I bought a Buffalo TeraStation 2TB NAS box the other day. It arrived today - Wohoo!
The NAS box has 4 x 500mb drives in an external box (see above). The box has an ethernet port at the back allowing it to be plugged into the router and accessed across my entire home network.
The 4 x 500mb drives come pre-configured as RAID 5 (giving approx 3 x 500gb usable space) but it can also be configured as RAID 0 or RAID 1 through a simple web interface.
Check out the bottom of the window above - 1.36TB Available!
I’m now busily copying my music, video and photo collections onto it so I can free up that space on my laptop.
The drive is refreshingly quiet, has a simple web-based configuration tool and took all of about 10 minutes from unpacking to mounted on my Mac desktop!
Thanks Branedy for the recommendation - hopefully this will work better than the Western Digital MyBook I bought a while back which was a DOA!
As a follow-on from yesterday’s post about hacking inkjet printer cartridges - in retrospect, a much better solution would be for printer manufacturers to make recyclable, transparent ink cartridges which warn when your ink is running low but only stop printing when you actually run out of ink!
Now what are the chances of that happening?
Ars Technica have an article about something I have long suspected, inkjet printers are filthy, lying thieves!
The article quotes figures from an Epson sponsored study (!) which show that inkjt printers regularly report that they are out of ink when there can be as much as 60% of the ink left in the cartridge.
Not surprisingly Epson printers came out of the study best with figures of 20% of ink remaining when the cartridge reports empty.
The really annoying thing about this is that all the manufacturers are aware of it but they do nothing to fix it. If a cartridge reports as empty, the printer will cease to print, even if there is plenty of ink left.
Does anyone know, is there a way to get around this (apart from buying a laser printer)?
Philips sent me a wireless headset to try out during the week.
It is a bluetooth headset with a few funky features:
- The microphone is about 6mm long (as opposed to the boom mikes on many headsets which come right around to your mouth)
- It has a separate audio jack/bluetooth dongle so you can plug it into your mp3 player and listen to your tunes wirelessly
- You can use it with your phone and mp3 player simultaneously!
- It is rechargeable and comes with a charger
It is also supposed to be able to connect to your computer but I couldn’t verify that - on my Mac, I couldn’t get it to maintain a connection and my Vaio couldn’t see it at all (having said that, that is more likely a Vista problem than a problem with this headset, as the Vaio can’t see any bluetooth device!).
With people concerned about the health and safety issues connected with heavy mobile phone usage - a bluetooth headset seems like an ideal device as it allows you to keep the mobile at a distance from your head.
See more here and here.
Philips tell me it retails for between €90 and €130.
I took a couple of close-up photos of my bookcase to compare the quality of the cameras in the Nokia N70 and the Nokia E65
Here is a copy of the photo the N70 took:
and here is the E65’s photo of the same bookcase (in high quality mode):
As you can see from these images, the N70 photo is higher quality! The colours from the N70 are richer and there is a lot of noise in the image from the E65.
The fact that the N70 takes better photos than the E65 is strange given that the N70 was released well over a year ago and the E65 has just come out.
My Nokia E65 arrived today and it is even nicer in reality than the site would have you believe!
My first impressions of the phone are very positive although I did get a fright when iSync told me it doesn’t support the E65 - eeek, how am I going to synchronise all my contacts and calendars? Fortunately after a quick search I found that Nokia have a downloadable script which will update iSync to synchronise with the E65.
The handset is beautiful (I went for the Mocca model) and the screen resolution is amazing (240 x 320) in a phone so small (105 x 49 x 15.5 mm).
The desktop and keyboard are extremely well thought out giving quick and easy access to the most frequently used functionality.
The phone is also very responsive. Previous Nokia models would take one or two seconds to open a new blank text. The E65 opens it almost instantly.
Where I am based in Rushbrook, the Vodafone network coverage is poor but the E65 seems to handle the low coverage better than either the N70 or the E61. There is a notable improvement in call quality.
The built-in wifi, one of the main reasons I decided on the E65, has been working exceptionally well. Despite working very closely with Truphone support we were unable to get the E61 to receive incoming calls on my US landline number. However, the E65 hs no trouble getting calls on my US number (so far!).
The only downsides of the phone I have found, so far, are the lack of games on the phone and the poor quality of the camera. But, at least it does have a camera. This was another factor in my deciding to buy this model.
Overall, I’m extremely happy with the phone and would recommend it to anyone.
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