Go go gadget…. Overkill?
Nah, you can never have gadget overkill! Long time no blog. So what’s been going on? Well, not a huge amount hence the lack of content, but today was a bit of a gadget frenzy. I got a Blackberry Perl to replace my work phone (a brick of a phone in the shape of an Orange SPV M5000), and so far I’m fairly impressed with it. I guess most notably it’s a lot smaller than the SPV. It’s too early to write a long review on the thing, but the sound (when using it as a telephone) was a bit poor. Other than that it seems OK. It’s small and I can get my email on it nice and easily.
But a new mobile phone doesn’t make a gadget frenzy, does it?! So what other goodies did I get then?! Well, seeing as you asked, my Infrant ReadyNAS NV+ (or Netgear ReadyNAS NV+ since they got bought out) arrived today. This is a networked attached storage (NAS) device, and I’ve got it to store all my RAW images from my camera. It has four disk bays, and my version came with 2 x 500GB drives. This gives me a total storage of 500GB, but with disk mirroring for redundancy. As I run out of space I can add more hard disks to the two spare bays to increase the storage space.
So far I’m extremely impressed with it. Performance-wise it seems much quicker at both read/write activities than my older Lacie single-disc NAS, and the configuration interface is very good. I also picked up a cheap APC UPS. The ReadyNAS detects the presence of the UPC (via a USB lead), and it improves the buffering/writing speed to the NAS because it knows it has a more reliable power source (so can rely on the RAM in the NAS for buffering more). My UPS is still charging up, so I’ll find out tomorrow if this all works as expected.
So that’s the gadgets done. In other news, I had a short ‘break’ in Marrakech a few weeks ago. My one tip from that trip would be to never fly Royal Air Maroc! They seem to be the most disorganised airline on the planet — or at least that I’ve encountered. I took some photos but they’re not that great. I’m sure if I hadn’t been delayed for 7 hours in Casablanca airport I wouldn’t have been so tired for the next few days, which would have meant I could get up early to take some photos in the best light. Instead I mainly snapped around midday!
Ho hum.
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