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

Continue reading …

Miniaturisation & Minimalism

Sep 9

Personal David 3 Comments
cd-rom, clonecd, DRM, micro, micro sd, miniaturisation, minimalism, mp3, piracy, rip, sdhc

I don’t tend to write too much about my actual life on this blog, although there’s a project I’m working on right now which has had a definite tech dimension.

My project is called Operation Clearance, it is me & my family clearing out our house of all our old unwanted possessions. My aspiration is to own as few items as is practical. I was partly inspired by the 100 item challenge, although I’m not holding myself to a firm number of items. Instead, I’m challenging myself to get all of my possessions into a single Ottoman (not including my clothes, but I’ve already given them an equivalent treatment). If you think I sound crazy, then think about the last time you moved house, now compare that memory to how it’ll be for me when I move, which I am planning to do in the near future. You see, not so crazy now, eh?!

What was the tech aspect of this? I discovered while excavating some of my cupboards a stack of  CD-ROMs, mostly games, with a few applications. So here I had a stack of discs I’m unlikely to use, potentially taking up valuable space in my Ottoman, that wasn’t good. So did I simply throw them away, or did I keep them? Y‘know, just in case. Well “just in case” is the enemy of any clear out, so my answer was to cheat!

Squeezing all these discs into Micro SD makes me happy.

I decided I would take an ISO image of all the discs and save them to a Micro SDHC card, then throw the discs away! If you don’t know what I’m talking about, it is possible to create a file, based on any physical drive, which is an exact bit for bit copy. Your computer can then “mount” the file as if it were that same real physical  drive. Given that you can currently get Micro SDHC cards with capacities of up to 16GB, you can fit an awful lot of CD images on them. Best of all, the physical size of a Micro SD card compared to even one CD is practically non-existent!

If at this point you’re wanting to ask me why didn’t I try trading in or selling these games, then let me answer you in advance – Firstly, I couldn’t sell them as I’d already dumped the boxes for them last year. Secondly, since I was keeping “back up” copies for myself, I thought it would be of questionable legitimacy to sell them when I still had copies for myself.

The only gotcha with this idea was that all of my games had copy protection, which prevented me using the universal ISO format. Fortunately, help was at had in the form of Slysoft’s CloneCD. They generously offer a twenty one day trial, and I only needed one day to image my discs. So I confess, I didn’t buy it. Although in the future, if I want to re-burn these images (which are proprietary to Slysoft applications ), I promise you Slysoft, I will buy a lifetime licence!

At this point in the story, I really must launch into a rant. To image these discs, I really shouldn’t have needed to use a specialist application, but I did because of DRM. My story is yet another text book example of how DRM makes life harder for legitimate uses of media, while the real illegitimate copies are being freely traded across the internet. So, thank you very much to all computer game companies, your copy protection measures hampered my legitimate project, while not preventing the “piracy” you impotently sought to defeat.

Deep breath, relax …

Now, if you want to try clearing your shelves, then I really recommend you do as I have. Further to this, many years ago, I MP3 ripped all of my music CD’s, so I’ve been able to throw away those CD’s too. Anything to reduce the number of individual items clogging up your shelves and cupboards. George Carlin wisely said that a house is just a place for our stuff, and every now and then we have to get a bigger house just to fit in even more stuff. So join me in getting rid of all your physical media. In the age of terrabyte hard drives, physical media should be dead if we all had any common sense.

Follow up – another Micro SDHC card.

Dec 17

Reviews David 2 Comments
16gb, class 2, micro, mobilefun, sandisk, sdhc

On Monday I posted reviewed my 8GB Micro SDHC card, back when I wrote that review, the 8GB cards were more economical than the 16GB cards. However, prices have come down. Once again, I went shopping with Mobile Fun.

I had two reasons for wanting a 16GB card for my phone. Firstly, I could hold my entire music collection and increase available space for video podcast storage. Secondly, it would free up my 8GB card for a secret project I’m working on (which, if I get working, I shall report on here!).

When I looked up the 16GB card on Mobile Fun the picture showed the card with a Class 4 marking, while my 8GB is a Class 6. “A shame” I thought, but I’d take the speed hit for the increased storage. However, I was dismayed when the 16GB card arrived, the actual card I received had a Class 2 marking on it. I wasn’t sure whether to complain or live with it. First things first, I had to test it.

If you recall from my 8GB review, that despite being a Class 6 card, it ran at an impressive 15 MB/s. So on the same basis, I was maybe hoping for 4 to 6 MB/s out of this Class 2 card. However, my socks were forthrightly blown off. This Sandisk Class 2 Micro SDHC card ran at a gobsmacking (it’s UK slang) 12 MB/s; faster than I even expected a Class 4 to run at. Safe to say I’m a happy boy!

If you would like to see in-depth benchmarks for this model of card, then see http://mobilitysite.com/2009/07/review-sandisk-16gb-microsdhc-card/

Review of Sandisk 8GB Micro SDHC Ultra card

Dec 15

Reviews David 4 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..