Ed's Tech Tips

A terabyte is a 1000 gigabytes and can be yours for less than $250. That's amazing! Storage prices have come down so much in the past couple years, you really do not have an excuse to be backing up data. About a year or two ago, hard drives were about $1 per gigabyte and you needed multiple drives to reach a capacity of 1 terabyte. Now you can get a single external terabyte drive for less than 25 cents a gigabyte.

I have recently purchased a Maxtor OneTouch 4 Plus and a LaCie Big Disk Extreme +. Both are external drives and support USB 2.0 and Firewire 400 connections. The LaCie also supports Firewire 800. If you are on a Mac, use Firewire. It offers you a faster sustained data transfer that is less CPU intensive than USB. 

You can daisy chain the drives together or attach a camcorder to the drive to import video. LaCie even offers a mini rack to stack multiple drives. Why would you want multiple terabyte drives? If you do a lot of video or photography, you need a lot of space. I upgraded from a 320 GB Maxtor to the 1 TB Lacie for backing up my MacBook via Time Machine and to have more room to work on video files since I only have about 12 GB of free space on my internal 160 GB drive to spare.

The LaCie drives comes pre-formatted for Macs with HFS+. The Lacie is a very solid and heavy drive. I do not think it would be very suitable for traveling. It has a auto power feature to be more energy efficient.   It makes a little more noise when it is running than the 320 GB Maxtor that it replaced, but not much more and only when it is spinning up. The Maxtor 1 TB comes formatted for Windows computers. 

However, if you have some extra money the ideal solution is the Drobo. It is a small black box that holds four SATA 3.5 inch hard drives of any size and manufacturer. It offers redundant and almost infinite storage better than RAID 5, because it does allow you to mix and match drives of different sizes. It also easily rebuilds failed or replaced drives. For example, you can start out with a 160 GB,  2 250 GB drives and a 320 GB hard drive. When the 160 GB drive gets full the Drobo will let you know and you can swap it out and replace with a larger drive. You do not need to shut down the device, disconnect it or anything else. Drobo keeps on running and serving data. No additional software or drivers are necessary. The few downsides are that it is expensive at $450 for an empty enclosure. It only supports USB 2.0 and the network interface is sold separately for another $200.

 

 

 

I just discovered the Jing Project this past week. It is a project of TechSmith, the developers of the popular Camtasia Studio and SnagIt screen capture programs for Windows. The Jing Project is for both Windows and Macs. It allows for screen captures and screencasting videos. The cool thing about Jing is how easy it makes it to share the videos you create. It is a simple process of capturing the screen, uploading the video and sending the link. The video above does a great job of describing the project which is currently free and I hope it remains so. I do not need to create screen captures that often, but when I do I appreciate something that is easy to use and share, such as Jing.

This is a way cool music video that uses Mac OS X as the set or stage for the video. You have to see it to fully appreciate. It looks like it took a lot of work to create. It was made by a digital filmmaker named Dennis Liu. The song is by the  The Bird And The Bee and is called "Again & Again". 

Last Friday night I watched the latest Marvel comic superhero inspired movie "Iron Man" and I was not disappointed. From the special effects to the sound track, this is a very well done movie. The story line was predictable, but the dialogue was clever and witty and the acting superb. Robert Downey, Jr. is cast as billionaire playboy genius weapons developer who has a change of heart and becomes a smart mouth hero in a cool looking metallic body that can fly at supersonic speeds and fire missiles. Gwyneth Paltrow, Terrence Hill and an almost unrecognizable Jeff Bridges are in the movie too. The 2 hours and six minutes went by pretty quickly and left the audience wanting more which will surely follow in a sequel or two. As for technology and gadgetry, 077's Q would be envious. Even Tony Stark's 3D halographic computer interface complete with virtual trash can for deleting files is cool. A lot of attention was paid to the details in every part of this film.  

Find out more about the movie at Yahoo's Movie web site.

