Category Archives: Reviews

Reviews of products and services.

Reviews

The Sunlight Foundation launched a useful tool this summer called Poligraft. It’s an online search engine that lets you input the link of a web article about politics, and gives you the background information on the issue and the politicians involved, including any questionable donations that may have taken place.

Here’s what the Sunlight Foundation has to say about it: “Poligraft uncovers the hidden web of political giving in news stories on the Internet — the patterns of political contributions that aren’t always obvious.”

“Using Poligraft is simple: just type or paste the URL or text of a news article, blog post or press release into it, and Poligraft will automatically scan that text for individual donors, corporations, lobbyists and politicians. Within seconds, you’ll see how they’ve been doing business with each other.  Once Poligraft highlights the names of donors, corporations, lobbyists, or politicians, you can click on those names to learn more. You can even add a Poligraft bookmarklet to your browser toolbar and run any webpage through it.”

This is really cool. You’ll now be able to see right away when some politician is posturing for something that they’ve gotten a hefty donation from that cause. There’ll be no hiding anymore.

Keep politics honest – use Poligraft

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Reviews

POLLI-BRICKS reduce plastic bottle pollution

Plastic pollution is a huge problem. Most everyone has heard of the floating plastic islands in our oceans (the biggest is in the Pacific Ocean, but there are several others), all of which are made up of plastic bottles, wrappers, bags and other plastic waste that can float. They don’t break down. They only break into smaller pieces, which are still plastic and continue to pollute over time. For a wonderful primer on the subject, check out Dianna Cohen‘s talk at TED about it.

MINIWIZ, a Taipei company, has come up with an innovative “brick” design they call POLLI-BRICKS. They’re made from 100% recycled PET polymer (plastic bottles) collected from plastic waste reservoirs. This means that instead of ending up in the floating plastic islands, plastic waste can be re-purposed into bricks that can be used as building materials. Because they’re hollow and translucent (but not transparent, for those concerned about privacy), they have inherent thermal insulation, offer natural lighting during the day, and can be embedded with LED lights and solar panels for night lighting. They’re also durable, fire-resistant, interlock readily, and can be manufactured on-site. Check out the two videos embedded below, one recorded at CES by InfoWorld, and another showing how sturdy a small bridge built out of these bricks can be.

There are more videos posted on the MINIWIZ channel at YouTube.

[via Greenopolis]

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Reviews

An update on CrashPlan

Updated 11/01/16: I’ve revised my opinion of CrashPlan. See here for the details.

Back in April, I wrote about CrashPlan, a wonderful, multi-platform piece of software that lets you back up to friends’ computers for free. I said that I used it to do trans-Atlantic backups, from my computer in Romania to my parents’ computer back in the USA.

It’s been a while since then, so I thought I’d give you a quick update. I’m still using it, and I still like it. It works.

When I wrote the other post, I mentioned I kept hitting some bandwidth ceiling somewhere along the line between Romania and the US, around 2 Mbps. Somehow, that ceiling has since disappeared. I’m now getting speeds up to 25 Mbps, though it’s usually around 5-7 Mbps.

So if you’re in need of a way to back up to a remote location, inexpensively, then CrashPlan is the way to do it. If you don’t have a friend who’s willing to help, that’s okay, you can back up to the CrashPlan servers for $4.50/month, or you can get the family plan, which covers all of your household computers, for $8.33/month. That’s very reasonable, and it’s definitely worth it.

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Reviews

Hardware review: CableJive duaLink sync splitter cable

The duaLink sync splitter cable, made by CableJive, allows you to connect two iPods, iPads or iPhones from a single USB port. This is particularly useful for laptop owners, who may not have a lot of ports on their machines.

Here’s a closer look at the cable itself.

And here’s what it looks like with two iPods connected to my MacBook Pro.

Finally, here’s what things look like in iTunes.

It’s a straightforward product that I think many of us could use. It costs $25.95, and you can get it directly from CableJive.

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Reviews

Hardware preview: DroboPro FS

➡ Updated 1/14/19: I have revised my opinion of Drobo devices. After experiencing multiple, serious data loss events on multiple Drobo models, even recent ones, I no longer consider them safe for my data.

Today, the DroboPro FS will be announced by Data Robotics. It’s the bigger brother of the Drobo FS, and it’s aimed at creative professionals, SOHOs and SMBs.

There was a gap in Drobo’s file sharing lineup. They had a NAS device, sure (the Drobo FS), but it didn’t have the capacity and the bandwidth of the DroboPro FS, which has two Gigabit Ethernet ports and eight drive bays.

Its ethernet ports can be configured two ways:

  1. On two different subnets, for offsite file replication, and
  2. Failover mode, where one port takes over if the other one dies

The really nice part here is the DroboPro FS works seamlessly with a new piece of software (to be introduced shortly) by Data Robotics, called Drobo Sync. The way it works makes the DroboPro FS the perfect candidate for offsite backups, for disaster recovery purposes.

Say you have two DroboPro FS units. You keep the first one in your company’s server room, do your internal backups to it, over the local network, and then run a quick DroboPro FS to DroboPro FS initial sync job using Drobo Sync. When that’s done, you can take the 2nd DroboPro FS unit to your disaster recovery site, plug it in over there, and Drobo Sync will start doing incremental backups automatically, saving you bandwidth and validating each file on a block-by-block level to make sure the data is identical on both Drobos. This is a solution that would be perfect for overworked sysadmins, because the setup and administration are easy, and the total cost is less than that of comparative solutions.

It uses the same form factor as the DroboPro and the DroboElite, which means it shares the same measures, and the same rack-mount kit. And you can also customize it with Drobo Apps, just like the Drobo FS.

A base DroboPro FS costs around $1,999, but you can buy it bundled with hard drive sets (8TB, 16TB and 32TB). It’s available directly from Data Robotics, or from B&H Photo, Amazon and other retailers.

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