Mobile Tech

When you’re traveling frequently, you know how important is the weight of your bags and suitcases. It can help you keeping your back safe, and stay in the boundaries of the airlines companies regulations.

A few months ago I found a great tool that made my life easier. It’s called a digital hanging scale. It’s a relatively small device that has a small hook at the bottom. You can hang on the hook whatever you want - bags, suitcases or anything else that can be attached to it.  Heck, you can even weigh fish when you go fishing.

It supports  multiple units: kg, lb, oz. You can weigh upto 40 kilograms on it which is quite impressive. Accuracy is 20 grams. It has a Tare function, that enables you to use a basket to weigh multiple items, while excluding the basket’s weight.

The best thing is it’s small enough to carry anywhere you want. However, it’s not too small. I’d recommend taking it when you have a large suitcase.

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Firefox - the best free browser in the entire world wide web. It was great in version 2. Now it’s even better in version 3.0!

The previous version of Firefox worked perfectly well for me during the past few years. Sure, it had a few glitches that I had to live with, but overall it was worth it. Whenever I needed to browse a website on Internet Explorer, I used the IE Tab plug-in.

However, version 2 wasn’t all good. As time went by and I installed more and more plug-ins, undesired phenomena showed up. The most annoying one was when Firefox would completely freeze itself for about twenty seconds or more. Slow computers would probably get stuck for a longer time.

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When you’re traveling with mobile devices, electricity is one of the most important factors to take into account. No matter how advanced is the technology you carry, if you can’t power it up, it becomes useless.

4xAA USB battery case - version 2

I’ve been making some research over the past few years looking for good solutions to power up my devices. Selecting a mobile power source is really a question of how much current and voltage your electric device consumes, and how much weight you’re willing to carry.

When I travel, I usually carry with me a PDA, a camera operated by 4xAA batteries, a hard-drive based OTG backup device and a 4xAA charger. During my previous journey, I hacked a 4xAA battery case that I recieved along with my ELOOK LK-A6 OTG device, so it could also charge my PDA (back then it was AXIM X5). It required soldering a 3.5mm DC plug directly into the battery contacts. It worked great, but things changed, and I needed some adjustments.

For my next journey, this setup has not changed much. I’m still carrying a 4xAA based camera, the ELOOK LK-A6 (unfortunately nothing better has come out yet), and a new PDA, the HTC TYTN II.

This time I decided to make the battery case more USB-oriented. I drilled a hole in the case, soldered a USB port that I excavated out of an old USB hub. I also soldered a USB extension cord directly to the battery contacts.

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The evolution continues! PNY 32GB SDHC cards are now sold in Amazon for a surprisingly reasonable price of $150. Comparing to the $700 Panasonic card, this is really a good price.

Lately, prices of the 16GB SDHC cards have been dropping as well. Clearly, this is a result of these newly released 32GB SDHC cards.

Link to the PNY 32GB SDHC card in Amazon

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Great news. The newest and latest 32GB SDHC cards from SanDisk and Panasonic are now being sold on eBay. I assume that during the next week or two we’ll start seeing them available in other online stores.

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It looks like a SD card, but it can attach to a USB port and the best part is - it can read micro-SDHC cards, although not specified on the box.

This adapter will convert your micro-SD or micro-SDHC cards to a SD card so you can use in your camera. It will also convert it to a tiny USB drive so you can connect it directly to your computer using a USB port.

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Panasonic announced a few months ago their latest SDHC card with the amazing capacity of 32GB. It was supposed to start selling in April, but now it looks like it will only be available for purchase by the beginning of May 2008. I still haven’t seen those SanDisk 32GB SDHC cards being sold, and we are getting closer to May.

The only bad news about this card is its expected retail price: 700$ for a Class 6, while SanDisk’s Class 4 card is expected to be sold for half the price 350$. These prices are expected to drop within a couple of months, dragging lower capacity cards, and especially the 16GB SDHC to an even lower price than what we see today.