I was shopping in Whole Foods the other week and remembered I needed deodorant. Normally I use Mennen, but Whole Foods does not carry that brand. Instead I discovered Tom's of Maine's line of deodorants. I knew of Tom's toothpaste, but I did not know that they made deodorant.

One of the items that struck me was that the deodorant is chemical free and uses hops to control bacteria growth which causes the bad odor in the first place and not the sweat like some peple wrongly believe. I used to brew my own beer and know about hops, the cone shaped flower that gives beer it's bitterness which balances out the sweetness of the barely malt. It's use is two fold: adds flavor and acts as a preservative. One of the hoppiest types of beers is I.P.A. or India Pale Ale. It gets it names from the fact that it was originally specially brewed in England for transport around the great horn of Africa (this was in the days before the Suez canal) to India. Extra hops were added to keep it fresh upon it's arrival months later in India. You can still find the popular style made by many microbreweries today and is one of my favorites.  

In addition to the use of hops, Tom’s of Maine signed a contract in 2005 that will convert 100% of their electricity consumption to wind energy supplied by Green-e, a certified, nationally recognized symbol of independently verified renewable energy.  This contract will eliminate production of 1.5 million pounds of carbon dioxide emissions annually—the equivalent of planting 214 acres of trees!  

Tom's also participates in or promotes a number of other environmental  and recycling practices and policies, but does the deodorant work? Well, so far so good. I tried the lemongrass fragrance, which smells quite pleasant and I have not had any complaints from my wife or co-workers.

I like the fact that Tom's uses natural ingredients and makes the most of technology in not only producing their products, but insuring that they are recyclable and using renewable forms of energy to produce them. They are successful at doing it and I hope more companies will follow their example. Now I'm going to give Tom's toothpaste a try. 

The plastic case on my trusty longtime Casio watch which holds the metal pin which connects to the strap broke this past weekend. My wrist felt naked without it. I do not recall how long I have had the watch. I've replaced the bands numerous times and I think I replaced the batteries once, however, now it was time to find a replacement.

I usually prefer function over flash and just wanted the basics, so I was browsing through the watches at my local Target and was drawn to the Casios. They have proven functional, durable and reasonably priced. Plus, what geek can resist a company that sells solar, calculator or television remote control wristwatches. But as I said earlier, I really just wanted the basics, but I was attracted to a watch with a large face with easy to read digits, date, day of the week, stopwatch, multiple alarms, water resistance and world time. But the big selling feature of the Waveceptor watch is its ability to automaticall set it itself:

Several times a day the watch receives the official US government time via a time calibration signal from the atomic transmitter in Ft. Collins, CO, eliminating the worry about changing your watch for Daylight Saving Time. Our atomic watches also feature a perpetual calendar, eliminating the need to adjust your watch for calendar month to month inconsistencies and Leap Year. 

So far so good, but time will be th real test. Hopefully, it will hold up as well as my previous watch. 

 

 

I bought my granddaughter a cool new toy this past weekend. It's the Fridge Farm Magnetic Animal Set from LeapFrog. I knew she liked to play with refrigerator magnets and when I saw this I thought she woul dreally enjoy it and she does. From the LeapFrog web page:

 

Practice matching skills and exercise the imagination. Inquisitive toddlers discover how to pair the front halves of farm animals with the back halves—forming five complete critters—or mix up the magnetic-backed pieces to create lots of imaginary animals.

Every mix or match introduces animal names, sounds, fun facts and lively learning songs. Play with the Fridge Farm set on the refrigerator or floor, or take it on the go. The pieces fit neatly in a compartment on the back. A built-in handle makes it easy to carry.

This is an award winning toy that cost's $15 from Target and is well worth the money. My grandaughter enjoys the music and carrying the pieces back and forth between the fridge and the dishwasher. When she is older and starting to learn the alphabet wewill check out the Fridge Phonics Magnetic Set.

I really like the LeapFrog toys. They are well built and durable, plus they combine technology, fun and learning in a well balanced package.