Frequent travelers know that J.W. Marriot’s line of hotels offer nothing but the finest in all aspects, and the hotel chain has gone one up on its competitors by keeping up with the times in terms of technology, offering “ultra-adaptable” rooms that definitely puts a regular room to shame. These new suites come furnished with a Plug-In Panel that is smart enough to detect virtually any device you attach automatically. The list of compatible devices are far and wide, ranging from MP3 players and iPods to digital cameras, notebook PCs, and even DVD players. A 32″ widescreen LCD display rounds off the ultra-adaptable room’s function by offering split screen views that enable you to work on your computer while keeping up with the latest in news simultaneously.

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You can’t deny that we’re living in a pill popping generation these days, where there is a solution to virtually every ailment (of course, you’ll have to discount diseases like hepatitis, AIDS, cancer, and its ilk). Of course, there are also others who pop pills for the wrong reason, of whom Pac Man is largely responsible. Nah, we’re kidding. Anyhows, to get on with the show, this disturbing trend has now surfaced amongst computer users, but with good reason. The all pervasive USB flash drive is now available in the classic red and white pill design, but of course the only thing this pill does is store your data and not meant for personal consumption.

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If you’re a proud owner of Apple’s PowerBook, iBook, and MacBook Pro computers, what better way to give it a performance boost than upgrading it with a brand new slimline, slot loading Blu-ray drive? This upgrade solution is provided by Fastmac’s new Blu-ray optical drive upgrade, offering users with up to 50GB of storage space - more than enough for the average home user when it comes to making backup of important data. To put things into perspective, what can 50GB hold? That amount of space will be enough to store up to 60 days’ worth of music four hours of High Definition quality video, approximately 50,000 JPEG photos and tens of thousands of RAW images.

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Samsung seems to be a company that has dipped its fingers into so many divisions and sections with much success - just take a look at the array of LCD and plasma TVs, cellphones, digital cameras, flash memory, MP3 and MP4 players, and computers that flood the market bearing the Samsung name on the outside and Samsung components on the inside. Those familiar with computer hardware will be pleased to know that Samsung has recently debuted its latest addition in the SpinPoint line of hard drives, offering unprecedented quietness despite operating at high speeds.

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I took delivery of my Nintendo Wii a couple of weeks ago and it is an awesome piece of kit, this next gadget should of come with the Wii or at least of been an official extra but no another company had to come up with the common sense to make a USB Charger for the Wii Remote.

The idea is so simple, the remote control docking station connects to the USB port at the back of the Wii and when the remote is not in use (in our house that is when we are asleep) dock the remote and let it charge. On the downside it does mean you need to leave the Wii turned on all the time, either that of connect it to a USB socket on your always on PC (or is that just me that never seems to turn the PC off).

You can get the Wii remote USB charger from Rare Mono Shop for $29.

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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