Pocket Boom Portable Vibration Speaker [Review]

Is your iPhone speaker not loud enough for you? Don’t want to lug around a hefty set of portable speakers? Then look no further than the PocketBoom portable surface vibration device which turns almost any surface you can think of into a speaker.

It’s pretty simple, all you do is unwrap the vibration head from the main battery unit and stick it to a large surface. The other end goes into the headphone socket on your iPhone, iPod touch, iPad, or any other generic MP3 player or device with a standard 3.5mm headphone jack.

If you turn the PocketBoom on without it being attached to any surface you will still hear your music being played but it will sound very quiet and tinny. If you touch the white sticky pad on the vibration head you’ll feel it moving up and down much like any normal speaker cone would do. The fun begins when you stick it to a random surface like a cardboard box or plastic tub….suddenly the music is massively amplified and you effectively turn the random item into a speaker! Continue reading “Pocket Boom Portable Vibration Speaker [Review]”

Pluscom 2.5″ IDE to USB HDD ultra slim and ultra cheap [Review]

Like most ‘geeks’ and ‘tech heads’ I have a sizeable graveyard of 3.5″ and 2.5″ IDE and SATA hard drives that I’d stripped out of decommissioned computers, laptops, Sky+ boxes etc

The larger spare SATA drives are soon to be put to good use in my new DROBO S which I just received and will review shortly but the older IDE drives were the ones that were really mounting up and beginning to gather dust.

I have a generic IDE/SATA to USB adapter for testing the drives and securely erasing them but it’s a clunky bit of kit that lives in a drawer by my desk. I decided the smaller form factor 2.5″ IDE drives taken out of old laptops would be handy in an enclosure to add to my portable USB drive collection. I already have 3 USB Freecom Toughdrive(320GB, 500GB and 750GB) which in my opinion are the best portable drive that size, they don’t require power but most important for me is they have nicely integrated USB cables.

So I don’t need a fancy enclosure for these old 2.5″ IDE drives, one 40GB and one 60GB, they’re just going to be spares so I set about finding the cheapest 2.5″ enclosures that I could on eBay and came up with a winner.

 

 

These Pluscom 2.5″ USB 2.0 Aluminium enclosures couldn’t get much cheaper at £3.80 including delivery! I opted for one  silver and one red just so I can tell them apart easily. I ordered them from the same seller and both were delivered the next day and I am pleasantly surprised with them.

Continue reading “Pluscom 2.5″ IDE to USB HDD ultra slim and ultra cheap [Review]”

XML Sitemap Tool for Google Yahoo MSN

Those who use Google webmaster tools will know how important an updated site map is for crawling purposes. There are several sites out there that will give you free online sitemap generation but limit this to 500 pages or less. This limit shouldn’t be a problem for most end users but when you start crawling photos pages made using JAlbum and you can easily have 1,000’s of html pages to add to the sitemap.I found a java based free online sitemap generator that has absolutely no limits, it’s fast, configurable and easy to use so I’m book marking it here for me to find it again in the future:

XML Sitemap Tool for Google Yahoo MSN

WARNING – I’ve found that trying to use the tool in the link above from an Apple running OS X 10.5 crashes both Firefox and Sarafi. I’m not sure why but once it starts to load the java app everything just hangs. Works fine on Internet Explorer 6 and 7 under XP.