David.R.Gilson

Bluetrek Bizz Bluetooth Headset Review

Nov 2

Reviews David 2 Comments
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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Why Christmas seems to come around so quickly.

Dec 27

Editorial David No Comments
age, memory, perception, time

Everyone always says how Christmas seems to come around so quickly. I agree with them, it does. Although, we can safely assume nothing strange is happening with the space-time continuum, and I think it’s safe to say that children still find subsequent Christmas’s as great and distant events in time.

So, what is going on with us (so called) grown-ups? Well, as with every good theory, let’s make a couple of assumptions. First, let’s assume that we build up memories at a constant rate, and that we use that constant rate to measure long periods of time in our mind.

Now, consider a 2 year old child. One year’s worth of memories represents a massive 50% (i.e. 1 divided by 2) of their life.  When they reach 3 years old, that same amount of time and memories only then represents 33% (i.e. 1 divided by 3) of their life. Hopefully you see the pattern here, and therefore it will be of no surprise to you to read that when that child reaches 20 years old, a year’s worth of memories only represents 5% of their life.

Hence, we as age, a year is a less and less significant portion of our life. As such, our perception of  large periods of time seems to speed up. Drawing a further conclusion from this near-universal observation, our brains must measure long periods of time on a basis of comparisson to past perceptions.

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Review of Sandisk 8GB Micro SDHC Ultra card

Dec 15

Reviews David 3 Comments
8gb, card, memory, mircro, sandisk, sd, sdhc, usb

A while ago I decided that 2GB of storage on my smartphone just wasn’t cutting it, so an upgrade was in order. Queue Sandisk’s 8GB Class 6 “Ultra” Micro SDHC card. The “Ultra” part does indeed sound like silly marketing talk, although I’ll explain I think it is warranted. SDHC classes exist to give you a guarantee of the lowest write speed of your device. For example, you are guaranteed a minimum write speed of 6 megabytes per second if you have a class 6 card.

I have been testing my class 6 Micro SDHC card with a file-copying application called “TeraCopy“, and I have always had a consistent and sustained write speed of 15 megabytes per second. That’s two and a half times faster than it is guaranteed to run. Just to give you an idea of what this means in practice, I copied about 5GiB of music onto this card in less than 5 minutes.

Now for some pictures:

This is the packaging the card came in. On the left is the card itself in a protective case. On the right you find the tiny USB adapter, and below is a lanyard attachment for the adapter. The USB adapter was the other attractive parts of the package. If you don’t have any SDHC capable equipment, this lets you make your Micro SDHC card into a tiny USB drive.

Here is a size comparison the adapter. Top to bottom order: Micro SDHC USB adapter, Logitech VX Revolution dongle, Sandisk 4GB Cruzer.

Here’s how the USB adapter looks plugged into my laptop. Again for size reference, you can see the mouse dongle plugged in beside it, and another SD card in my laptop’s SD slot.

Finally, here’s an extreme close up of the card, just to try and show you how small these things really are..

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