Icron Technologies has finally lifted the curtains on the first wireless USB 2.0 hub in the world which is based on an industry standard 802.11g radio. This hub is known as the WiRanger Cable Free USB 2.0 Hub, and it takes standard USB connectivity to the wireless realm, enabling you to hook up a myriad of USB devices such as printers, scanners, hard drives, digital cameras, and MP3 players to either PC or Macs throughout a building without going through the hassle and headache of connecting wires.

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Problem: You need hard drive space to store your vast downloaded legally purchased music and movie collection. Plus the tens of GB of photos your digital camera has spewed out over the years. Plus all of the documents, email archives and general digital detritus that are a feature of life with a PC.

You’ve also got at least a main PC and a laptop around the house that need access to that data, plus perhaps something to stream videos to the TV or HiFi, so something that plugs into a LAN would be nice.

You could buy a simple external hard drive. They’re cheap these days ($200 for 500GB) but take it from me - when you leave them on 24×7 for a few years they die. And when they do, the 0.5TB of data that was on there dies with them. Not fun

If you’re like me you only need to learn that lesson once which is why I went shopping for something that had RAID capabilities. What that means in non-geek speak is that the data is stored on many disks instead of one so you get redundancy. When a disk dies, you can just replace it with a new one and no data is lost.

I also had 2 machines sitting in a cupboard making noise and heat to do nothing but serve up the various drives I’d bought over the years. It was about time to upgrade and replace all those machines and disks with one box.

After a fairly in depth look at the market for home NAS devices I settled on the Infrant ReadyNAS NV+. So what is it? Well the short version is that it’s a box you fill with disks, connect to your network and forget about. You can buy it bare to put disks in yourself, or you can get pre-populated versions with up to 2TB. For details, read on.

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There’s this one keyboard in my house that is just nasty. I mean, the years of food, drink, greasy fingers, and not being cleaned didn’t do anything to helps its cause. It’s pretty much beyond cleaning at this point, unless you were to take out each key, individually clean it, then reassemble it. At that point, I think we can all agree it’s time for a new one. Maybe, just maybe, I’ll pick up the Washable Keyboard from Unotron. It won’t quite clean itself, but it makes it easier for you to do it yourself.
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OCZ Technology has been releasing its fair share of innovative and ultra-high performance memory products in the past, and this time the OCZ Trifecta SD card series has come under the spotlight, offering a unique three-in-one solution for those who deal with a myriad of devices. What makes the OCZ Trifecta SD card stand out from the rest is its form factor - it acts as a standard SD card to cater for devices such as digital cameras and digital video camcorders, but for smaller devices such as newer cellphones and portable media players, a microSD card is required and the OCZ Trifecta easily fills this need by removing the microSD portion of the card. Whenever you need to transfer data to a computer or are in need of an impromptu USB flash drive, just remove the bottom part of the OCZ Trifecta to reveal a USB connector and plug it into any available USB port.

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Thanks, Apple. Even though you’re a bit late with this, I still appreciate it. You see, today Apple released a new feature for iTunes called “Complete My Album.” It’s kinda sorta self explanatory, but not really. Read on if you want to know more.
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You may remember a bit ago I blogged about a hunt for a Tablet PC. Well, the hunt is complete.

Thanks mostly in part to a commenter we’ll refer to as -dOc, turned us on to John Hill (the CEO) and his site Allegiance Technology Partners. All they sell are pen based, mobile, and tablet machines. He really knows his stuff and is easy to work with.

They have all the big labels, and a few of the smaller ones at their beck and call (have you ever heard of Sahara?!).

After numerous (and likely annoying) phone calls and emails on my part, John, (and please welcome their newest sales associate Hal) helped me through the decision process. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m not a whiz at wireless networks, and when mine started acting up a few days ago, it was pretty annoying to fix it. I tried resetting it, changing some settings (that only made it worse), changing IP addresses and odd dances. In the end, I never actually fixed it. I merely swapped the router with another one I had lying around, and fortunately that worked for me. Now, the Wi-Spy Spectrum Analyzer might not have fixed my problem specifically, but it could’ve and I’m sure it can fix other people’s problems.
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You gotta love those gadgets where you go: Man, I wish I thought of that one. It seems dead simple because it is, only you weren’t smart enough to start mass producing and over charging for it. Now, the Laptop Sunshade is sort’ve one of those products. I’ve definitely thought of some sort of shield to block the light when using a laptop outside, but this little contraption seems to actually be a rather efficient way of doing it. It’ll work a little better than propping up a newspaper or map on a table. Both solutions will get you some odd looks though.
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