Archive for the 'hardware' Category

Bose Soundlink: ideal travel companion

Published on January 20, 2012 in hardware. Closed Tags: , , .


Thanks to the nice people at Bose Belgium, I have been using the Bose Soundlink for a couple of weeks, and when I left for a trip to Buenos Aires last month, I thought: why not take it along? After all, it’s only 1.3kg and it could give me some better sound in the hotel. I did not regret it.

First of all it’s fully wireless: the Soundlink works on long-lasting batteries and gets its music over Bluetooth easily up to 10 meters away. It’s really light, so you really carry it with you without thinking too much. Any time I get back to my room, I just press the icon on the speaker and it reconnects to my iPhone. I take it to the kitchen, the terrace on the rooftop, and it just keeps playing, even when I leave the iPhone in my room.

Most importantly: the sound is impressive. Everyone who heard my Soundlink was really impressed and started asking me for technical -and financial- details. Now, at 300€, it’s not exactly cheap, but it’s worth all that.

For all the ‘gadgets’ I use, I ask myself: does it make my life more enjoyable (for a reasonable price)? For the Bose Soundlink, that’s a definite ‘Yes’.

Capdase camera bag for Canon

Published on December 4, 2011 in hardware and photography. Closed Tags: .

I just got a new bag for my ‘small’ Canon: a Capdase MKeeper 180A. My previous bag was too soft and I wanted to try something more solid. I looked through the Canon 500D bags and rather liked the rectangular MKeeper series. The 180 is just big enough for the 350/400/450/500/550 body and an extra lens. I could actually fit the camera body in with the extra battery grip, but that’s stretching the case a bit. If you take the camera without a battery pack, you can choose to store body and lens attached or separate. A really nice feature of the bag is the ‘raincoat’: in the back zipper pocket there is a rain protection cover that envelopes the whole case. Clever touch!

 

Capdase mKeeper

There is a big selection of camera bags at LoveCases for Canon and other SLR Camera Cases!

Review: Synology DS410 8TB NAS

Published on July 10, 2011 in hardware. 1 Comment Tags: , , , .

Storage vendors should come to me for heavy duty testing, I have way too much hard disks break down on me. Last year my 4TB Lacie drive died. It’s a good thing I’m paranoid about data storage and I had 2 copies of my photo archive (now about 1.4 TB) elsewhere. Although my Lacie drive had ‘protected’ storage, after repair it came back reformatted. I decided to never buy Lacie anymore – I have had a 1TB, 2TB and a 4TB drive and they have all broken down at some point. My next storage solution would be a stand-alone NAS with 4 disks!

After reading some reviews on QNAP and Synology, I decided on the Synology DS410. I ordered it at Memoryshop for a decent price and some days later it was shipped to me together with 4 Samsung 2TB drives. Installation is swift and uneventful. I configured it as one big 6TB RAID-5 volume and started copying all my pictures, music and movies. The device comes with the shares /music, /video and /pictures preconfigured, and copying to these folders makes sense, because then the music appears in the handy iTunes server, and all media shows up in the DLNA Media Server.

The advantage of a Linux-powered NAS is that it comes with a number of easy-to-install applications (Torrent Client, MySQL, LAMP stack web server) and you can even install, through ipkg, lots of standard Linux packages. On the QNAP server at the office, I have file sync tasks running at regular intervals and it works flawlessly.

If you’re serious about your storage (because you need it for your work), don’t be content with just an external USB drive. Invest a bit more to have a NAS you can trust. And also: never trust it 100%. I now have +- 16TB of storage at home so that I have multiple copies of everything and I also use Mozy cloud storage for my exported pictures (‘only’ 12 GB for the moment).

Review: Panasonic TX-L42E30E LCD TV

Published on July 9, 2011 in hardware. Closed Tags: , , , .

I bought and/or used quite some new gear the last couple of months and I’ve been meaning to write about my experiences and never got around to actually start. Because I like reading other people’s reviews before I buy anything, I’ll start writing my own now! Let’s start with the biggest one:

Why I ‘needed’ a new TV

When digital TVs came out, the price for full HD (1080 lines instead of 720) was very high. I remember seeing all those 2000€+ beasts and it just didn’t make sense to switch yet, also there was almost no source of Full HD video. Blueray was launched around 2008 and seemed more like a ploy to make you buy all your old films again in a slightly better format. However, the prices of Full HD has dropped a lot, and I had more and more devices at home that had HDMI outputs and 1080p output that I could not show in full glory. So I started shopping around beginning of this year.

I knew I wanted an A-brand, which boiled down to Sony, Samsung, Panasonic, Philips, LG or Toshiba. Shopping for digital TV is exhausting. Each brand  seems to have 150 different models which are sometimes hard to tell apart. I know I was thinking during the shopping: I wish Apple made TV screens: they would have a 32, a 44 and a 56″ model: just pick one. I wish I was able to say that I made a huge spreadsheet with all models, features and prices, created a N-variable price model and chose based on that, but honestly, I just picked one that looked nice in the shop (Vandenborre) and seemed like a good bargain. So I now have the Panasonic 42″ Viera TV. Vandenborre offered to come bring and install it, but I opted for picking it up in the shop.

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