[MobileRatty] tag: mobius

AMD Tech Day: First Half

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 14:20:17 +0000

After a short bus ride from our hotel, the 13 12 invited bloggers (minus James Kendrick, who is moving this week) showed up at the beautiful new AMD Lone Star Campus. Parts of it are still being finished, but the company began moving in late last year.

Mauricio Freitas of GeekZone (we met at Mobius 2007 in Amsterdam) standing in front of the entrance to “our” building

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The Newer Tech Guardian MAXimus RAID Mirrored Data Redundant Solution Review

Thu, 05 Jun 2008 04:31:43 +0000

Do any of us need any more signs to be written on any more walls that redundant backing up of our data is the single most important thing we can possibly do? I hope not, because it seems that hardly a day goes by without another harsh reminder being driven home that it is imperative. Just this weekend many of us read with horror about the colossal explosion at The Planet, which affected over 9000 servers. Did you catch that? Servers, not sites. [fingeredbygeardiary]

Although most of the servers suffered no data loss, that was not true in all cases. My friend Ewdi wrote in his personal blog about another site owner who had “a secondary server (in the same datacenter – The Planet H1) with RAID 10 as a backup server where he rsync his primary server, however due to the incident, his backup server RAID array was corrupted and he was unable to recover it. Lucky him his primary server was intact, however this experience makes him rethink his backup strategy.” Indeed.

As you all will recall, Ewdi was my knight in shining armor when Gear Diary suffered its own massive server crash on March 1, and the lessons learned that day were very hard, but they were learned well. For Gear Diary’s data I now use a combination of FTP download to two separate laptops, I back one of those up to a portable 250GB hard drive, I burn DVD copies to store away from my home office, I am currently trying Sugar Sync, I back up the entire Gear Diary site nightly via rsync to an off-site server…and yet I still don’t feel entirely safe. You think I am paranoid? I think that after what happened I couldn’t possibly be paranoid enough.

I rely on Mac’s OSX Time Machine - the free backup solution that comes bundled with Leopard for my personal data, and I have found it to work very well. How well was proven when my less than three month old MacBook Pro suffered a freakish hard drive crash in the middle of the Microsoft Mobius event I attended in May. Irony much? Bad luck much? Well guess what? No one is immune and no one ever expects it when it happens. Every cliché you have ever heard about being safe versus sorry…there is so much truth in it.

That’s why when I was offered the chance to try the Newer Tech Guardian MAXimus RAID Mirrored Data Redundant Solution, my answer was a very quick yes. Described as a provider of “”live activity” backup/data redundancy of your critical data with Plug and Play simplicity on any Mac or PC,” the Guardian MAXimus has “pre-configured hardware RAID solutions” featuring “two paired lightning fast SATA (Type I/II) drives with up to 1.0TB each of storage capacity and a high speed Oxford 924 FireWire 800/400 & USB 2.0 chipset.”

In case you are like I was, completely ignorant about what the acronym RAID stands for, let me save you some Google time; it’s “Redundant Array of Independent Disks”.

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The HTC Touch Dual is Now Available at Best Buy

Fri, 23 May 2008 16:52:44 +0000

I just received information from HTC that their US version Touch Dual is now available from Best Buy. As you may recall, this was the device that Jenneth and I received in Amsterdam during the Fall 2007 Mobius, although ours were the European versions and they weren’t running 6.1. Granted, the Touch Dual doesn’t have a full keyboard so it’s not the ideal device if you are a heavy texter or if you need to compose massive emails on your phone. But if you want a touchscreen quad-band mobile with the full power of Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional, this is a very nice option. [fingeredbygeardiary]

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The MWg Zinc II Unboxed and Discussed

Thu, 22 May 2008 01:04:00 +0000

It was almost a year ago that Clinton posted his review of the O2 Zinc, and since then a lot has changed. As I mentioned in my MWg Mobius posting, O2 was purchased by eXpansys, and as part of the purchase eXpansys acquired everything and has now rebranded the company as MWg. [fingeredbygeardiary]

Today I’m going to share my early thoughts regarding the MWg Zinc II which I was given at the Mobius event; the second part of this review will come in a few weeks and will cover the software and overall user experience. But first, the unboxing…

Anyone who has ever owned an O2 device will tell you that their packaging was always nicely done, and the experience was akin to opening a present - something that companies such as HTC have recently begun to duplicate. As the newest incarnation of O2, MWg has continued that tradition.

