Tag Archive for Devices

Make your own SSD

Quad-CF PCI Controller from Addonics — Brett mentioned this in his comment on my macbook air, what a cool little product, add an SSD to any PC.

Wireless-enchanced DS?

Just ordered Amazon.com: Advance Wars: Days of Ruin: Video Games based on the NYTimes review today. Have to wonder — when will we see a DS with wireless integration like the Kindle? I don’t buy games that often, cartridges and manuals are a pain, why can’t I just download the games wirelessly?

Got Drobo working

A Little Ludwig Goes A Long Way: Not too happy with my Drobo — I did finally get a support call with Drobo and they got it working. I had to go twiddle a BIOS setting having to do with legacy USB support. The Drobo folks claim this is the BIOS manufacturer’s fault and assert that other mass storage USB devices will fail as well. However I have had no problems with a variety of generic USB housings and with a LaCie box so I don’t think the Drobo folks have this really figured out yet. Additionally the Drobo software decided to grab drive M for their use which was bad as I already had a network drive mapped to M. So that was chunky and painful.

The box seems to work fine now tho.

MIDI drumpads and other stuff

Midi Madness — some wildly cool devices here that I would never use.

Power strips

Why do all power strips have to be so ugly? I saw one in a downtown window that appeared to be a tower of cast stained concrete and it looked great. Why can’t you buy these anywhere? I am sick of the crappy plastic choices available. There is innovation to permit more transformers to plug in, and innovation to be more “green”, but why can’t these things look better? Is molded plastic really the only choice?

Stuff I Want But Do Not Need — Gadgets

Gadget put options

TechForward: Guaranteed Buybacks for Consumer Electronics — via Marginal Revolution. Ideal for someone like me who surfs the wave of the latest technology.

Stuff I want but don't need — grabbag

Absolute Black TVs

Pioneer’s Kuro Plasma Will Deliver Absolute Black — Contrast Ratio Is ‘Officially Irrelevant’ | Gadget Lab from Wired.com — I’d like this, I hate the grayish emissions from most of my screens.

Too bad for them that their black has already been trumped — new “blackest” material — “You could think of a material that basically collects all the light that falls into it” — oh my gosh we are manufacturing black holes now, I knew this nanotech stuff was dangerous.

Not too happy with my Drobo

Data Robotics, Inc. | Knowledge Base — these things are getting fab reviews but

  • my PC won’t boot with it attached — apparently there is some bios tweak i can do — yuck
  • and even when i can see it, the pc doesn’t recognize it as a drive

the hardware seems nice but this is too much trouble.

Kindle hacking

Reversing Everything: Hacking the Kindle part 3: root shell and runtime system — minesweeper! photo viewer! screencap! easter egg! all kinds of great stuff here.

Stuff I want but don't need — musical instrument edition

Christmas gift awesomeness

  • The Kindle is awesome. The awesomeness is due to the wireless delivery of books. And the fact that I can browse Amazon at my PC and direct books to my Kindle with one click. (Similarly, the Unbox/Tivo integration is awesome for the same reason — Amazon is silently building a great asset here). The book selection is soooo much broader than that for the Sony Reader.
  • Call of Duty 4 is awesome. the ranking/challenge system keeps you engaged. Haven’t cracked the UT box yet, so entranced with COD4 – must get to 5-star general.
  • Stupid little RC helicopters that we got are fun. Available from lots of vendors. Pretty uncontrollable, watch out lamps!

Everything else is awesome too! I will blog it all in the fullness of time.

LG Viewty config

Probably crazy but we are trying to coerce an LG Viewty cellphone to work on ATTWireless — good tips here on how to get internet configured — Re: LG KU990 (Viewty) – Setting up Internet? – LG – Wireless Forums from AT&T

Stuff I want but do not need — music edition

Stuff I want but do not need — gear edition

Sony gets it right for me

My Sony – Reader broke, Brad Feld has documented my support experience. Thankfully Sony was responsive and finally got it right, I have a brand new reader now and can get back to using it. I really like the device, and hopefully Sony will get the whole purchase and support solution right for everyone.

Grabbag of useful sites

Hard disk failure

Via Rahul at JB, All Things Distributed: On the Reliability of Hard Disks. Fascinating. A 6-10% failure rate for hard disks, wow.  Another great argument for redudant storage.

Stuff I should have blogged a while ago

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