it would have been great to see some bleeding edge jumps in the hardware. As it stands the hardware spec increases were minimal and they filled the gap with aluminum and glass. As nice as the new trackpads are (did give them a try at the Lenox Apple Store, very nice) I would rather have twice the memory or more cores. Apple charges a premium for their products and usually that premium can be largely justified by the quality of the components in the machines (OSX and style make up the rest depending on your opinion), but with these new laptops the price premium feels a bit more shallow.

There has been some chatter that indicates the new machines have the hardware to support 8GB of RAM and SLI between the GPUs. Hopefully when Snow Leopard comes out or sooner they will make some adjustments on the software end of things to enable both of these features.

Still a big fan of Apple, these new laptops are really nice and look awesome, just would have been nice to see a bigger jump in the specs. There are some really wicked laptops coming out now that make the new MacBook Pros look underpowered in comparison. Those laptops just don’t run OSX.

The Old Phone

The 8125 was a pretty decent phone and my favorite features were the following:

• The smartphone features in general (calendar, contacts, tasks, email). This was my first smartphone and I bought it for those features and used them heavily.
• The Exchange synchronization through ActiveSync worked very well.
• The ability to tether the phone to a laptop, I used this on several trips. It was EDGE and slow but it did work pretty reliably. I was able to make this work wirelessly over bluetooth with my MBP.
• The slide out keyboard was really nice and I could thumb-type pretty dang fast with it.
• PocketPuTTY is awesome and I used it a lot. Before PocketPuTTY there was some other SSH client that i’ve forgotten the name of that I used.
• There is a lot of stuff you can install on WM to smooth over its rough edges (e.g. OperaMini is a big step up from IE)
• It was a beast – an advantage and disadvantage. Very large to hold and store but also tough. It survived 3 truly hardcore drops with no damage aside from chips and scratches on its exterior.

It had a few annoying habits, the worst of which was it would often stop receiving calls. I wouldn’t realize it for a couple hours and then after a reboot (I had to reboot the thing a few times a week) I’d have a bunch of built up voice mail and missed calls. It was really aggravating but it seemed everyone with WM phones had the same general issues so I just worked with it and still found the phone quite useful overall.

The New Phone

A couple weeks ago the iPhone 3G came out and despite my inclination to avoid it for awhile I ended up giving in to peer pressure and ordering one a few days after release. I was out of contract, the 8125 was showing its age, and the combination of the more appropriate price (in line with WM and BB phones) and the new SDK and App store made me decide to give it a shot.

I’ve had the iPhone 3G in hand for 1.5 weeks now and thought I would offer my perception of the device compared to a WM phone I used daily for 2.5 years.

First some shots of the devices next to each other. From top/bottom they are actually pretty similar in size but the iPhone is about half as thick as the 8125. Not a huge surprise given the age of the 8125 but the newer iterations of that phone aren’t especially smaller (looked at all the smart phones at AT&T while waiting for my turn to activate).

The Good

There are a lot of things I like about the iPhone 3G but my favorites by far are the following:

• The Exchange synchronization is flawless and actually better than WM. I haven’t received a single sync error which was a common occurrence for me with WM. Email setup in general is trivially easy.
• The email/calendar/contact/browser applications are better, easier to use, and more stable.
• The touch screen works really well and the whole phone feels utterly usable. Stuff makes sense.
• The App store and installation/update process is wonderfully effortless.
• I love the visual voice mail. You can see who has left messages, call them back, listen to them individually, or delete the messages without having to dial your voicemail and listen in serial.

There are a lot of additional small touches that I appreciate like the conversational display of SMS messages, the way the phone senses when you pull it away from your ear so you can hit ‘end call’ without having to wake it up (had to do this for every call with WM), the way meeting alerts look and work, the physical mute toggle that works even when the phone is locked, the consistent usage of the home button (instead of having to hit ‘ok’ a dozen times in WM) and much more. The general usability of the device makes me use the data plan. With the old phone I felt like it was more of a thing to use in an emergency or pinch but now I find myself using Safari, writing emails (as opposed to just reading them with WM), and everything else constantly. It’s just easier.

There isn’t a good way to manage tasks in the iPhone 3G by default but that’s okay because nothing can beat Remember the Milk and the RtM iPhone web interface is really fantastic. Speaking of applications, there are a lot of really great ones available in the new App Store and a lot of the best ones are free. Some of the best I have tried include:

• The Mocha VNC and Telnet clients work great.
• WeatherBug is great. Provides watches/warnings for your location, radar, and more detail than the built in weather app.
• Yelp and Urbanspoon are pretty useful and like many of the apps make effective use of the GPS.
• In terms of games Aurora Feint and Tap Tap Revenge are very polished and fun.

