Alternatives to the Apple Mp3 players

 

So you want an mp3 player, but you don’t want an Apple for whatever reason.  Might i suggest the Sansa line of mp3 players. 

For the most part the Sansa line of products, by Sandisk (the flash drive guys), are competitively priced, or cheaper than the comparable Apple player.  They usually have more options to boot! 

Lets take the big 3: 

1. Sansa Clip.  This does battle with either the Apple Shuffle, or Nano.  It comes in 1,2, or 4 GB sizes and includes a FM tuner, small screen, and plays mp3 and wma files.
2. Sansa Fuze.  This does battle with either the Apple Nano, or Ipod classic.  It comes in 2,4, or 8 GB flavors. The Fuze has a very nice 1.9″ color screen.  The Fuze also includes a FM tuner, but also comes with a voice recorder and the ability to view photos.  The Fuze even allows for expansion via a microSD card slot!  The Fuze plays mp3, wma, and mpeg4.
3. Sansa View.  This goes head to head with the apple ipod.  it comes in 8,16, or 32 GB sizes.  It has all the features of the fuze, with a larger 2.4″ screen.  it also plays mp3, wma, wmv, h264, and non-drm AAC.

A bonus for the kids:  The Sansa Shaker: A simple mp3 player that you shake to change songs.  no screen, but it has 2 headphone jacks for shareing and a built in speaker.

All the Sansa players play Audible files, and are easily sync’ed with most major music subscription services.   It has to be pointed out though that they will not sync with itunes, nor will they play apple-drm protected files.  It is nice to have an option besides the apple ipod line of mp3 players.  the Sansa line is usually cheaper or the same price as the apple products, with more features.  If you don’t have too many apple itunes downloads, look into the Sansa line.

 

Leave a comment for what you want to hear about next, or drop me a line at thetechchip@gmail.com

Should i start a twitter for this blog?

Robotic Automatic backup: DROBO!

Drobo is touted as the “World’s first storage robot.” While pricey it appears to be pretty much as advertised. 

Drobo is the little black box you see in the picture to the right.  For just under $500 you get the box, add whatever SATA drives you want and you can get going.  What DROBO does is automatically back up all you data, seamlessly.  DROBO does not care whether or not the drives are the same; it creates one giant drive from all the available drives.  What happens if a drive goes bad you say?  DROBO alerts you to the fact that the drive is bad and moves all data that was on that drive to another one.  Pull your bad drive and slap in another drive and your good to go.  Connect DROBO to a DroboShare and you have all the same automatic backup via GigaBit Ethernet connection.

 

The beauty of this system is that you do not need to know anything about backup, RAID, etc. just plug in DROBO and the little robot takes care of it all!

Check out Drobo, it isn’t cheap – but it has easy and convenient down pat.

 

TheTechChip   www.thetechchip@gmail.com or leave a comment.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Podiobooks

What does that weird title mean?

Podiobooks are serialized audio books made available via podcast RSS feed. It works just like a podcast, except that its an audio book delivered usually one chapter at a time. I love them! You can get them on itunes, directly from the author, or from a website like podiobooks.com . If you enjoy books on tape, you will Love Podiobooks.

All the books i have listen to, or continue to listen to are free.

I have loved all of Scott Sigler’s Books. They are sci-fi/horror thrillers. Not for young kids, but great story’s. He has done so well that he is being published, with his first release coming in April titled: infected. The podiobook is on his website, his current podiobook is Nocturnal.

Similarly i have really enjoyed all of Mur Lafferty’s works. She is more fantasy/comic book inspired. She is a struggling author trying to break into the business. Her just wrapped podiobook was awesome, titled: Playing for keeps.

If you are interested in a totally awesome trilogy, try JC Hutchins and his 7th Son trilogy. Story about cloning and trying to take over the world.

Finally if you go over to podiobooks.com they have a plethora of books being added all the time.

Transistor rodeo is an All ages book, i have only listened to the prelude but i can’t wait to listen to the rest.

I am sure there are more podiobooks that i have not stumbled across. They cover all genres and tastes. Some recordings have better quality than others, so if you don’t like one please try another. Most of these people are doing this in their spare time, but it’s also Free!

Have a great day!

TheTechChip@gmail.com

Wanna be a TV Station?

What’s the one thing that separates the average person trying to cover news, and a multi-million dollar Television station like channel 3?

The ability to broadcast live. At channel 3 we have live trucks that cost thousands of dollars to beam the video back from the field. However that all could change in the coming months. There is a new service that is currently in Alpha testing, but should be released shortly: QIK-streaming video directly to the web from your cell phone.

The service is pretty much limited to Nokia phones currently, and you will want a WiFi enabled phone and or an unlimited data plan as streaming video hogs bandwidth.

Assuming you meet those requirements, you can stream live video from your phone to the web. Anytime, Anywhere – as long as you have a signal. Also any video you stream will be automatically saved on the website for playback later, and or upload to YouTube or the like.

Now obviously the quality is Cell phone video quality: but i can easily see it being used for breaking news, or any large media event. Here is the URL if your interested in finding out more!

http://qik.com/

Sorry for the long space between posts – i have been under the weather – I will strive to post more in the future!

TheTechChip@gmail.com

Biohazard Warning Symbol

Hey there everybody.

I have not forgotten about this blog… its just been really quiet in the tech world recently – i think everyone is recovering from the one-two punch of CES followed by Macworld.

