Archive for category Gear
Notes on an iPad
Posted by Juergen Tolksdorf in Apple, Gear, iPhone, von Juergen on June 25, 2010
I want to use my iPad as a replacement for my old-school Moleskine, but I’d like to keep one classic item. The pen. Websites like CNET describe the Pogo Stylus or Pogo Sketch as the pen to be.
My Handwriting is usually in a pretty small font, as I learned it at school. Before giving you a long review on the Stylus, see my results from a Screenshot of my iPad and make your own view on this pen.
Drobo and Droboshare – my review
Posted by Juergen Tolksdorf in Gear, Technology on May 15, 2010
As being perky I put a Drobo on my wishlist for my birthday. As the day finally happend, there was a big brown gift-package in our living room. Is was a Drobo! Yeah! So I bought some 2TB Hard drives and equipped the Drobo with them.
What is Drobo?
First of all Drobo is not a speaker, as it has been thought by the person who made this gift to me. It is a data-tank, which can manage up to 4 ahrd disk drives as one bigh drive. With the currently available 2TB HDDs, you could have one big ca 6GB HDD, not 8, because Drobo is managing a RAID system, so if one HDD crashes, your data remains save. If all crashes … good luck, but to me this device is perfect to backup may files, like documents, photos and music. It is self maintaining and I don’t have to take care on managing hard drives manually.
Setup
Plugged in the Hard drives, fired the device up, installed the DroboDashboard app on my mac, formatted it with HFS+, which was very easy and a guided installation. Ready to go! In order to be able to stream videos from my Drobo to my Dreambox, I bought a Droboshare and mounted it into my Dreambox.
Droboshare
Droboshare has a 1GBit/s network adapter, which is great, because it allows to stream with this speed, but wait. Droboshare is connected with USB 2.0 to the Drobo?! Yes, speed it limited to 480MBit/s. Well, not so bad, since it’s OK viewing the movies. It is not so perfect using it for Time-Machine backups compared to the built-in FireWire800 connector in the Drobo.
Drobonoise
Another thing which is not so perfect is the built-in fan in the Drobo, because it is pretty loud from time to time when the fan goes up to cool the HDDs, but as it is located in the upper-floor, I don’t mind.
Drobomismatch
After uploading my pictures and music files, by Finder was hanging. I resolved it as written in a former post, so I do not think this is a Drobo specific.
Droboconclusion
Droboshare is pretty dumb and I’m not sure if it’s worth THIS amount of money. You can just manage one user-account, so I’m unable to provide different access to different devices or user. This is bad, especially in regard to virus attacks or privacy. In general Droboshare is reliable and does not crash at all. It’s running now for a month without any issues.The Droboapps are funny, but I’m rather continuing to use it as a data tank and to applications with my Mac on top of it.
Drobo itself is pretty save as well. It is self maintaining and I don’t have to take care on the drives. Spindown works fine, so if it’s not in use it’s quit.
General
Good stuff. Geeks could get the same for less money by using FreeNAS, but if you just want to plug-in HDDs and have fun, Drobo is your choice!
iPad, Flash, Android – next?
Posted by Juergen Tolksdorf in Apple, Gear on May 13, 2010
A friend of mine is using an iPad for a couple of weeks and is pretty happy using it. Yesterday I had the first chance having an iPad in my own hands. It was a fantastic experience. Ste Jobs himself wrote in his blog post basically that the days for Flash technologies have been counted. Well, I’ve been a strong believer in Flash technologies, but I have to admit the statements in his post are kind of pretty close to the reality.
I consider buying an iPad on my own as soon as possible, because I’m quite often in situations, where I do need a big screen to look something up, but I do not want to spend my time on waiting until my computer, Outlook/Entourage or my browser is ready to go. Thus the iPad seems to be my device of choice.
A friend of mine has a small MacBook in his living room for such cases, but it seems the iPad is even more flexible, especially when we’re talking on battery live vs weight vs usage vs cost. Using the iPhone is not an option. Writing eMails with this device is too far away from what I would call convenient. I’m rather using my poor old blackberry for writing longer eMails than using the iPhone.Watching photos with friends? Usually I’m doing this with my MacBook or my Playstation on TV, but this taks time for boot again. So, the iPad seems to be my only choice.
But having such a device without Flash?
See what Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen is saying to that:
Caution – cannot be seen on an iPhone or iPad since Wall Street Journal provides video in Flash players.
One more interesting thing of this interview. I miss a strategic statement from Adobe’s site. Saying “we’ll see what customers want” is smart and saying that it makes sense having one environment for all platforms is smart too, but this is not in the interest of platform providers. Do we need to wait until another Linus T will enlight us with a free mobile device OS, or is Android already the answer?
Found this “Why you not should buy an iPad”-Spot on YouTube:
Alternative? Android?
Wel, not really out there. The first betas of Flash are running on Android, but all of this stuff is beta.
One thing is for sure. There’s a big battle and this battle is pretty interesting to watch and it is great being part of it as a customer. It is also great being part of it because I’m pretty sure the end of this battle will guide us to the next generation of devices and possibly to the next generation of how to access information. Or is all of this just a hype to keep stock prices high?!
Well, I still like the iPad and it’s idea. As Shantanu said, it is a good 1st generation device.
One question remains: Where the heck is Microsoft in this area? Kin does not really seem to be an answer.
Parallels Support – last post, for now
Posted by Juergen Tolksdorf in Apple, Gear on January 18, 2010
Yippieh!
I got a new download link from Parallels support, getting the english version of Parallels Desktop. There was no requirement entering my license information, but it seems to be stored somewhere in my settings. Product activated. Outlook works fine, too.
Great! Thank you, Support!
IPhone 3Gs und Vodafone
Posted by Juergen Tolksdorf in Gear, iPhone on September 6, 2009
Ich muss diese Linksammlung kurz bereit stellen, da es schon etwas gedauert hat, bis ich alles zusammen hatte …
Ich empfehle einen WLAN Zugang zu haben, da man nicht auf Anhieb mit dem IPhone über 3G online kommt.
Nachem das Iphone nun auch mit der Vodafone-Karte funktioniert, sollen noch Einstellungen für den Versand von MMS und den ZUgang zum Internet mittels 3G vorgenommen werden.
Zuerst die Einstellungen für den Versand vom MMS
Hierbei ist zu beachten, dass die Einstellung des Proxy Servers in der Anleitung für Vodafone falsch ist, da noch ein “:8080″ also Doppelpunkt achtsigachtzig angehängt werden muss, da der Server auf den Port 8080 horcht.
Auf jeden Fall danach durchbooten, da erst dann das Iphone die Einstellungen übernommen hat und man danach MMS versenden kann.
Dann die Einstellungen für den Zugang zum Internet