There are a ton of solid apps available – the above is just a small sample of the good, free ones. I am currently using several bookmarked web applications as well and for the most part you can’t even tell you’re using a non-native application. These include RtM (already mentioned for tasks), Google Reader, Google Talk, and an iPhone optimized Wikipedia.

One more neutral (though generally positive) impression I have is towards the keyboard. I am not as fast as I was with that 8125 slide out keyboard yet but it is getting better. I’ve found that though individual key accuracy isn’t very high the auto-correction that comes in behind as you type works surprising well. If you trust it to make corrections you can work back up to near buttonized speed though I suspect it will never be as fast. One very nice touch is that the bottom keys of the keyboard change depending on your input. If typing an email the @ symbol is a key and if typing a URL ‘.com’ is one key. That’s a really nice touch and combined with the shortcut of hitting ‘space’ twice inputting a period followed by space I don’t have to switch modes on the keyboard as often as I did with the WM phone.

The Bad

The iPhone isn’t without negatives.

• I’ve had it crash/restart 3 times.
• A lot of the Apps are trash (thankful for the reviews in the App Store) or have costs when they should be free.
• There isn’t yet an SSH terminal supporting an interactive command line and terminal emulation (though one appears to be coming in the near future)
• There isn’t an official way to tether the iPhone to your laptop. I did snag Netshare before Apple pulled it the second time and it works great (~650 kbps down, ~350 kbps up) but I won’t count it in general due to it no longer being available for download.

As a final point I am not a huge fan of the closed environment Apple has created but at the same time am willing to take it because the phone is so nice and the App Store is so large and easy to use. I just want my phone/PDA to work without having to fiddle and coax and the iPhone does a wondeful job of that. WM was really open but the process of putting stuff on your phone was completely irregular, disjointed, and time consuming. We will see how Apple’s approach works out in the long run as more mature applications are released. I already know of 3 applications they let reach the App store and then pulled (Netshare, BoxOffice(WTF?), and 3-Tuple). The first was against AT&T TOS, the last was a complete copy of another company’s board game Set but I have no idea why BoxOffice was pulled. It seems Apple should at the very least not screw up by letting applications through and then pulling them. If they are going to consistently miss the apps they want to block anyway why even have a review process?

The biggest negative to the iPhone 3G in my opinion is the battery life. It is not good. I unplug at 7am each morning and by the time I get home around 6:30pm I am at 10% power and seeing the warning and that’s using sensible screen brightness and allowing it to sleep quickly when not in use. My 8125 could last multiple days on occasion depending on usage while the iPhone needs far more frequent charges. You will need a car charger so factor that into the iPhone cost. If you happen to have an iPod accessory that charges iPods try that before buying something for the iPhone because it probably will at least charge. I have a Belkin FM transmitter for the iPod and though the tuner part doesn’t work it does deliver a charge to the iPhone.

Bottom Line

Overall the iPhone 3G has proved to be a huge step up from my old 8125 running Windows Mobile. It feels slightly more stable than WM and is very usable. I trust the email, contact, and calendar sync’ing completely while I distrusted it often with WM. Safari blows away both IE and OperaMini and I find myself following links in emails without hesitation and viewing web pages often because I have full confidence in being able to view sites effectively. The audio quality is very good. The App Store is awesome and I love having literally hundreds of useful applications available to install with 1 click and sync (and the apps are only going to get better as time goes on). The upgrade process for applications already installed is easy and effortless. Once a better SSH client shows up that last remaining advantage of WM in terms of applications (IMHO) will be gone. Finally, hopping on a wifi network is easy and transparent and when not on wifi the 3G speed is solid. The Atlanta area 3G coverage stretches out well past the perimeter, all the way to Hiram/Powder Springs, so I am never without it.

I’d recommend the iPhone 3G without hesitation to anyone looking for a cell phone in the smartphone category. I didn’t think I would like it as much as I do.

Until this point, I was using just my 17″ (1920 x 1200) laptop and nothing else. I really like the Macbook Pro keyboard and additionally, though I realize I am in a minority on this, I love the condensed format of laptop keyboards. I also love trackpads.

