Archive for September 1, 2017

Review: Garmin Edge 520 Cyclocomputer

Posted in Products with tags on September 1, 2017 by itnerd

When I ride my bike, I’m looking to improve in some way on every ride. To help me with that, I have a Garmin Edge 520 cyclocomputer on my bike.

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This is a small but sophisticated computer that out of the box allows you to measure distance, speed, ride time and elevation with no external sensors required to do so. That’s because the cyclocomputer uses GPS and Glonass to track where you are and how fast you are moving. It will also display a rudimentary map that will allow you to know where you are. Plus it also has rudimentary navigation abilities to route you through a course that you can download to the cyclocomputer via the MicroUSB connection while connected to a Mac or PC. You also use the MicroUSB port to charge the cyclocomputer so that you can get up to 15 hours of battery life.

However, the real power starts to appear when you pair the cyclocomputer with any of a number of external sensors to get data. The sensors need to support the ANT+ standard for them to work which pretty much everything that you’d be interested in does. In my case, I use a heart rate monitor and a cadence sensor (so that I know how fast I am pedaling). My wife who has the same cyclocomputer takes it one step further by adding a speed sensor on top of the sensors that I have mentioned above. If you really want to get nerdy, you can add the sorts of sensors that pro cyclists use like this power meter that measure your power output when you ride. Or you can integrate it into the Di2 electronic shifting system that cycling components company Shimano makes. It will even integrate with Garmin’s cycling lights and action cameras.

In terms of the data that it collects, it will allow you to measure your performance on the bike in the same way that pro cyclists do. This allows you to really hone in on what you’re good at and what you need to work on. But if you’re not trying to be the next Chris Froome, you can leverage the fact that this computer will work with Strava in a couple of ways. Strava is a social fitness site where riders’ GPS files are compared by time over certain stretches of road. I use it myself and a I use an app called Garmin Connect on my iPhone (it’s also available for Android and Windows Phone) to automatically upload my rides to Strava when I am done. But the Edge 520 supports Live Strava Segments which are sections or road where you can set the best time among those who ride the same section of road. You’ll get a notification of when you are approaching a Strava Segment and relevant info such as best time, your friends best times, etc. This feature does require you to pay for a Strava Premium account, but you do get a taste of this feature for three months.

Garmin Connect is also useful to users of the Edge 520 in two other ways. First is that the cyclocomputer is capable of paring with a phone via Garmin Connect so that you can see the name and number when someone calls you as well as text messages of anyone who texts you on the computer. Though you cannot respond to it, it is handy as you don’t have to pull your phone out of your cycling jersey to see who is calling or texting as long as you pay attention to the road. That way you can decide to pull over and respond, or ignore it and keep riding. The other feature that Garmin Connect brings you is Incident Detection. The Edge 520 leverages its internal accelerometers to detect what it considers to be an incident such as a crash or you being hit by a car. It will then first put a message on the screen of the Edge 520. If this message is not cleared within a given time period then the Edge 520 will then send a message to a Bluetooth paired phone that will that will in turn send a message on to a list of registered contacts about the incident. It’s easy to set up and it will act as some extra piece of mind for your loved ones.

Gripes? Despite the fact that this computer supports both ANT+ and Bluetooth, the Edge 520 would not support pairing with my Series 2 Apple Watch to get heart rate info from it. Now, I can see this from a couple of angles. The first being that Garmin sells wearables of its own and they really don’t want to play nice with the competition which I can understand. The other side of this is that Apple is playing nice with lots and lots of fitness companies and Garmin needs to get into the game. Now I thought that I was an edge case (excuse the pun) with this gripe, but a quick Google search suggests that I may not be the only one out there that would like Apple Watch support to happen.

The Garmin Edge 520 is not cheap. It’s $400 CAD by itself. But you can get it in a bundle with a heart rate monitor, a cadence sensor, and a speed sensor for $550 CAD. It’s aimed at serious cyclists who want to gather all sorts of data about their rides. Thus if you’re someone who only rides on local cycling paths and enjoys the scenery, this isn’t the computer for you and I would suggest looking at one of Garmin’s lower end models. But if you do fit the use case that this cyclocomputer is aimed it, head to your local bike shop and pick one up today.

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Review: Nikon COOLPIX W300 Digital Camera

Posted in Products with tags on September 1, 2017 by itnerd

My first test of the Nikon COOLPIX W300 digital camera was an unplanned one. My wife and I were in line for the ferry to take us to Port aux Basques Newfoundland during our recent road trip and it fell out of my pocket onto the ground. That was a height of about 3 feet. The people around us freaked out because they were convinced that I just killed the camera. But I picked it up and proved to them that everything still worked by firing off a few pictures and showing the results on the LCD screen, which is viewable in all lighting conditions.

