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Improved technology leads to a wide range of drives - The Boston Globe
Store your data in a flash
Improved technology leads to a wide range of drives - but which suits your needs?
The Patriot Xporter XT Boost. The Patriot Xporter XT Boost.
By John M. Guilfoil
Globe Correspondent / August 16, 2009
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Punch cards, diskettes, CD-R disks, and now tiny, portable USB flash drives. The way we store our vital personal data - and downloaded photos and music - has evolved faster than arguably the computer, itself.
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A decade ago, it would have taken three to nine diskettes to store the equivalent of a single song downloaded from iTunes. Then we thought we had it made when writable CD-ROM disks came to be - each could fit dozens of songs. But today, a USB flash drive can fit hundreds, even thousands of songs on one little stick.
But which brand or style flash drive should you choose? Floppy diskettes and CD-Rs were simple, and largely the same brand to brand. Where technology has improved, diversity has emerged: Now, there are flash drives in a wide range of storage capacities that serve different purposes. Some are ultrasecure and encrypted, others are waterproof, and still others are inexpensive and provide good value.
There’s also a good amount of junk out there, with sliding parts that tend to fail and USB connectors that break and snap off, ruining your drive and putting your data at risk.
Size is also a consideration. If you’re only backing up text documents and spreadsheets, then you don’t need much space. Standard 1-gigabyte or 2-gigabyte drives will be more than sufficient. If you’re backing up your photos - and you have a lot of photos - an 8-gigabyte drive should be all you need. But if you’re saving MP3 music files, you may need a 16-gigabyte or 32-gigabyte drive. Flash drives are not (yet) practical for backing up co
Top 10 Travel Gadgets Under $50 - Frugal Traveler Blog - NYTimes.com
Top 10 Travel Gadgets Under $50
In my romantic travel daydreams, I imagine myself marching off into the hills of Patagonia with nothing in my backpack but a change of underwear and a piece of flint. In reality, however, I — and most travelers today — bring gadgets. Lots of gadgets.
From iPods to noise-canceling headphones, from digital cameras to GPS trackers, they take up space, can consume electricity and distract us from actually enjoying the trip. Gadgets also tend to be expensive, small and easy-to-lose. But gadgets can be both useful and cheap — they can help even budget travelers make the most of their adventures. Here is a list of the 10 gadgets, all under $50, that I either own or have been lusting after.
Leatherman
1. Last summer, when I was hitchhiking across northern Cyprus, a British couple wanted to give me a ride from our hotel. The problem: Their car wouldn’t start. Luckily, I was carrying a Leatherman Skeletool CX, which has pliers, which I used to tighten the battery leads and get the car going. Now I don’t go anywhere without a multitool. I’ve used it to slice goat cheese in Monaco and reattach a suitcase wheel in Vilnius. This week, however, I’m planning to lay aside my Skeletool for the Leatherman Juice C2, which not only costs less ($31.99 at Amazon) but has more tools, including a corkscrew.
Fenix LD01
2. Caving in the Black Hills of South Dakota. Camping in Oregon. Reading a book on an overnight train from Istanbul to Bucharest. Couldn’t have done any of that without a flashlight. Now, forget about old-school incandescent bulbs — LEDs are the way to go, and from the reviews I’ve read, Cree brand LEDs are both more powerful and less expensive than other brands. The Fenix LD01 ($42 from Amazon) is ridiculously tiny but throws off 80 lumens from a single AAA-powered Cree bulb.
Memorex Money Clip Flash Drive
3. Pickpocketing is a major concern of travelers, whether they’re carrying loads of cash or 50 euros that need to last the next two weeks. My solution is to put aside the wallet, ofte
Top 10 Travel Gadgets Under $50 - Frugal Traveler Blog - NYTimes.com
Top 10 Travel Gadgets Under $50
In my romantic travel daydreams, I imagine myself marching off into the hills of Patagonia with nothing in my backpack but a change of underwear and a piece of flint. In reality, however, I — and most travelers today — bring gadgets. Lots of gadgets.
From iPods to noise-canceling headphones, from digital cameras to GPS trackers, they take up space, can consume electricity and distract us from actually enjoying the trip. Gadgets also tend to be expensive, small and easy-to-lose. But gadgets can be both useful and cheap — they can help even budget travelers make the most of their adventures. Here is a list of the 10 gadgets, all under $50, that I either own or have been lusting after.