My reason for this is I do not have to move my hands for anything. Once you get used to the layout of a laptop keyboard I actually think you can move faster and you don’t have to move your hands at all to hit any key or any shortcut. Now if you are an accountant or similar or working with numbers all of the time then sure, a number pad probably makes sense, but otherwise it is wasted space. I can bang out numbers at almost full typing speed (~110 wpm) using the bar along the top and I don’t have to move my right hand over to a number pad.

Similarly, I love the trackpad because I don’t have to move at all to reach for a mouse. I’ve gotten to where I can use my thumbs for almost everything trackpad-wise.

So I had this new monitor and I didn’t want to dual screen (I use spaces which doesn’t play very nice with multiple screens). This meant either don’t use the monitor (which wasn’t an option after I gave it is test run) or buy a mouse and keyboard.

I ended up forking over some cash for the following:

Wireless Keyboard

Wireless Mighty Mouse

Yeah they are expensive but even though I rag on Apple stability sometimes I still love their stuff and these have turned out to be an excellent keyboard and mouse. Now my impressions of both.

The Keyboard

This took me a bit to get used to because the keys, unlike the MBP, don’t run flush into one another. There is a strip of aluminum between them and at first I was striking that aluminum a lot when typing at full speed. I like it now that I have adjusted to switching between those keyboards though. I bought this one not for the bluetooth but because the layout is identical in almost every way to the MBP keyboard layout. The keys feel very good and though I wasn’t looking for bluetooth it does work very well. This keyboard just looks cool too – no wires, super tiny, and it feels well made.

The Mighty Mouse

This is probably the best mouse I have ever used. It again looks very cool, all flush and smooth but that isn’t the important part. It gives you right, middle, and left clicking though you wouldn’t know that by just looking at it. You can also program the side buttons to do something when squeezed. The trackball lets you scroll vertically and horizontally with ease (this was a big reason why I got this mouse – I love the trackpad scrolling in all directions on the MBP and would have missed that functionality big time). It again has no wires, the bluetooth works perfectly and at surprisingly long range. I have used it to control while watching movies on the laptop (Netflix’s video player is actually pretty nice). Finally, this mouse is very precise and it also feels very well made. This thing is awesome. The 2 devices are very small so I can keep the mouse really close to the keyboard and don’t have to reach too much for it.

So the new mouse and keyboard work pretty well but I still believe my ideal setup would be essentially a MBP with no screen and the base of it wired up to send keyboard/mouse signals to another machine. Or if I could detach the screen temporarily when using the larger monitor. If anyone knows if either of these is possible please let me know

• Kernel panics. With Leopard i’ve had 8 – 10 kernel panics in total. They show you a fancy screen that tries to make it feel better than the windows blue and white but the effect is the same. This never happened a single time with my linux workstation (I never had to reboot it after a year+ of use) and it also almost never happened with any of the Windows machines i’ve had since Windows 98.
• Updates require restarts. OSX is no better than windows in this regard. The reminders are just as annoying as well.
• Proprietary file formats. The mac doesn’t place a line break (as recognized by Linux/Unix/Windows) in plain-text files so your data is completely useless (all collapsed into 1 line) until you run it through mac2unix on a Linux machine. This behavior is even worse than that of windows. Why does grab spit out .tiffs? Why do .picts exist?
• Proprietary file systems. HFS+ can’t be mounted in read/write on a Linux system. This was an unpleasant surprise when I grabbed my timemachine-formatted external drive to snag a file off a server. Why don’t they use ext3, xfs, zfs, or anything else that is already out there and works just as well?
• Case Sensitivity. I’ve already posted about this. Very frustrating to me that it was ever case insensitive and that the installer allowed me to select an option that prevented my macbook pro from running supported software.
• Spaces Bugs. I’ve had it happen a half dozen times where if you move away from your current “space” and then come back the applications in that space aren’t rendered. They are still running and their menus are visible, but there is no way to see the windows again. They have to be quit and restarted which really, really sucks for certain applications.
• Display Bugs. The brightness of the screen will not stay where I set it (max). It always slides to about 75% and I have found absolutely no way to prevent this from happening.
• Flimsy Screen. I wish the screen on the macbook pro stayed in place. It will move back/forward at the slightest touch. This doesn’t come into play too often but there have been multiple times where I had to sit up straighter than I would like because the screen kept closing.
• Key Shortcuts not on Keyboard. Loads of application list shortcuts involving shift, alt, command, etc and they all use weird symbols (sometimes different) that are not physically printed on the keyboard. An up arrow is shift, a inverted L-looking shape is alt. What is up with this? Windows and Linux do the far more intuitive thing of saying “shift” when they mean shift and “alt” when they mean alt.

