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Western Digital Bumps it Up! (With Pic)

Western Digital has bumped up the 10,000 RPM drives with a solution for those wanting larger capacity on the traditionally small capacity storage area. with many drives on the market now in the 1TB range at a reasonable cost, it makes sense to take a look at bumping up your internal and external storage however these SATA drives generally spin at 7200RPM. This is a jump over the old 5400RPM technology in the past and combined with large cache size, now at a standard 16MB cache, the speeds to access your data and write to the drives has significantly increased.

I have always been a fan of 10,000RPM technology however because of the higer spin rate on the platters, more heat is generated and thus the size has usually been reserved to a max of 160GB. The announcement this morning from Western Digital almost doubles the capacity and seems to focus it’s attention on the gaming market with the VelociRaptor. The 10,000RPM drive with a 16MB Cache features a capcity of 300GB. The drive itself is a 2.5inch form factor however it is wrapped by what Western Digital calls the IcePack taking it to a 3.5 inch factor, commen with most internal drives today.

Alienware will have the VelociRaptor in the ALX Desktop by the end of the month of April and will also sell direct the drives through its website. The WD3000GLFS will also be available through the WD store at http://www.shopwd.com/ The cost for the drive will be around $299 which should satisfy most performance seekers for Gaming, Digital Audio and Video Editing and overall speed of your data read and writes. For more info, check out the WD Website

Andy
TechtalkRadio Broadcasting Live Sundays 10am to 12noon Arizona Time
Andy TaylorLeave a commentTechtalkRadio

New products we’re checking out!

We received some new products just in time for tonights Ustream.TV broadcast! We’ll give you a look at the XploreTech Rugged PC Tablet. Awesome and great size screen with Biometrics on the unit for security. This is the most rugged PC we’ve ever looked at.

Also,

Plustek sent us over the OpticFilm 7300 Slide and Negative Scanner. A new way to scan, space saving and great results.

Tonight, 6pm Pacific on Ustream.tv/channel/techtalkradio

TechtalkRadio Broadcasting Live Sundays 10am to 12noon Arizona Time
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Perks to the Job

There really are certain perks of doing a Technology Radio Show, Running a Website and hosting segments on tech for the local CBS Affiliate. With some of those perks comes responsibilities, such as making sure stuff gets back to manufacturers on time so they can send them out to other reviewers, editors and the lot. There are also deadlines with Radio and TV and we have to fit all the stuff in we can within a reasonable amount of time. Sometimes, we have to pull ourselves away from testing the stuff out and jot our thoughts down on One Note or Google Doc just so that we don’t get to far behind. So, with the perks comes work.

Early this morning, FedEx showed up at the door with a nice new padded envelope which contained one of the latest digital cameras from Casio. The EX-Z80 is a colorful digital camera with a huge LCD screen on the back for viewing. Gone is the eye viewfinder so they can fit as much screen on this baby as possible. I have to say, even though we are looking at a Hot Pink digital camera, its brushed metal and nice corners with compact size make this easy to handle.

There are many options with this and over the next couple of days we’ll play around with it, take some shots and put together some thoughts on this camera. We’ll also snap some more shots for you of the camera and some shots from the Casio EX-Z80 to take a look at. Office Depot is going to print up a couple of the images in Large format for us and we will be shutterbugs for the next week or two. By The Way, Office Depot is handling large format printing and can tackle just about anything you need. Make sure you consider them for your next special job.

Ok, but now..we have something very strange that has happened in the TechtalkRadio studio. I left late this afternoon for a meeting with our producer Carol. Driving around Tucson on a Friday afternoon can get rather hectic and while I had thought I would be back around 5:30, it was more like 6:30. Gloria met me outside and we went in and had a nice fish dinner, while watching A Fish Called Wanda. Ironic as that is.

After the movie I told her I needed to get some work done in the studio and fix a website that is giving me flash problems. I opened the door and there in the back of the studio was a strange large metal crate. I called for gloria if she had seen this huge beast of a roadie style crate and she was oblivious to it. The girls were not here and left before I did. What was this mysterious crate and how did it get in the studio. I haven’t opened it yet..but the temptation is killing me.

I’ll have more tommorow.

TechtalkRadio Broadcasting Live Sundays 10am to 12noon Arizona Time
Andy Taylor1 CommentTechtalkRadio

Today Was on Rocky and Sue

Greetings from Tucson, This morning I was on the Rocky and Sue morning show (WKRZ-FM) from Wilkes Barre PA and did a segment highlighting the Archos 705 WiFi, ShoZu.com and the wave bye bye to Windows XP set for June 30th. This farewell to Xp does not mean your XP will stop working, just that Windows will no longer be available for sale. Microsoft will still support XP through mid April 2009. If you are thinking you would like to get a system and want to get it installed with XP, some manufacturers will sell you a system with XP, you want to do it before June 30th. You can listen to the segment with the awesome morning duo here
wkrz031108.mp3

I then went over to KOLD and did the TV segment where we featured the BlueX Watch and Headphones. Jenny misplaced her MP3 Shuffle and we talked about some options for replacement including the RCA Jet which is also a Bluetooth compatible MP3 device, great for those that want to work out! We’ll have the video posted at TechtalkRadio.com later today.

We also showed the Wacom Bamboo tablet which retails for about 79.00.

TechtalkRadio Broadcasting Live Sundays 10am to 12noon Arizona Time
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iTunes is Working Now!

About a month ago I logged onto iTunes and found that for some reason we had not had any updates to iTunes since September of last year! I tried to adjust the code, rewrite the XML and even reverse engineer some coding to get the thing to update. I just didn’t have any luck in this.

Today I finally decided to delve into this and figure out what was going wrong. Having the site through Feedburner has been no problem at all and as a matter of fact, whenever I adjusted the iTunes Feed, my Feedburner would generate RSS errors. Arggg.

After trolling the web, I found some really good sites with RSS and XML examples and was able to re-write the Channel information for our podcast.

Here are a couple of good links I found:
http://www.devshed.com/c/a/XML/How-to-Set-Up-Podcasting-and-Vodcasting/2/

http://www.podcast411.com/howto_1.html

I have since been able to update the Channel Info, waiting on the graphic to refresh, and now the updates are appearing in iTunes again. Feedburner is also returning a Valid feed.
To Subscribe to our iTunes Feed:
http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=121593668

TechtalkRadio Broadcasting Live Sundays 10am to 12noon Arizona Time