Leatherman
1. Last summer, when I was hitchhiking across northern Cyprus, a British couple wanted to give me a ride from our hotel. The problem: Their car wouldn’t start. Luckily, I was carrying a Leatherman Skeletool CX, which has pliers, which I used to tighten the battery leads and get the car going. Now I don’t go anywhere without a multitool. I’ve used it to slice goat cheese in Monaco and reattach a suitcase wheel in Vilnius. This week, however, I’m planning to lay aside my Skeletool for the Leatherman Juice C2, which not only costs less ($31.99 at Amazon) but has more tools, including a corkscrew.
Fenix LD01
2. Caving in the Black Hills of South Dakota. Camping in Oregon. Reading a book on an overnight train from Istanbul to Bucharest. Couldn’t have done any of that without a flashlight. Now, forget about old-school incandescent bulbs — LEDs are the way to go, and from the reviews I’ve read, Cree brand LEDs are both more powerful and less expensive than other brands. The Fenix LD01 ($42 from Amazon) is ridiculously tiny but throws off 80 lumens from a single AAA-powered Cree bulb.
Memorex Money Clip Flash Drive
3. Pickpocketing is a major concern of travelers, whether they’re carrying loads of cash or 50 euros that need to last the next two weeks. My solution is to put aside the wallet, ofte
Kindle, iPhone upgrades not worth the hefty price - The Boston Globe
Kindle, iPhone upgrades not worth the hefty price
By Hiawatha Bray
Globe Staff / June 25, 2009
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They’re superbly engineered marvels of technology, and I couldn’t imagine buying either of them.
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Photos Compare wireless plans, pricing, phones
They’re the two coolest gadgets that have recently come this way: Apple Inc.’s iPhone 3G S and the Kindle DX electronic book, from Amazon.com. Both are upgrades of highly successful products; neither is enough of an improvement to make sensible people grab for their wallets.
Consider the Kindle DX, an upgrade of an upgrade. Just three months ago, Amazon replaced the relatively chunky, first-generation e-reader with the sleek new Kindle 2. As with the original, a user could instantly download electronic books from Amazon. The then-new Kindle boasted a particularly slick new feature: text-to-speech software that would read your downloaded books out loud.
How has the Kindle DX improved on the Kindle 2? Well, it’s bigger, which makes for a more comfortable read. Newspapers come across especially well. It made The Wall Street Journal look splendid.
The new Kindle also switches to widescreen mode when you tilt it to one side, an idea made popular by the iPhone. And the DX boosts storage from a potential 1,500 books to 3,500.
Still, the Kindle 2 was no bargain at $359, and the DX is pricier at $489. Nothing they’ve added to the DX is worth that much money. Indeed, I’m skeptical about the entire Kindle concept. Aside from the price, they’re too big for comfortable commuting. The thought of leaving one behind on the subway is almost unbearable.
And there’s a safer electronic alternative: the cellphone. Most of us own one already, they easily fit in a pocket, and the bright, sharp screens on today’s smartphones make for decent readability. Amazon gets it; the company has created Kindle software that runs on Apple’s iPhone.
Kindle software even runs on the original iPh
First their suits, then their earplugs - The Boston Globe
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First their suits, then their earplugs
June 14, 2009
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Beach season is here, and all that watery fun can leave children with a serious case of swimmer's ear, an infection of the skin covering the outer ear canal caused by water trapped in the ears during swimming or bathing. It's uncomfortable and painful, two things you don't want to deal with on vacation.
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ClearEars earplugs can help parents avoid the problem. Made of an FDA-approved polymer that absorbs water from the ears, ClearEars provide relief in 5 to 10 minutes. More travel-friendly than ear drops, a package of five pairs costs about $7 at CVS and other drugstores, and online at www .clearears.com.
gdgt
gdgt is the new consumer electronics site by Peter Rojas and Ryan Block -- the guys behind Engadget and Gizmodo. We're still prepping things (no, this isn't the final site!), and with a little luck we'll be out in the first half of 2009. In the mean time, we've got a weekly podcast you can listen to, subscribe below!
Feel free to leave your email address if you want to be notified when we launch in full. You can also reserve your user name in advance, but it'll be on a first come first serve basis. (If someone else requested the same name before or if for some reason we just can't offer it, we'll let you know.)
Oh, and don't worry, we will never, ever send anything junky to your email.
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You can also follow Peter here (blog, Twitter), Ryan here (blog, Twitter), and any gdgt updates here.
gdgt roundtable - Palm Pre
Posted Jun 12, 2009
We've all been waiting for this show a long time -- years it feels like. Yeah, this week it's all about the Palm Pre. We're going to dig deep on webOS, the Pre, the Palm reboot that brought them into being, and even on how the newly announced iPhone 3G S and $99 iPhone 3G might affect Palm's plans.