Clearly this is not your average digital camera. It’s meant for those who live more extreme lifestyles. That made it perfect for our road trip seeing as we were going hiking and cycling. Here’s a few other reasons why this isn’t your average camera:

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  • It is waterproof. It will survive being under water for depths up to 30 m for 60 minutes. Though I would suggest based on this experience with another Nikon camera that you acquire this strap that gives the camera the ability to float if you don’t want to dive into a lake to find. However, it can take photos and video underwater which means in that use case, you don’t need the strap.
  • It is shockproof
  • It is freezeproof to -10 celsius
  • It is dustproof

From a feel perspective, it felt well built and solid. All the ports (Mini HDMI and Micro USB) are behind a door that houses the MicroSD card slot. That door has clearly been designed to keep water and dust out as it has gaskets on it. There was no question once I started to hold it that it would survive anything that I tossed at it within reason.

In terms of what kind of pictures and videos it can take, it will capture 4K Ultra HD video, and 16MP photos. Because I put a 16GB card into the camera, I limited myself to talking 1080p videos during the road trip. The results were outstanding for the most part. Take these examples which highlights the fact that this camera has image stabilization that is insanely great. These pictures were all taken from a moving car that was doing highway speeds at the time:

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The only area where the camera struggled a bit is in low light or at night. I had some issues getting good shots in those scenarios. But as you can see, the Coolpix W300 still did okay:

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This is a great camera to take pictures with as it seems to be able to adjust itself to take the perfect picture for the most part.

In terms of video, here’s an example that I shot in 1080p:

It was windy on the day I took this video and I turned on the function that cuts the wind noise. It didn’t eliminate the wind noise, but it did a good enough job that you could hear voices at the end of the video. Other than that, I can find little to complain about the quality of the video.

One of the cool features that the COOLPIX W300 has is that it has WiFi and Bluetooth. Combined with the SnapBridge App which is available for iOS and Android, you can do a number of things:

  • You can use the phone to have the camera grab GPS co-ordinates. That’s great as I’ve used cameras with built in GPS functionality, and that functionality can really drain the camera’s battery.
  • It can automatically download photos to your phone. In my case, it downloaded 2MP versions of the photos to my iPhone and then my iPhone put them on my iCloud account. I can see how this would be handy, but I could not figure out how to upload the 16MP versions. There was an option for that in the SnapBridge App that greyed out and I could not figure out how to activate it. Optionally, you can upload your pics to Nikon IMAGE SPACE which is their cloud photo service.
  • You can use the software to act as a remote viewfinder and remotely take pictures. For example, my wife and I used this feature to take pictures of ourselves in an area of Gros Morne National Park while the camera sat on a picnic table in front of us.

Some other cool features COOLPIX W300 include the fact that you can use dedicated buttons to get access to an altimeter, GPS, and a flashlight. I found that to be handy as there were times when I wondered how close I was to sea level, or when I needed some extra light to read something.

In terms of holding the camera, it was very easy to hold it with one hand. That combined with the fact that it would survive a drop encouraged me to take these pictures on a moving bike during a bike ride in Gros Morne National Park. Which by the way you should only do if you’re an experienced cyclist (click to enlarge):

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Another cool feature is that you can change modes simply by moving the camera. But the real selling point for me was the battery life. I took over 500 photos over 13 days and I only charged the battery in the camera 4 times. That’s impressive.

The Nikon COOLPIX W300 is $500 CDN which is a great price for a camera that has these capabilities. If you have an “active” lifestyle and you need a point and shoot camera that can survive anything that your lifestyle throws at you, the Nikon COOLPIX W300 is totally worth a look.

 

 

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Review: Linksys WRT32X AC3200 Dual Band WiFi Gaming Router

Posted in Products with tags on September 1, 2017 by itnerd

UPDATE: It appears that a recent firmware update pushed out by Linksys has caused issues where people are reporting that this router no longer functions as well as it did when I reviewed it. You can find out more details here, but you might want to hold off purchasing this router until this issue gets sorted.

UPDATE #2: Those issues now seem to be resolved. You can find out more details here and here.

