Jan 5
Mobile News David
allaboutsymbian, audacity, camera, flash, GIMP, hi-def, LED, mobile, phone, publication, screen-cast, symbian, tutorial, video, youtube
LED Flash
I’m currently writing several features for Allaboutsymbian again, and the first of them was published there last night. Here’s a link.
A while ago, I noticed that photos taken on my Nokia E55, with its LED flash, were casting the people in an unnatural blue tint. One day I couldn’t take it any more and fired up The GIMP to see what I could do to tweak these colours. I was so stunned at the results I obtained with such little effort that I had to write about it.
Originally, I was going to post here, but then it struck me that the only people with this problem are people taking photos on camera phones, so since I was already contributing to AllAboutSymbian it seemed logical to publish there instead.
While writing, I realised it was going to be a super-dry read, and that a screen-cast video would be a much more appropriate choice of medium. So, this was my first experience of capturing and rendering a hi-def screen capture. I had a few hiccups along the way, the most problematic was sound. I don’t have a proper microphone, and so was stuck using the laptop mic, which would have been fine, but my laptop’s fan is super noisy. So, I had to apply some noise reduction in Audacity, which worked, but did leave me sounding kind of tinny and muted, at least to my ears.
It also pushed my four year old laptop to the limits, scrubbing along in Kdenlive made it choke a little, and actually completing a two-pass render took around 90 minutes (for a 6 minute video!). I really lamented having to buy a laptop when I did, because I only missed getting the first dual core CPU’s by three to four months 
Anyway, I’m pleased with the overall result, and it’s another article to add to my publication list!
Click below to see the video …
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Nov 2
Reviews David
accessories, bizz, bluetooth, bluetrek, card, charging, drive, flash, free, hands, handsfree, headset, mate, memory, micro, mobile, mobile mate, pairing, reader, sandisk, sd, sdhc, secure digital, usb, writer
We have a hardware review today. Mobilefun.co.uk have kindly sent me a Bluetooth headset to try out – the Bluetrek Bizz.
The BlueTrek Bizz Bluetooth Headset
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Aug 24
Reviews David
drive, eagletec, flash, miniature, mobilefun, nano, storage, tiny, usb
We have a hardware review today. This is the smallest USB flash drive I have ever seen, and I wanted to try one out. So thanks to MobileFun.co.uk for sending one out to me for review.
EagleTec 8GB Nano
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May 4
Reviews David
64gb, corsair, data, drive, flash, storage, thumb, thumb drive, usb, voyager
Well, I thought it was about time I wrote something new. Seeing as I just got my hands on a new gadget, what better time?!
I have finally got my hands on (by virtue of recently having my birthday!) something I’ve been tempted to get for a long time – this being Corsair’s 64GB Flash Voyager USB thumb drive. So far, this is the largest capacity thumb drive you can get. For me it is ideal, because as I’ve spoke of before on here, I really seek to minimise my data footprint. So while those of you out there may need Terrabytes of storage, for reasons I can only imagine; perhaps you’re archiving the entire internet; I do not need that much storage space. I often trim my files, only keeping things that are worth keeping. As to content, I’m speaking about everything: documents, photos, music, etc. My footprint constantly floats between 42 & 44 gigabytes. So a 64GB drive with no need of cables or moving parts is my perfect back up device.
Unboxing …
So, let’s have a look at the thing…
Here’s the packaging, it’s presented fairly simply. There is a box-out on the back containing all the extra paraphernalia. The box is at the top-rear while the you can see the drive is lower-centre on the front. So the packaging could have probably been made smaller. It’s the standard hard plastic pack that you have to completely wreck to extract the contents.
Speaking of paraphernalia, here is everything included in the pack:
If you click on the photo to view it on Flickr, I’ve annotated everything, but here is a short list of the contents:
- 64GB Corsair Flash Voyager
- Short USB 2.0 cable
- Lanyard
- Attachable chain with a rubber fob to slot the drive’s lid onto while in use.
- Draw-string pouch to contain everything in.
The drive is encased in rubber which gives it a definite robust feel. The drive itself is also very large for a thumb drive, here’s a picture of it in my hand so you can see:
Because of the size, the USB cable that is supplied is welcome, as it might be too much weight if, say, your laptop’s USB ports aren’t very sturdy. To see what I mean, see how far it sticks out the side of my laptop (particularly note how it dwarfs the dongle of my VX Revolution mouse):
The drive also has a blue indicator light which blinks to show when it is reading or writing (click photo to see annotations):
Usage
In everyday use, I am practising what I preach and using Truecyrpt to make sure that the contents are safe from prying eyes. However, this does slow the drive down. In my owns tests, I found that the write speed directly to the drive was almost 10MiB/sec. However, the write speed to the Truecrypt container volume drops down to 4.7MiB/sec.
To back up all of my files, I’ve cranked up the geek-o-meter somewhat by writing a batch file that uses a little known Windows command line tool called “Robocopy“.
Related Links:
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Dec 19
How-To Guides David
bootable, burn, flash, iso, optical, usb
If you have an image of a CD or DVD (say a bootable Linux Live CD), but you want to use a flash drive instead of burning a CD or DVD, then you need “unetbootin“.
This program can even download linux images for you if you want. Although if you have your iso file read, this program will ‘burn’ it to your USB flash drive, just as you would an ISO file to an optical disc, brilliant!
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