Joining us this week with their thoughts and impressions are the one and only Leo Laporte and Engadget Mobile's own Chris Ziegler. But stick around until the end, because we're also going to take a look way back to 2007 in a bonus segment with our old pal Josh Topolsky about the open letter the three of us wrote Palm.
Hosts: Peter Rojas and Ryan Block
Guests: Leo Laporte, Chris Ziegler, Josh Topolsky
Producer: Trent Wolbe
Music: Mux Mool - Night Court, Michna - Triple Chrome Dipped, courtesy Ghostly International and RCRD LBL
Download: MP3 | AAC
Subscribe: iTunes | Zune | MP3 | AAC
gdgt weekly 041 - 06.06.2009
Posted Jun 06, 2009
Between Palm's big launch, E3, and WWDC right around the corner, this was clearly a massive week for the gadget world. So we're digging into the Pre -- but only a little, since you can expect a roundtable on
The Smartphone’s Rapid Rise From Gadget to Tool to Necessity - NYTimes.com
Smartphone Rises Fast From Gadget to Necessity
By STEVE LOHR
In today’s recession-racked economy, penny-pinching is a national pastime. But people are still opening their wallets for smartphones.
Sales of BlackBerrys, iPhones and other smartphone models are rising smartly and are projected to increase 25 percent this year, according to Gartner, a research business. Widely anticipated new models like the Palm Pre, which went on sale nationwide on Saturday, will help fuel that growth. Meanwhile, total cellphone sales are expected to fall.
The smartphone surge, it seems, is a case of a trading-up trend in technology that is running strong enough to weather the downturn. And as is so often true when it comes to adoption of new technology, the smartphone story is as much about consumer sociology and psychology as it is about chips, bytes and bandwidth.
For a growing swath of the population, the social expectation is that one is nearly always connected and reachable almost instantly via e-mail. The smartphone, analysts say, is the instrument of that connectedness — and thus worth the cost, both as a communications tool and as a status symbol.
“The social norm is that you should respond within a couple of hours, if not immediately,” said David E. Meyer, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan. “If you don’t, it is assumed you are out to lunch mentally, out of it socially, or don’t like the person who sent the e-mail.”
The spread of those social assumptions may signal a technological crossover that echoes the proliferation of e-mail itself more than a decade ago. At some point in the early 1990s, it became socially unacceptable — at least for many people — to not have an e-mail address.
Smartphones are not cheap, particularly in tough economic times. The phones, even with routine discounts from wireless carriers, usually cost $100 to $300, while the data and calling service plans are typically $80 to $100 a month.
But recent smartphone converts are often people who count pennies, including many fr
The InfoWorld Hardware Hall of Fame - NYTimes.com
The InfoWorld Hardware Hall of Fame
By ERIC KNORR, InfoWorld, IDG
Our hardware Valhalla boasts 18 inaugural members, from mainframe to PDA, that will be instantly familiar to IT folks in the know. Many of these products are humble workhorses whose main distinction is (or was) extraordinary longevity. Everyone has heard the urban myth that goes something like: "No one knew what was in that closet, but when they opened it up, that [insert product name] had two inches of dust on it. Nobody had touched it for five years and it was still running." In baseball terms, our Hall of Fame is biased toward the Cal Ripkens of hardware rather than the Mark McGwires.
We would like to say our selections are scientific. Actually, they derive from the subjective experiences of our staffers, contributors, and friends (some of whom are older than dirt). We could not, for example, establish a hard and fast minimum for the number of years a product needed to be in "general use" to qualify. Five years seemed about right, but some markets move faster than others, and some products lasted longer than their users wished they would. Plus, we wanted to be sure to include a couple of worthy, more recent products. This is a meritocracy, not a nostalgia fest.
[ The fanfare is over and it’s time for a walk through the InfoWorld Hardware Hall of Fame. Our 18 inductees span 42 years and range from big iron to devices frequently lost in the back seat of a taxicab. ]
We may have developed a curious affection for hunks of plastic and metal, but we are serious enough to focus on work rather than play hardware. No yokes or MP3 players here (although we did feel compelled to include one PDA). Our hall of famers are products we generally took for granted as they propelled us to where we are today. Some of them helped define the era in which they reigned. With luck, you can still find them on eBay.