 

I honestly think that Linksys and their marketing department got the marketing of this router wrong. When Linksys handed their brand new WRT32X gaming router to review, I thought that I would run a few tests with it that are gaming related as it is marketed as a gaming router and call it a day. The thing is, the more that I used this router, the more I found that this is a great router for the most part. Period. It just happens to do gaming really well.

Let me start with the looks. Linksys scores points with me for making this router not look like something out of a Transformers movie as some other companies who make gaming routers tend to make their routers look like.

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It looks like an all black WRT1900AC or WRT1900ACS. That means that it will fit into your decor without standing out like a sore thumb. In terms of features, here’s what you get:

  • AC3200 MU-MIMO
  • 802.11a/g, 802.11n, 802.11ac
  • AC3200 (N600 + AC2600)
  • 2.4 and 5 GHz (simultaneous dual-band)
  • DFS certified for operation in the clear DFS channel airspace
  • 5-port Pro-grade Gigabit Ethernet ports: 1x Gigabit WAN port, 4x Gigabit LAN ports
  • One USB 3.0 port, One Combo eSATA/USB 2.0 port, Power
  • 4x external, dual-band, detachable antennas
  • 1.8 GHz dual-core Processor
  • 512MB DDR3 RAM / 256MB Flash Memory
  • Wireless Encryption: WPA2 Personal
  • VPN Support: PPTP IPSec pass‐through
  • Storage File System Support: FAT, NTFS, and HFS+
  • Browser-based Setup and custom graphical user interface
  • Open Source ready for OpenWrt

This is heavy duty hardware. But all of the above isn’t the part of the story that you should focus on. What you should focus on is the software. For starters, the web based GUI is one of the best that I’ve ever seen. The setup of this router was insanely trivial. And once it is set up, here’s what you get:

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It’s a very clean look and it you can easily figure out where you have to go to tweak or set up your router. It also give you a clear view of what’s going on in real time, be it speed related or device related. Kudos to Linksys for coming up with this user interface. Now you can install your own firmware via OpenWrt, but I seriously wouldn’t bother as this user interface rocks.

Another reason why I wouldn’t swap the firmware is the fact that this router has the incorporate the Killer Prioritization Engine. What this does is provides serious online gamers who have Killer enabled PCs the performance to pwn their opponents in epic fashion by optimizing traffic for low latency and less lag and ensures that the Killer-enabled PC’s gaming, audio, and video is fast and smooth. So. That’s great marketing. But is it true?

Yes it is.

I acquired a MSI GT73VR 6RF Titan Pro gaming laptop which supports the Killer Prioritization Engine and after updating Windows 10 to Redstone 2, I downloaded a copy of Steam so that I could install Team Fortress 2 and play it with everything maxed out. That way I could see if their performance claims held up on my Gigabit Internet connection over WiFi. There was no lag, no stuttering, no choppy two way audio while communicating with other players. Nothing negative at all. And this isn’t just when nothing else was going on with the network. I could be using my Roku to stream a TV show or a movie and get this level of performance. It was actually quite impressive.

But it didn’t stop there. I used my own MacBook Pro running the same game on the same server to see what the difference was. To my surprise, performance was much better than what I was used to. It wasn’t up to the level of the MSI laptop, but I had zero reason to complain. Not only that, anything that I threw at this router be it YouTube videos, streaming movies on my Roku, or whatever, it was smooth to a level that I have not seen before. Especially on the 5GHz band via WiFi. This too was impressive. And to be frank, I wasn’t expecting that result. This is precisely why I feel that this router is being marketed wrong. It is the best router that I have reviewed in years by a huge margin.

The only area which the WRT32X perhaps falls a bit short is in WiFi range on the 5GHz band. My condo has a couple of concrete walls to go through, and that combined with the fact that it only has four antennas when some of its competition have six or eight antennas had it struggling a bit to reach the far reaches of my condo with full signal strength. But having said that, I still had no issues streaming videos or pwning opponents in online games from those locations. So while this is a weakness, it’s far from being a fatal one.

The new Linksys WRT32X Gaming Router will be in stores on September 21, 2017 and go for an estimated $369.99 CAD. If you’re a gamer who wants maximum pwnage and you have hardware that supports the Killer Prioritization Engine, you need to get this router. If however you want a top performing router and you’re not a hardcore gamer who wants maximum pwnage, you should still get this router. Quite simply, this is the best router that Linksys has ever produced. Though, if I were them I’d change how it’s marketed as it is such a good router that they are perhaps limiting their target audience by only marketing to gamers.