Now lets wait six months to see what will become of those 64GB cards we all wait for.

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In April 2008 you will be able to buy a brand new Sandisk 32GB SDHC card. This is really good news, although the price for this card will be quite expensive. So why is it good news?

1. A new 32GB SDHC in the market means that 16GB, 8GB and 4GB SDHC cards will drop prices to make room for their new friend.

2. This means 64GB SDHC is the next step. We might already see them in the market by the end of 2008 or the first quarter of 2009. Who knows.

The interesting part is that although those tiny micro SDHC cards are one quarter of a full-size SDHC card, they are already available for sale in the form of 8GB micro SDHC, by Sandisk as well. It is probable that we are going to see by the end of 2008 16GB micro SDHC.

Since the new SDHC cards are evolving so fast, pretty soon someone will have to answer the question regarding the limitation of FAT32. I’m not sure if it really is a problem, but the maximum limitation of FAT32 when formatting a partition with Microsoft Windows is 32GB. You actually can format a FAT32 to a size bigger than 32GB using an external application, such as Partition Magic, but the big question is - will those SDHC compatible devices have problems reading those partitions? Will manufacturers force us yet again to dump our old devices from last year and buy new ones, only to use those 64GB or 128GB SDHC cards? I really hope not, but only time will tell.

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Lately I’ve discovered that my Canon S3 IS supports the new SDHC cards. This news was exciting for me because when I bought this camera, the specifications showed that it supports SD only. Usually when it comes to SDHC compatability, a thumb rule is that if not specified otherwise, the device does not support SDHC.

Devices that have no support for SDHC can take SD cards upto 2GB. Some of them can take 4GB SD cards. Those 4GB SD cards are not SDHC, and since the SD standard doesn’t allow the file system to be over 2GB, they use some kind of a hack for this. It’s not acceptable for all devices so you’re taking a risk by buying a 4GB SD card.

As I was saying, the rumors came from well-known forums. They refer to the official US Canon website which added this specification only recently.

I’m still skeptic about it and wouldn’t believe until I am able to take a 16GB SDHC card, put it in my camera, shoot 16GB of pictures, and finally copy them all to a PC to verify the data.

Recently 8GB SDHC cards have become very cheap, as well as 16GB SDHC. As for myself, I wouldn’t be happy with SD cards until they will be available in 64GB or 128GB SDHC. This will probably happen by the end of 2009.

I’m trying to get my hands on one of these SDHC cards to test my camera so I’ll update soon. Read the full article to see updates.

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Finally I’ve got a new laptop. A brand new ASUS F3S. It comes with Windows Vista Home Premium Edition and as expected, I’m facing many new problems. Windows Vista is heavy and slow unfortunately.

Even though this computer comes with a good specification: 2GB RAM and Duo Core T7300 2.0GHz CPU, I can feel that the new operating system is eating all the resources too easily.

The thing that mainly bothered me was the speed of the Start Menu. It is simply unbearable to work with. When you want to see All Program, you have to wait for 3-5 seconds. If it’s not enough, when you try to open a sub-folder, you have to wait again. Is this the way it’s supposed to go with 2GB RAM and a Duo Core 2GHz?

However, after being frustrated over the slowness and trying to find alternate ways to bypass the Start Menu, I’ve finally found the solution.

The solution for slow Start Menu/All Programs

1. Right click on the Start Menu

2. Click Properties

3. You should see now the Start Menu tab in a window titled Taskbar and Start Menu Properties.

4. Click Customize.

5. Un-check the box: Highlight newly installed programs. It should show: Highlight newly installed programs-OFF.

6. Click OK.

7. Check out the speed. If it was slow, it will be lightning fast now.

I have no idea why Microsoft had this checked by default in the first place, but go figure. I hope it will help you feel a little better about Windows Vista. After I discovered this option I can finally use the Start Menu again to execute applications.

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