The front of the attractively printed box has a magnetized flap that when opened reveals…

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Mozy-ing Along

Mon, 19 May 2008 15:22:07 +0000

After my MacBook drama last week at Mobius, I decided it might be worthwhile to check into over-the-air backup solutions for my personal data. I use rsync via the Mac Terminal as one of my Gear Diary backup solutions, but never thought it necessary to do it for my personal stuff…until now. [fingeredbygeardiary]

One solution that a friend recommended was Mozy, which just so happens to give a 2GB free account so you can see if it will work for you. Today I signed up to try it out…

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Win a Game Console of Your Choice from Loot Ninja!

Sun, 18 May 2008 21:39:02 +0000

Al Zamora sent an email while I was at Mobius about a new give-away they are doing on Loot Ninja, and I wanted to share it with you all. [fingeredbygeardiary]

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The Last Day of Mobius Seattle 2008: AKA the Spectacular MacBook Pro Meltdown

Sun, 18 May 2008 21:17:29 +0000

When I arrived at the conference area to grab breakfast before entering, Tim McAfee was there to greet us, handing out REDFLY t-shirts. I was hoping for a medium, but some of the other guys had already beat me to them; he made it up to me by giving me two larges. Ha! After getting set up and then eating my food, I settled in with the others to listen to the first presentation on the Microsoft Zune. [fingeredbygeardiary]

Creative Strategies Presentation

Ben from Creative Strategies started a two hour discussion with the question “How is technology going to better integrate and improve people’s lives.” He gave a quick overview of the personal computing experience over the past couple decades, and about how many of the systems we had bought were basically versions of the current enterprise models. In the last few years, the trend has become about choices - colors, configurations, various sizes, making the whole experience more optimized and personal for each individual.

CS’s view of the Digital Future is that “No device is an island,” meaning that all of your information will be synced with all of your devices, in all of your locations. I’m ready for that…

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The HTC Diamond Unboxed

Fri, 16 May 2008 20:11:19 +0000

While Judie is at Mobius getting here hands on Zincs and Advantages, the guys over at ePrice have managed to get hold of a HTC Diamond, and have photographed the unboxing for all of us to peruse. [fingeredbygeardiary]

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Mobius Seattle 2008: Samsung U900 Soul

Thu, 15 May 2008 14:41:25 +0000

This wasn’t from a presentation, but I thought it was something you all might enjoy. Michael Oryl of Mobile Burn recently received a Samsung Soul, a European Market fashion phone that looks really amazing. He pulled it out on one of our breaks and shared it with me; I found it to be a very sexy little feature phone. The various materials from which is it composed give it a satisfying in-hand weight, and the textures that your hand encounters make it feel…for lack of a better word…”posh”. [fingeredbygeardiary]

Michael says, “Samsung’s new SGH-U900 Soul gets its name from Samsung calling the device the “Soul Of ULtra”, a fitting name for what the company says is the last handset in its original Ultra line of thin profile feature phones.”

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Mobius Seattle 2008: Day Two, First Half, Zune

Thu, 15 May 2008 13:10:36 +0000

Terry and Dave from the Zune team opened our day by giving a brief overview of the device’s history, interface, 2.5 update, software, and models. A detailed overview was given of the Zune “my social | my profile” page on the Zune site, exploring the networking aspect of the player and discussing ways that it will more deeply explore the whole “social” aspect. They have also added quite a bit of playlist functionality and user experience upgrades in the Zune software, and they are adding ways to connect with networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, etc.. [fingeredbygeardiary]

… [visit site to read more]

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