Fat Firestarter

I'd previously blogged about the AppFire Firestater and got a comment about it being a tad bulky and its size would mean it would block devices from being able to be plugged into the neighbouring USB port.

It is bulky, it does block access to the neighbouring USB port and I was fine with swapping USB devices for a while, but I use AppFire Firestarter so often that it was becoming a pain to keep having to shut everything down on Firestarter to unplug it so I could use another device.

A quick rummage around my box of cables (all geeks have boxes of cables, right?) and I found this:

a very short USB extension cable which means I can plug in multiple USB devices and is still small enough for me to take my Firestarter everywhere.

Not the most exciting blogpost I know, but shows there are ways around Firestarter's slightly chubby form factor if you need to run multiple USB devices side by side.

I don't know where I got the cable from (would have been bundled with some other USB device I purchased), but if you don't have one then you can buy them separately for around £1.

Firestarter - Part 1

About a week ago I received delivery of my AppFire Firestarter, which is a portable (USB) wiki appliance that runs Atlassian Confluence and allows peer to peer and remote sync with a Confluence server.

This post is about the basics, but I'll continue the series with how to get the complete Atlassian stack on Firestarter.

For those that don't know what Firestarter is, this is what one looks like:



I love the simplicity of this device, you plug it in and it just works and is a great way of giving you offline access to a Confluence wiki, or even a sandbox for development.

When you plug it in this is what you see in Finder:

then you just double-click "firestarter-start-stop.jar" and wait until you see:

You click the "localhost" link and you're up and running.

Sarah Maddox has a more detailed write up on her blog, but my post is just a starter for 10 as this series is about getting the entire stack on your Firestarter.

The New Thing

I said I'd keep you posted over at (Time for Something New) on what I was up to and never one to break my word, here's the news.

I've signed with AppFusions, which is an Atlassian partner specializing in everything Atlassian and integrating Atlassian products such as Confluence and JIRA with 3rd party systems.

The AppFusions team are "off the chart smart" and if you are looking for collaboration solutions, project management solutions, helpdesk solutions, content management solutions (we do more, my brain just melted trying to think of everything we do) then you should contact AppFusions.

I am truly privileged to be part of this team and hope I can bring as much to the table as they do.