 

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Review: MSI GT73VR 6RF Titan Pro Gaming Laptop

Posted in Products with tags on September 1, 2017 by itnerd

Gaming laptops are all the rage. If you’re not familiar with them, here’s the lowdown. These are purpose built laptops that are designed to maximize the gaming experience in every way. They often sacrifice battery life and weight to do so, but those who buy these type of laptops don’t care about either of those.

Case in point is the MSI GT73VR 6RF Titan Pro which to properly show it to you, I took a video of it:

Here’s what I got when I opened the box and powered it up:

  • 64GB DDR4 RAM
  • 2.7 GHz Intel Core i7-6820HK processor
  • Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 8GB GDDR5X graphics chipset
  • 17.3″ built-in 4K LCD with 3840 X 2160 resolution and 100% Adobe RGB (optional)
  • Windows 10 Home
  • A 1TB SSD drive and a 1TB 7200 RPM drive
  • Thunderbolt 3
  • Killer Gigabit LAN and Killer 802.11ac WiFi
  • Exclusive ESS SABRE HiFi DAC for lossless, high-quality audio
  • Nahimic 2 Sound Technology delivering a 360⁰ immersive audio experience
  • Sound by Dynaudio system
  • Full sized keyboard with dynamic lighting
  • VR Capable
  • Lithium Ion battery
  • Weighs 4.14 kg

Now let me get to the stuff that everyone cares about. How does this laptop perform? I was able to run Team Fortress 2 at 3840 X 2160 with everything maxed out with no issues. It was smooth and fluid with no lag. Quite frankly, it’s the fastest laptop I have used in years. Gamers who plunk down their cash for this MSI laptop will find little to complain. Here’s why this laptop is this fast:

  • For starters, the Intel Core i7-6820HK processor is a quad-cored CPU includes HyperThreading, and has a maximum Turbo speed of 3.6GHz. You can use some MSI supplied software to overclock that CPU if for whatever reason that isn’t fast enough for you.
  • The Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 adds to this by being able to crank out an insane 120 frames per seconds in Team Fortress 2 at 3840 X 2160. You can use some MSI supplied software to overclock the Nvidia card if for whatever reason that isn’t fast enough for you.
  • Killer supplies the WiFi and Ethernet hardware which when paired with networking gear such as the Linksys WRT32X router guarantees low latency, low lag, high performance gaming.
  • The combination of a SSD and a 7200 hard drive in a RAID 0 storage configuration keeps things speedy. Everything from Windows 10 to games load quickly. The SSD sits on a PCI-E Gen 3.0 x4 bus utilizing NVMe technology.

On top of all the above, it has a keyboard that has LED lights you can customize the color and how the colors change.  The keyboard also feels great for touch typists like me. Connectivity options include five USB 3.0 slots, one HiFi audio headphone out/mic in combo one line-in/out combo, one HDMI 1.4 out, one mini-DP out, a single RJ45 port, one Thunderbolt 3.0 port, and an SD card reader. After I tweak the onboard 3W speakers using the Nahimic soundboard app, they were “acceptable” for movies, but probably wouldn’t be your first choice for longer gaming or music listening sessions due to their lacking bass response. The screen is one of the most bright and vivid screens that I’ve ever used and I can say it beats the Retina Display from Apple by a wide margin. The only area where this laptop falls down is in battery life where I was only able to get about 90 minutes to two hours depending on what I was doing. Gaming was towards the 90 minutes end of the spectrum. Browsing the web was closer to two hours. That may disappoint some, but chances are that the core audience of this laptop will not care.

And now for the price. Expect all this speed and power to cost you just under $5000 CDN. Not cheap by any standard. But let’s be clear. This laptop is for a gamer who wants the ultimate in performance to pwn the competition, and is perfectly fine with what it costs. People who are buying this to run Microsoft Office need not apply. I was impressed by it and I believe that any hardcore gamer who sees this laptop will be impressed too.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Review: Orico 2.5″ Portable Hard Drive Protection Bag (PHD-25) & Portable Hard Drive Carrying Case (PHB-25)

Posted in Products with tags on September 1, 2017 by itnerd

My wife and I needed to get cases for our external hard drives during our road trip to Newfoundland. My wife and I chose two different Orico products. In her case, she chose the Orico 2.5 inch Portable Hard Drive Protection Bag because of the color:IMG_0705.jpg

This is a moistureproof, dustproof and antistatic case made for 2.5″ hard drives. The outside has a bit of a nylon shell on the outside which is purple because my wife liked the color on this case.

