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Main

The best Raspberry Pi 3 starter kits compared and reviewed

Update Mar-2016: Most of the kits in the review now contain Raspberry Pi 3 models. The kits themselves haven’t changed significantly (minor SD card and power supply swaps), but the RPi2 has been swapped out for RPi 3. 🙂

Update 20-Feb-2015: All kits have been updated to include Raspberry Pi 2 models! (except for the Make kit.)

The Raspberry Pi is an amazing low-cost computer. Unlike the ever-popular Arduino microcontroller, the Raspberry Pi was designed to be a full-blown computer from the start. It can run various flavors of Linux/Unix, act as a Media Center, and even moonlight as a Microcontroller.

raspberry-pi-b+-boardAnd what better way to get started with a Raspberry Pi than with a starter kit? The question is: which one to get?

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Storage

Adding a 1TB Seagate Backup Plus Slim HDD to my Wii U (or: How I hacked a USB 2.0 cable.)

The last article I wrote about was a review of 1TB portable USB 3.0 hard drives. During this review, I tested each drive with a variety of computers and other devices that had USB ports, including my Nintendo Wii and Wii U consoles. Part of this review was trying to answer the question of “Which is the best hard drive for the Nintendo Wii U?” — which I couldn’t definitively answer. I found that all of these slim 1TB drives worked just fine with the old Nintendo Wii (the previous generation console), but only 1 of them worked with the Wii U (the most current Nintendo console.)

wii-u+some-hard-driveWell, I should say that only 1 of the drives almost worked with the Wii U. That is, until I figured out a clever hack to get it to work reliably.

Continue reading “Adding a 1TB Seagate Backup Plus Slim HDD to my Wii U (or: How I hacked a USB 2.0 cable.)”

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Storage

1TB Portable USB 3.0 HDD review: WD My Passport Ultra -vs- Seagate Backup Plus Slim -vs- Toshiba -vs- HGST -vs- Samsung

It is this author’s opinion that 2015 should be the ‘Year of the Backup’. It is 2015 and almost no one takes backups. And even those of us who do take backups, well, we don’t do it often enough.

Originally the problem of backing up was not having a reliable, yet automated program. (Much less an easy way to restore a backup, if needed.) But Windows 7 has a good backup system now and Windows 8 has an even better one. And Mac OS X has had its excellent TimeMachine feature for quite a while now. So these are now non-issues. This leaves only one question: Where to back up to?

Tape drives were never a good choice for consumers, CD-Rs and DVD+Rs were too small and too slow. And until recently, most external hard drives were big, bulky, and required a power brick to be plugged in just to run them. Oh, and they were somewhat slow running over the USB 2.0 port.

all-five-1tb-drivesFortunately, technology has reached a point where portable, self-powered USB 3.0 hard drives the size of a deck of cards can hold a full 1 to 2 TB! And they’re fast, too!

Update 15-Feb-2015! Two new drives have been added to the review: The HGST Touro Mobile vs the Samsung P3 Portable.

For this review, we picked out a portable USB 3.0 hard drive from 5 major manufacturers, WD, Seagate, Toshiba, HGST, and Samsung and put each drive through its paces.

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Categories
Cameras

Three Entry-Level GoPro-type action cameras reviewed

Small action cameras like the GoPro have been around for awhile, but these cameras have traditionally only attracted the attention of those involved in “extreme” sports. As such, the price of such cameras has been kept in the $250 to $500 range.

GoProHero-PolaroidCube-SJ40As technology has become cheaper, other manufacturers have realized that there is now an opportunity to make cheap, entry-level action cams for around $100. This review picks out 3 of the most recent models and compares them to see how they perform.