It goes without saying that we will be battered with e-mails and comments demanding to know why we left out or included this or that product. We encourag
Two years on, netbooks on verge of big shake-up - NYTimes.com
Two years on, netbooks on verge of big shake-up
By MARTYN WILLIAMS, IDG News Service\Tokyo Bureau, IDG
Asustek kicked off an entirely new category in the mobile computing space when it presented a prototype of its Eee PC at Taiwan's Computex trade show two years ago. Since then, many users have embraced netbook PCs for their small size, light weight and low cost. Their popularity pushed Microsoft to extend the life of Windows XP and they've turned out to be one of the bright spots in the PC industry over the last few months.
But the sector hasn't been a hotbed of innovation. Except for a few exceptions, most netbooks share pretty similar specs and are based on the same Intel Atom processor and Microsoft Windows XP operating system. But now, as the netbook sector enters its third year, new chips and operating systems hold the potential for massive change in the sector.
Leading the charge on the hardware side are Qualcomm and Nvidia.
Qualcomm has produced a new chip called the Snapdragon that uses less power than Intel's Atom, so it runs cooler and doesn't require a heatsink. That means laptops built with it can be thinner and have a longer battery life -- Qualcomm expects between 8 and 10 hours. The chip comes with a feature that will be appreciated by any traveller: compatibility with both major cell phone standards in use worldwide.
But there are potential drawbacks. Qualcomm's processors don't understand the x86 instruction set used by chips from Intel and AMD, so they won't run mainstream Windows. Instead, netbook makers are turning to Linux, which has been ported to many non-x86 processor architectures.
Prototypes of Snapdragon machines, and some based on similar ARM-based chips from companies like Freescale and Texas Instruments, were on show at last week's Computex, but no one was talking launch dates.
NVidia's proposition doesn't attempt to cut Intel out of the equation. It has developed a graphics chip called Ion to supplement the Atom processor and provide some nice performance gains.
"We believe
The 3 things Apple didn’t say today - NYTimes.com
The 3 things Apple didn’t say today
By PAUL BOUTIN, VentureBeat
Apple head of marketing Phil Schiller delivered a pleasant, enjoyable keynote show for several thousand software developers this morning at the Moscone West conference center in San Francisco. Newer, better iPhones were the show’s already-predicted climax. But there were three things Phil didn’t mention onstage that stood out to my fellow Apple loyalists packed into the back row of the press section.
Twitter. Or Facebook. Over the weekend, the New York Times recounted a rumor that Apple was close to acquiring Twitter. The rumor was true enough — Apple was in the latter stages of an acquisition process. What does it mean that none of Apple’s demos today involved Twitter or Facebook, the hottest two sites on the Internet? Schiller showed how an iPhone can be used to capture family photos and now, videos. (Family vacation albums are a standard Apple demo.) Schiller explained that new iPhone buyers will be abe to upload their videos to YouTube. He name-checked MMS, the photo and video-enhanced version of the SMS technology behind cellphone text messages. But Schiller didn’t tweet anything from his phone, nor did he post to Facebook.
I’m sure a thousand Apple apologists will claim this was done to prevent any appearance of bias among the 50,000 apps available for the iPhone. Not true at all. Steve Jobs would have zero hesitance to give the iPhone a new Twitter button that would kill a thousand apps. Instead, Apple’s onstage ignorance of social networking shows how slow-moving and out of touch the company can be. It’s easy to find Microsoft shortcomings to mock. It’s harder to recognize your own.
AT&T. Schiller acknowledged that AT&T, the sole carrier for iPhones in America until sometime next year, will not support MMS until sometime this summer. That means buyers of new iPhone 3G S won’t be able to send photos or videos to each other. Nor will new iPhone buyers be able to “tether” their phones to a PC or Mac laptop, enabling the laptop to connect to
Apple drops price of least expensive iPhone to $99, rolls out new Macbook - BostonHerald.com
AN FRANCISCO — Apple Inc. is dropping the retail price of the least expensive iPhone to $99 from $199 and introducing new models.
Apple executives said today at an annual conference for software developers that the newer iPhones will include some sought-after features such as a video camera, a compass and an auto-focus function on photos. A 16-gigabyte version will cost $199 and a 32-gigabyte model will be $299. They go on sale June 19.
Apple also cut prices on MacBook Pro laptops.
Despite anticipation that he might make a cameo, Apple CEO Steve Jobs did not take the stage at the event.
Apple made the new 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Pro laptops the introductory part of its developers’ conference in San Francisco, where speculation swirled that a new iPhone would be unveiled later in the presentation.
The laptop with the 13-inch screen starts at $1,200, and the 15-inch model sells for $1,700 and up — both $300 less than existing similar models.
The company also lowered the price on its ultra-thin MacBook Air to $1,500 from $1,800.
Apple’s 17-inch MacBook Pro, which was unveiled in January, costs $2,500 and up.
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