I run this machine pretty hard and overall I still prefer the Mac over my previous machines but it is far from perfect. I’ve heard there is a mega-patch wrapping up testing for Leopard on the way and I hope that some of these issues will go away then.

In any case, a well-equipped nearly-new 17″ macbook pro recently freed up at the office and on the urging of my coworkers I took it home to try yesterday evening. I haven’t used a mac for any significant duration since the pre-OSX days so it has been a bit fun exploring an unfamiliar environment. Thought I would share my thoughts after banging on it for the first few hours.

Things I don’t like:

• Why the hell is the ‘fn’ key where CTRL should be?
• I currently prefer the xp/gnome style of maximize/user-pref for windows over the mac ‘zoom’ approach.
• Took me more than 5 minutes to find a subversion client that was useful. First one I grabbed didn’t support SSH making it completely useless.
• I keep trying to use CTRL for various shortcuts instead of ⌘
• …

Things I like:

• bash
• F9-F11
• Spotlight is incredible
• The display is excellent
• Text looks wonderful
• I prefer the dock greatly over the minimized window approach in xp/gnome

So whether its the OS or the newer hardware or a combination of the two this thing is pretty nice. My issues are all related to familiarity and given that Microsoft fumbled a bit with Vista perhaps this was the next logical step in terms of laptop anyway. It just happened sooner than I anticipated. The laptop is running tiger as it was purchased barely before leopard was released. Perhaps if it sticks with me i’ll have to pull the trigger on the upgrade.

We setup a big ball of servers for a new client recently and being around that equipment for a few days really made me appreciate the speed of those boxes. A fresh restart of JBoss and a complete redeploy of our non-trivial .ear takes 1.5 – 2 minutes on my office workstation (respectably equipped) but only 20 seconds on these new web servers. Queries against large row counts that take minutes on the workstation take seconds or fractions of a second on the new database hardware.

Doing fresh restarts and redeploys and testing against large data sets are only necessary occasionally on my local environment but wouldn’t it be great to not care?

That said, I think (and only half-jokingly) that Dell or another vendor should start offering server-based workstations. If not offering them assembled at least pushing the idea.

Here’s a diagram from the front:

Basically take 2 well-equipped 2U 2950s (or maybe the 3U 6950s if you really want to get crazy), strap them to a vent unit that pushes the hot air back behind your desk, attach legs to the bottom and put your monitor and peripherals right on top of the servers.

Here’s a view from the top:

The position of your desk would be pretty crucial as even though the air is being pushed out of the back those 2 machines being backed up against one another is going to generate some heat. You would probably want to either back the desk into a wall and cut a hole into the office of someone you don’t like or situate the desk against an exterior wall and cut a hole to the outside.

Though this is largely a joke, having 2 servers would be pretty excellent if you could figure out what to do about both the airflow and the noise. Dell’s servers, and maybe all others as well, sound like mini jets at startup and don’t quiet down too terribly much when running steady.

This past holiday season the price and my interest had finally changed enough to justify a purchase. I picked up one of the Black 30gb 5th generation iPods and after a couple months of use absolutely love it. The interface and aesthetic of the device combined with the intuitive and effective presentation of iTunes motivated me to clean up, organize, and find album art for the 20gb of so of mp3s I have collected over the years and listened to with various iterations of winamp. I’ve even purchased DRM-filled albums, games, and audio books on iTunes and despite my usual hatred of DRM and monopolistic corporations i’ve completely embraced the interaction of the iPod with iTunes and don’t at all mind that I am allowing a single vendor to control the way I organize and listen to music. That speaks volumes for the quality of these products.

That said, ownership of such a spacious and effective device has led me to become an avid listener of podcasts. The point of this post is largely to share the list of podcasts I currently enjoy an exceptional amount. Here it is in no particular order:

• Chicago GSB Postcast Series
• Comic Strip Live: Standup Comedy
• QDNow (this is a network of 3 – 5 minute podcast series covering various topics)
• ESPN: PTI (I never catch this when it runs on TV and the format is perfect for a podcast)
• HBR IdeaCast
• Manager Tools

Since I have never listened to podcasts on a regular basis, I can pull down years of content such that I won’t ever be able to work through all of it. These sure beat listening to the garbage radio stations covering Atlanta. I loved the 99x morning show when Fred Toucher was a part of the cast but it disbanded and went down the crapper when he left.