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Storage

A list of UHS-II SD cards, readers, and cameras

For those of you not in the know, most current SD cards implement an Ultra High Speed bus (which is abbreviated UHS-I or UHS-1) because it is the 1st version of this bus. It has a maximum transfer rate of 104MB/sec. Since there are some cases which require higher transfer speeds, the SD card consortium has created a new bus called UHS-II (or UHS-2.) The difference is two-fold:

  1. UHS-II raises the maximum transfer rate up to 312MB/s.
  2. UHS-II uses an additional row of pins/contacts to get there.

uhs-i-vs-uhs-iiThis means that UHS-II cards can only be fully utilized if the device using it has physical support for these extra pins/contacts. If the device does not have these extra pins (and that’s pretty much all devices as of 2014), then the SD card will fall back to UHS-I mode.

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Main

The best Arduino starter kits compared and reviewed

The Arduino is arguably one of the best things to come to the “Maker” Renaissance that we are currently experiencing. The Arduino is a simple microcontroller that can allow the one who wields it great power and programmatic control over their electronic circuits and systems. Yet to be a great wizard of such things, one must start at the humble beginnings of the very basics.arduino-angledWhat better way to get started than with an Arduino starter kit? That’s the trick, though, isn’t it? There’s more than one starter kit out there!

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Storage

SanDisk Ultra Fit (SDCZ43) -vs- Leef Supra USB 3.0

In the 16GB USB 3.0 Flash Drives for under $20 review last month, it was noted that the incredibly small Leef Supra 3.0 was a blazing fast contender. The only thing faster was the large SanDisk Extreme and that was the funny thing: SanDisk didn’t have a tiny USB 3.0 drive! Up until now, the only thing SanDisk had in this category was the Cruzer Fit, a USB 2.0 drive.

sandisk-ultra-fit-vs-leef-sWell, SanDisk just released the Ultra Fit USB 3.0 drive which appears to be positioned exactly to compete against the Leef Supra 3.0. The question is “How does it perform?”

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Storage

Which portable USB 3.0 SD / MicroSD card reader is the best?

After reviewing the whole SanDisk SD card line-up recently, it seems obvious that we all need to move more and more data around, faster and faster. So how to choose which SD card reader for getting pictures and videos off our cameras?

Looking on Amazon.com reveals a whole mess of USB 3.0 SD card readers. Some as cheap as $5, others are more expensive costing $10 and $15. But how do you really know what you’re getting? The average Amazon.com review isn’t all that comprehensive.

Three USB 3.0 SD card readers were picked from the pile (all around $10), put under the microscope, and then a bunch of SD cards were thrown at them to see what happened. Surprisingly, each SD reader had its own advantages and disadvantages with no clear winner. Choosing which one will come down to personal preference, mostly.

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Categories
Storage

The best SanDisk SD card for your digital camera

If you’re not shooting pictures with your cellphone camera, then it’s probably a good bet that you’re probably using a digital camera that takes SD memory cards for picture storage. There are lots of SD card manufacturers out there, but perhaps the most popular SD memory card manufacturer is SanDisk.

3-Sandisk-sd-cards

Looking at SanDisk’s website, it appears that they have quite the line-up of SD cards. One would think that 3 different SD cards would be enough to sell to a camera-happy world, but SanDisk seems to think that 6 different cards is needed for all your different photo shooting needs. So which card to buy for your camera?

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Storage

Review: Leef Supra 3.0 USB flash drive -vs- The 633x Lexar MicroSDHC card

When reviewing the Top 16GB USB flash drives under $20 of 2014, it was observed that the ever-tiny Leef Supra 3.0 was surprisingly fast for such a small thing. This warranted a closer comparison to something like a Lexar 633x MicroSDHC card (with USB 3.0 Lexar reader) which was a tad larger, but overall, pretty close to the same size. In addition to this, a generic USB 2.0 MicroSD card reader was thrown in for contrast.

LexarUSB3-vs-LeefSupra3
Lexar USB 3.0 MicroSD reader, Leef Supra 3.0 16GB, and USB 2.0 MicroSD reader

The nagging question was “How does the Leef stack up to the competition?”

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