The fastest SD card in the industry - not!

So when I heard a tagline like that, I had to test it. I ordered a Sandisk Extreme Pro SD card, and tested it in an Apple MacBook Pro, which I thought would have no interface or bus-related speed limits.

 

I also tested it against their Ultra and their Extreme cards. The summary of results is that there is a 1Mb/s difference (17Mb/s vs 16Mb/s) between the top end card (~R900), and the bottom end card (~R450).

 

Conclusion: its not worth paying more money for these "faster" SD cards. For double the money, I want to see more than 6% performance difference. Pfffft.

Apple TV 2

Apple describe the Apple TV as a hobby project, which begs the question of why they are bothering with it. And the reason they're bothering is because to not have a toe in your lounge means giving up a large segment of your media spend; video. Apple relatively recently refreshed the 1st gen device with a newer, sleeker, smaller version. I had the old one, and am now busy playing with a 2nd generation version.

 

The 1st generation device had a hard drive in it, and you could either stream your content to it from any computer running iTunes (the devices all have built-in WiFi), store the content on the device and have no computer running or purchase content from the online store (or, as was usually the case, all three).

 

The new generation device is smaller, black and not white and is functionally more useless than the first one. It has lost the hard drive and now has flash storage. Great if you're in an environment with very fast, always-on connectivity. That is not true of SA. Its also lost its USB port, and has the same miserable compatibility in terms of media playback (i.e if its not in iTunes, it won't play it).

 

So why buy it ? Because, if you've gone to the effort of sorting out your media so that it plays and looks great on your iDevice, you want it available in your lounge in the same way too. And yes, you could dock your device, but thats dorky. This at least can be controlled by remote, makes that big TV useful by displaying album art and can drive 5.1 sound through its TOSlink output (the HDMI audio out seems to be of inferior quality).

 

Oh yes, this new gen device also supports Airplay; that is quite cool. Imagine you have a pic or video on your phone; you can get it onto your TV simply by selecting the Apple TV as your output screen - neat! That is a cool trick. And shifting the price point too was smart - $100 is reasonable and fair for a hobby, the old one at $300+ wasn't.

The coolest iPad2 cover - ever!

Joby are better known for making funky portable tripods (aka the Gorillapod), but they also have a line for the favorite fondleslab of the moment; Ori for iPad 2.

 

Yes, your friends will laugh at you because it makes your sleek, svelte device thicker and heavier. Yes, they will laugh because it takes you a minute or three to setup once you get somewhere.

 

But you shouldn't care; the number of angles, the versatility of the positions, the front and back protection make it all worthwhile!

 

Check out the video to get an idea of how cool this cover is! I bought mine from Rene at Wintec Solutions, a very friendly gentleman who wowed me with his service and attitude.

Crashplan iOS and Android apps now available

I've spoken of Crashplan before; they have now released mobile applications. They work very well, and are a great way to retrieve your backed up data from almost anywhere. Neat!

HTC Sensation & LeeDroid

 

I've been a big fan of HTC for a while; their Sense UI is really slick. I changed my previous Desire HD for a Sensation, which is essentially the same phone but dual-core.

 

There's not much to say, other than that its a slick device, good build quality, but a little boring with plain old factory software. I used revolutionary.io in order to S-off the device, and installed LeeDroid on it. The combination is very fast, powerful and a pleasure to use. Highly recommended!

How to revolutionize the way you backup your data

I always struggled with backups. I manually used to copy my data all over the place, and the only automated backup technique I implemented on a Mac was Time

 

Machine. But that had positives (was natvely built in and supported by the OS and more importantly, when doing a bare-metal restore), and negatives (I didn't always trust it, it requires more disk space than what you're backup up and it is physically next to your device; a fire would take both out).

 

And of course, it isn't cross-platform. Not an issue in my household, but it might be in yours.

 

 

I have "talked" about Dropbox before, but its too expensive when you're planning to backup 500GB or so of data (yes, my pics and music is that big). I always struggled with what to use, and then came across two excellent services; Mozy.Com and CrashPlan. I ended up using CrashPlan primarily because

1. it supports machine to machine backups (you don't need to buy the cloud service)
2. its cheaper when you have multiple systems

 

I've got it seutp and am banging away at cloud and machine-to-machine backups. Lets see how it goes! But so far, very impressed with the tech and the concept.

 

OS X Lion

I downloaded and installed Lion from the Apple App Store. Grrr.

 

 

Definitely not going to tell you anything you don't already know or can't read from other sites. Just some thoughts;

 

1. Having a 4GB download sounds like a brilliant idea, until you realise you live in a country with shit broadband. Advice: copy the installer from the Applications folder to somewhere else after you've made the big investment
2. One of the least touted features of Lion is the Recovery Partition. Its excellent, and a welcome addition
3. Augmenting the above is the ability now to encrypt the entire OS file system using FileVault.
4. The natural gestures, LaunchPad (for iTards) and Mission Control are gimmicky. I've left them on, but don't think its anything wonderful.
5. The Apple ID is now quite pervasive in the OS; you link it to your user account, you assign encryption recovery keys to them etc, all pointing toward more powerful user and identity management across devices

 

Overall, on the surface, it feels like a maintenance release rather than a massive shift. But fundamental changes that improve security and manageability are never bad things. We'll just have to see how the big download concept works when you're not in the US or Europe.