So here is today’s brief post – a link to an older article explaining how the BioHazard symbol came to be:

”We tested the sample symbols across the country — the marketing department
had survey groups to test different labels for Dow products. There were half
a
dozen of our original symbols in this survey of 24 different symbols. The
rest
were recognizable, like the peanut man for Planter’s peanuts, the
Texaco star,
the Shell Oil symbol, the Red Cross and the swastika. They were
asked to look at
them and then asked to guess at what each one meant. The
biohazard symbol got
the fewest guesses. Then we went back one week later to
the same set of people
and the same set of symbols, plus 36 more common
ones, and asked them which of
these did they remember the best. And they
picked out the biohazard symbol.

The Full article can be read after the link.

http://www.hms.harvard.edu/orsp/coms/BiosafetyResources/History-of-Biohazard-Symbol.htm

Have a nice day, and stay tuned for more fun!
TheTechChip – Contact: TheTechChip@gmail.com

The Tech Chip: Cool Gadget of the Day #1

Welcome to Wednesday!

Today’s cool tech gadget of the day is something i do not currently have, but want really bad!

Its called the Eye-Fi. http://www.eye.fi/

Here’s what it does, and why you want it: do you have a Digital camera that uses SD memory cards? Are you tired of plugging the camera into your computer to download the pictures, or taking the card out of the camera and using a card reader to transfer pictures? Do you have Wi-Fi in your house?

Then Eye-Fi is for you! This handy little SD memory card comes in at 2GB of storage, and fits in your camera as a normal SD memory card would. However, Eye-Fi has a built in Wi-Fi ability that lets it wirelessly connect to your computer and download your pictures from up to 45′ away indoors. Additionally the Eye-Fi software has the ability to automatically upload your pictures to the website of your choice (most are supported) for sharing or printing. Among the websites supported are: Picasa, Flickr, Facebook, Walmart, Costco, and Photobucket.

Also just announced yesterday, Eye-Fi now supports Mac in addition to Windows.

All this for the low list price of $99.99. And that price is expected to drop as demand builds.

Again, i have not used this, but assuming it works as advertised i can’t wait to wirelessly dump my photo’s from my digital cameras.

Have a Great Day!

Chip

Welcome to The Tech Chip

Hi there. My name is Chip, hence the play on words in the name of this blog – The Tech Chip.

My hope is to bring you all the interesting, exciting, or at least intriguing aspects of the tech world. Things are changing daily, so there should be a lot to talk about. I am hoping to cover the gamut of stuff, from household gadgets to the newest supercomputers, to the coolest toys your kids (and even YOU) will want. All this while also providing my feelings on the gadgets usefulness and practicality.

Some background on me, I am 34 years old and I have worked at Channel 3 for 15 years as a video editor. Its my job to take the video and sound from around the world, and around Connecticut, and condense it down to what you see on the evening news each day. Beyond working with all the fun toys that Channel 3 lets me play with, I have been extremely interested in computers since the early Commodore 64 days. I remember vividly going to my friend’s house to use his computer to program games, it took forever for the programs to run because the computer had to search the cassette tape to find the right spots to pull the information from.

Fast forward to my first computer, an IBM PCjr. Not a great computer (no hard drive, just a 5 1/4 inch floppy and 2 cartridge slots) but it was mine! I spent hours programming in basic, making spreadsheets, and playing games. Eventually I was able to buy my first laptop (a 486 Pentium ThinkPad with a screaming 128k phone modem!) and have progressed to the point of having 5 computers (3 homebuilt) running in my house on a home network. Add in a love for gadgets and pretty much all cutting edge technology, and you get me: a self proclaimed techno-geek.

This brings me to today’s big tech news. If you follow tech at all, you know that today was the start of MacWorld 2008. Kicking off with Steve Jobs keynote address delivered around 12:15 our time. I am not a Mac Fan boy, as you can tell by my computer history, but I do love my ipod! So I spent my lunchtime glued to the web tracking what is new from Cupertino. Here are the bullet points:

1. Time capsule: this is basically an apple airport combined with a hard drive, and running time machine. If you have Macs in your house this seems like a nice way to backup all your computers automatically and wirelessly. Not really useful if your running pc’s though.
2. A minor software upgrade to the I-phone. And the ipod-touch gets a lot of the same abilities as the I-phone without the phone: catch is you have to pay an additional $20 and connect via wi-fi.
3. Movie Rentals. You will now be able to rent a movie instead of only buy a movie from the itunes store. Rentals will cost $2.99 for older, $3.99 for new releases. You will have 30 days to start your movie, and 24hrs to view it in once started. During the 24hrs you can watch it as many times as you please.
4. Apple TV: take 2. This appears to be the same old Apple TV hardware with newer software and they knocked the price down to $229.
5. And finally the showstopper: the Mac book Air. It’s basically a really tiny, light Mac book. Besides the super lightweight, and super small form factor. Nice features of the Mac book Air are, multi touch-gesture support just like the iphone and I-touch. Choice of 80gb hard drive or 64gb solid-state drive (think thumb drive). All that with a 5hr battery life is pretty impressive. One question I have, with such a small form factor: how rugged will it be?

Anyways, that brings you up to speed with me, and the big goings on of the day in the tech world. Talk to you soon!

Chip

Contact me via email anytime: TheTechChip@gmail.com