In my case, I chose an all black Orico Portable Hard Drive Carrying Case:

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This case is made of high-quality EVA waterproof material. That makes it durable, wearable, scratch resistant and not easily deformed.

In either case, you get this on the inside:

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On the left, you get a mesh net, on the right you get a strap. Here’s how I utilized this space:

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Here you can see the Western Digital My Passport For Mac hard drive. Everything fit without an issue and in either case, my wife and I had no issues. Both cases are about $20 CDN at your local computer store. Pick one up to protect your external hard drive.

 

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Review: Parallels Desktop For Mac 13

Posted in Products with tags on September 1, 2017 by itnerd

Frequent readers of this blog will know that I am a long time user of Parallels Desktop For Mac. Last year’s update to be frank underwhelmed me. But that strangely didn’t stop me from plunking down my cash to update to Version 13 which is shipping now.

One thing that this update does is introduce support for the touch bar which comes on the new MacBook Pros. I don’t have a touch bar Mac, so I borrowed one to see what it brings to the table. From what I can tell, it does two things:

  • You can now display a number of tools and features from within Windows virtual machines via the touch bar. You can also have a duplicate of the Windows Task Bar, plus you can display icons for pinned items such as Cortana or the File Explorer.
  • You can use the Touch Bar to control Windows apps inside Windows VMs. There’s a few predefined setups for Office apps, Cortana, and a few other apps and the tools are there to build your own for whatever app you have.

Other improvements include support for USB-C/Thunderbolt 3 which worked fine on the MacBook Pro that I tested on, as well as a Picture-In-Picture mode which allows you to view live previews of multiple VMs running onscreen simultaneously. That was kind of cool to try out. When the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update ships in a month or so, it will also support viewing contact info from the People Bar in the Macs Dock as I found out when I fired up a preview build to test with.

Parallels Desktop introduced a bundled suite of Mac utilities called Parallels Toolbox last year. This year there’s a Windows version as well. Some  tools that stood out included Airplane Mode, Clean Drive, and Find Duplicates. All of them do what they imply and are welcome on my Mac.

Owners of a Mac with a Retina display can either render the guest VM at full Retina resolution and rely on the guest operating system’s own scaling, or they can use a “scaled” mode, which presents a lower resolution to the guest VM and then rely’s on the host operating system to scale the image to a usable size. I tend to choose the latter myself because I find that to be far more useful, but it’s nice to have the ability to do either.

Finally, it is fully qualified for MacOS High Sierra which will ship from Apple sometime this month.

But let’s be honest, performance is what you care about. In other words, is this version of Parallels Desktop faster than last year’s version? The performance improvements will not blow you out of the water. But they do exist. While my VM’s don’t run any faster than they did before, they did start up a touch faster, the creation of snapshots was a touch faster, and using storage over USB (such as an external hard drive) was a touch faster.

So, should you drop $50 to upgrade or $80 for a brand new copy? The changes are incremental, not Earth shattering, but for the most part will be welcomed by most users. I say that if you need virtualization software, you should feel free to shell out the cash for this latest iteration of Parallels Desktop For Mac.

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Review: Orico 2.5 inch USB 3.0 Hard Drive Enclosure (2588S3)

Posted in Commentary on September 1, 2017 by itnerd

After I dropped an SSD into my wife’s MacBook Pro, I had a perfectly good 2.5″ Western Digital 500GB Black hard drive left over. So I decided to turn it into a portable hard drive. To accomplish this, I used an Orico 2.5 inch USB hard drive enclosure. Putting it together is insanely easy first you take the lower half of the enclosure and slide the hard drive in like this:

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Once the hard drive is plugged in, you slide the top on to get this:

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Done! Declare victory and have a beer as no tools were required to get this done and it only took two minutes. It gives you a portable hard drive with USB 3.0 speed and it includes a USB 3.0 cable. Once built, it feels very solid and durable. Though I would recommend getting a case for it. The best part is that it cost me $20 CDN at my local computer store. Taking into consideration the price and the ease of setup, this is a must buy if you need to repurpose a 2.5″ hard drive.

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Review: Carbon Copy Cloner 5

Posted in Products with tags on September 1, 2017 by itnerd

My go to backup and hard disk cloning program has been Carbon Copy Cloner for a whle now. Last week they released version 5 with a ton of new features which are meant to make the application easier to use. Which in turn means you’re going to back up your computer and protect your data.

