My MyBook World Edition II Fun 😀 - Prelude

Feb 19, 08

So, with the recent announcement of CompUSA’s closing, I have been swinging by there on occasion to check out the deals on whatever stuff there is. I recently purchased a MyBook World Edition II 1TB model and have been having a lot of fun with it. They were down to 299 which isn’t ridiculously cheap, but it’s far, far below the retail of… whatever it was. Something crazy like 450 i think. I found them several places online for around 320ish. I went by the other day and they are now down to 257 which is a pretty sweet deal.

So, I thought I would read up about my purchase and it turns out that this device is actually quite configurable. It is equipped with ~200MHz processor and 32MB of ram, from what I have read online. cat /proc/cpuinfo shows the processor as a ARM926EJ-Sid(wb) rev 5 (v5l) and meminfo shows 30032 Total. So, definitely not winning any speed awards, but more than adequate for what it’s shipped to accomplish.

With my major goal accomplished, I had some hope that I would be able to ‘hack’ the device a little. A very little bit of searching on google revealed this page, among many others. cat /proc/version shows I’m running Linux version 2.6.17.14 (clarke@mccoy.oxsemi.com.asic.oxsemi.com) (gcc version 4.1.0) #1 PREEMPT Mon Mar 26 12:36:33 BST 2007. Armed with my little research, I decided I had the following goals for this device:

  1. Serve as a mirrored storage point for all files I wanted to manually backup.
  2. Automatically download torrents from a directory I would put torrents into
  3. Automatically download predefined lists of videos and convert them to various formats
  4. Consume schedule video from my PCTV2GO and convert it to various formats
  5. Download predefined lists of blogs etc I wanted to read and convert them to audio.
  6. Serve as a print server? Maybe print out predefined documents for consumption.

As you can see, a lot of this revolves around creating custom media to consume. I’m not a big fan of pirated video/music. I personally buy all my DVD and CD media I want to consume. I do believe that torrenting broadcast television is not illegal, however I want to stream the video from my PCTV2GO for my broadcast shows and record them from there. Once this is complete, I have thought about purchasing something with a little more streaming power to perform something similar to what Orb does. I’m not sure I want to make that kind of investment, especially if I can have this converting all of the information I want to consume in ways that are friendly to me and my devices. I’ll let you know how it goes. 😁

PS. I recently spoke to a manager at my local CompUSA about this announcement and confirmed both of the Jacksonville, FL stores will remain open under the new deal.