The Kingston Wi-Drive is a new kid on the storage block.   Aimed at providing extra storage to iOS devices, it pairs a wireless SSD storage gadget with a free iPhone app to double the capacity of your Apple handheld.  I’m currently writing up my review of it for The Herald.

What they don’t tell you anywhere on the packaging or instructions (and by implication deny) is that the Wi-Drive works with ANY web and Wi-Fi enabled gadget.

Want to use the Wi-Drive with an Android phone or tablet, Windows or Mac laptop?

Here’s how… Simply connect to the Wi-Drive’s Wi-Fi AP then point your browser to http://kingston.  As if by magic, the main window of the iOS app appears within your browser.  You can browse folders and open files just like in the app…. or perhaps more accurately, just like the internet.

I’ve tested it on a few different devices – phone, tablet and laptop – and it works nicely on all of them.  It’ll even stream movies quite happily from the web interface.

Personally, I think this transforms the Wi-Drive from a super-niche proposition (iPhone users who are stuck for space and aren’t due an upgrade) to something far more mainstream and interesting.

I’m currently Beta testing Google’s new Page Speed Service on my site.  It’s basically a transparent page content optimiser and CDN which aims to speed up delivery of sites to end users. This could be a huge deal for anyone who, like me, hosts their site from home.

Hosting a personal site from home is a great idea, and something I’d strongly recommend to anyone.  As well as learning the basics of server configuration and maintenance you also get several unique benfits, like:

• You can hook up other devices like weather stations, door bells or ambient Twitter clients
• Storage is virtually unlimited
• It’s pretty cheap to run (I reckon around £20 a year in electricity)

The one problem with hosting from home is bandwidth.  A basic DSL or Cable line is fine for handling modest everyday traffic (this site gets between 300 and 1,000 visits per day), but isn’t suited to handling large spikes.  Hopefully, Google’s Page Speed Service (PSS) will be able to smooth out those spikes and give me the best of both worlds.  So far it’s looking good. (more…)

This is my first test of posting a photo gallery from Facebook into my own site. Hope it works! Click the more link for the pics… (more…)

What is it?!

I was in B&Q a few weeks ago and this LED panel caught my eye.  It’s not the type of thing I’d normally buy but I fancied its hacking potential as an ambient device of some sort.

Taking the back off revealed a set of nine mini circuit boards, each with a red, green and blue LED plus a simple circuit to cycle through those colours.  The wiring couldn’t have been simpler – the 5V DC power supply ran to a switch with each of the LED boards wired in parallel from that.

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