The new Pogoplug: More USB ports for extra hard drives, very pink.
(Credit: Cloud Engines)X
Just recently we reviewed Cloud Engines' Pogoplug, a very affordable US$99 solution that effortlessly turns any USB hard drive or memory stick into an online-connected makeshift server. We really enjoyed playing with the original, although its blocky white look wasn't exactly eyecatching. We take that back--and perhaps even long for the minimalism--with Cloud Engines' new Pogoplug, available in December. Read more »
The Pro WX wireless USB external hard drive. (Credit: Imation)
If you've wished you could connect your external hard drive to your computer without having to use the USB cable, now you can.
Imation announced recently the availability of the first wireless USB external hard drive, the Pro WX. The hard drive works just like any other USB hard drive, with one exception: It doesn't require a USB cable.
Wireless USB has been under development for about five years, and some of the first products were demoed at CES 2009. This technology allows you to connect USB 2.0 devices to a computer wirelessly from up to 10m away with a throughput speed of up to 480Mbps.
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The XT5 Jaguar, located at Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee, recently received a refresh that included upgrading its quad-core CPUs to hex-core Opteron processors. That means a 2.3 petaflop per second theoretical performance peak ("nearly a quarter of a million cores"), and 1.75 petaflops measured by the Linpack benchmark.
Some people push physical boundaries through body modification or inane stunts and get accolades. Others break through scientific frontiers and get awarded with the Nobel prize. Overclockers, however, do it simply because it's nerdy cool.
Using the AMD Dragon platform and a 3.2GHz Phenom II X4 955 processor, overclockers at QuakeCon (an enthusiast PC convention) managed to bring the CPU clockspeed to just over 7GHz. Instead of liquid Nitrogen that cools to -196 degrees Celsius, this feat was achieved by using liquid Helium which brought the system temperature down to -267 degrees Celsius. Read more »
The entry hall in my house has been a test bed for home monitoring cameras for years. I like to be able to record people coming into the house and see what's going on around the front door. Anyone with a family and occasional babysitters will understand. So I continue to look for simple, robust video-monitoring solutions, and vendors keep obliging by improving the state of the art in home remote cameras.
The Vue. (Credit: Rafe Needleman/CNET)
The latest: Two interesting and very different products, Avaak's Vue and the Astak Mole. Both are very easy to get up and running, and neither require monkeying with arcane router settings to get offsite access to the video streams--something that can be a problem with the Panasonic BL-C131a cameras that I otherwise favor. (I've also tried the Logitech WiLife system, and find it quite good.)
The Vue
The Vue is the most unusual remote camera I've seen. The product is unchanged from my March 2 preview, but I had a chance to experiment with the shipping version recently. The big benefit of the Vue: The cameras are tiny, battery-powered and thus completely wireless, and the system is extremely easy to set up. You plug an included controller box into your router or switch and tuck it out of the way, and then you can place the cameras anywhere in your house on their clever little stick-on magnetic dome mounts. The standard kit comes with two cameras.
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