Here’s why you want to upgrade from version 4:

  • Support for MacOS High Sierra: This includes doing bootable backups and bootable restores on the brand new APFS file system. This is the number one reason why you need to get this version of Carbon Copy Cloner. A close second is the fact that it supports APFS encryption.
  • Guided backup/restore/cloning: If you are new to backing up your Mac, Carbon Copy Cloner 5 will walk you through doing a backup or a restore which will lessen the chance that you’ll screw something up. To further help those who are new to the backup game, there are tips that pop up by hovering your mouse over various parts of the user interface.
  • Graphical view of tasks: In my case, I run four backup tasks that each last for a week and backup to disk images. But I did have a problem when two backup tasks would run at the same time on a Saturday. After I installed Carbon Copy Cloner 5 and I used this view, I was able to see that visually and quickly fix it. This is something that will really help users figure out when a backup task will happen as well as tweak things to their satisfaction.
  • You can group tasks together: This can be for organization purposes, or you can run them as a group. Either way, it gives you additional flexibility.

All of the above, plus a bunch of improvements that have been made have made Carbon Copy Cloner easy to use for novice and pro users. In fact, it has evolved to the point where I will begin to recommend it to my clients over Apple’s Time Machine backup solution as it is that easy to use. I’ve been using it for the last week and I have nothing negative to say about it. If you’re still on the fence, you can try it out for 30 days. If you like it, you can dive in for $52 CAD which if you’re a home user will cover all the Macs in your home. If you need backup software for your Mac, and trust me you do need backup software, look no further than your Mac.

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Review: Western Digital My Passport For Mac

Posted in Products with tags on September 1, 2017 by itnerd

People don’t think about backing up their computer when they travel. Thus when disaster strikes in the form of a dead hard drive, dead laptop, or the computer being stolen, they’ve lost all their data. That’s why I’ve always made it a policy to travel with a portable hard drive that is packed separately from my computer which I use to back up every night.

During the road trip across Canada that my wife and I just completed, I used an new portable hard drive from Western Digital called the My Passport For Mac:

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Normally, I don’t get the Mac specific version of any portable hard drive because they cost way more for no good reason other than the fact that it’s formatted for Mac out of the box. Western Digital must have heard that from their customer base as the 1TB model cost me $80 CDN which is the same cost as the PC version. The company also makes 2TB, 3TB, and 4TB models as well.

So, what do you get for your cash? Well, quite a bit actually. The drive itself is very small and thin which makes it easy to pack. It’s also a USB 3.0 drive (which includes a cable by the way) which makes it speedy for those who have don’t have a USB-C computer. It will work with Apple’s own Time Machine backup software and it will work with whatever backup software that you choose to use. In my case, that’s Carbon Copy Cloner. But if you don’t have backup software, Western Digital offers up their own software called WD Backup. For bonus points, the drive has 256-bit AES hardware encryption that you can enable and tweak with the included WD Security software. That way your data stays safe.

The drive was quick to do my nightly backup taking less than 15 minutes to complete the job which was just a touch faster than the previous Western Digital drive I have been using for this purpose. So clearly Western Digital have made a few tweaks to get slightly better performance. It’s also rugged as I popped it into the outside pocket of a suitcase that was tossed in and out of cars for almost 2 weeks without any sort of protective case around it…. and it lived. But in case your drive dies, it comes with a three year warranty. Though, if I were Western Digital, I would have tossed a case into the box.

One note: The drive looks stylish. But it only comes in black. The PC versions of this drive come in three or four other colors. That’s kind of strange.

Backing up your data is important at home and when you’re on the road. In the case of the latter, Western Digital has a compelling offering in the form of the My Passport For Mac that makes this easy for Mac users. This is a must get if you travel and you care about your data.

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Review: Orico 4 Port USB Charger (DSP-4U)

Posted in Products with tags on September 1, 2017 by itnerd

Something that I used to keep my various electronics charged was this new piece of tech that’s in my laptop bag:

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This is the Orico 4 Port USB Charger. It’s very small and easy to pack. Plus it has adapters for the UK, Aus, and EU that slide on top of the foldable prongs that you would use in North America. That means that you can use this charger in dozens of countries. Something that is very classy is that it comes with a felt bag that you can use to keep everything in. The charger supports 100V – 240V so you can use it anywhere that you can plug it in. Each USB ports puts out 5V which means that your devices will charge quickly. I used this on my recent road trip to the east coast of Canada and I really appreciated having it as I could plug it in anywhere and it got my devices fully charged quickly.

The best part is that it was less that $25 CDN and is available in your choice of white or black. That makes it an easy call if you need a USB charger for your next trip overseas.

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