Tech Tok

New WD Passport Drive .. with FireWire 800

Tuesday, November 11th, 2008

WD Passport Studio

Woo, there’s a new WD Passport drive (the drives we use at gaming on Friday nights), and not only is this one bigger (500 GB), but it also sports a FireWire 800 port. It’s called the Passport Studio.

WD Media Player

Also new from Western Digital is an HD Media Player. [buy.com link]

Alas, Costco Canada doesn’t seem to have any of this new WD stuff yet.

Posted in Hardware | Comments

Long-term storage

Saturday, November 1st, 2008

Iain always tells me I should just get a hard drive and copy things to it for long-term storage.

Even though it’s more expensive per gigabyte (see “Media Costs“) it’s a lot faster and easier to deal with. It saves you tons of time, too. Backing up hundres of gigs of data to 4.4 GB DVD’s gets really old after a while.

However, it occurred to me that there is a very good reason not to use hard drives for long-term storage: connectors change over time.

SCSI and IDE are getting more and more rare these days. Some day the same thing will happen to SATA. Yet, even the most modern optical device — the Blu-ray drive — can still read the very first optical format: the CD.

Posted in Hardware | Comments

Jailbreak: replace iTunes

Tuesday, October 28th, 2008

Some apps that let you liberate your iPhone/iPod Touch from iTunes and Apple’s renaming obfuscation: dTunes, PwnPlayer, and MPlayer make a pretty potent combination.

MPlayer is probably the weakest of the bunch; playing video skips frames and sometimes has no audio. I would expect it to get better over time though.

Just a few more reasons to JailBreak. :-)

Archive for the 'Hardware' Category

New WD Passport Drive .. with **FireWire 800**

Long-term storage

Jailbreak: replace iTunes

New WD Passport Drive .. with FireWire 800