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…)

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.

(more…)

Ok, so I’ve been a part-time technology writer for The Herald for all of three weeks. It’s going pretty well so far with positive reader feedback and even a couple of responses from companies who’s products I’ve reviewed. But last night I made the jump to mainstream news…

At around 3pm on Monday, a colleague mentioned that the Strathclyde Police site was running slowly. I had a look at their source code and noticed multiple rogue javascript tags that were sliently redirecting users to a website called robint.us. A bit more digging revealed that site was registered to an individual in China and had a history of distributing nasty viruses.

At first Strathclyde Police were dismissive, but after some persuasion regarding the seriousness of the threat, especially to any visitors running older browsers (the site robint.us has a history of distributing IE Buffer Overflow attacks) they decided to take the site down at 6pm.

At the time of writing – nearly 24 hours later – the police site is still offline.

I did most of the background research for the story in today’s Herald (which you can read here) and the story has since been picked up by a number of news sites:

• The Herald
• Evening Times
• The Register
• The Drum
• eWorldPost
• Hack in the box

I’ve also been quoted in the article.  From The Herald:

Grant Gibson, digital innovation manager at the Herald and Times Group, which publishes The Herald, warned that the police should not be complacent about the potential threat.

He said: “Regardless of whether the site is active or dormant at this precise moment, the hackers have a window into the Strathclyde Police page from a location outwith their control. This ‘window’ is registered to an individual in China, which could be reactivated at any time.”

Yesterday I integrated some of the newly announced Facebook Social Widgets into heraldscotland.  Using their new auto-connect system, any Facebook users who visit heraldscotland will now be able to see what their friends are recommending and sharing on our site.

The demo below outlines how it all works…

I’m quite pleased with how smoothly the integration went — literally just a few hours from first looking at the developers documentation to having these features live on the site.

We’re less than 24 hours into the trial, but the results are already impressive — over 1,600 Facebook users have shared our most popular article which, multiplied by the size of their average social graph, means this article has been highlighted to nearly 200,000 Facebook users who wouldn’t otherwise have seen it.

With winter on the way, one thing I really had to sort out was heating for the garage, especially on the summer house side.  The insulation in the walls and ceiling is working well, but with outdoor temperatures dropping to single digits I really needed something to raise the temperature in the winter evenings.

I had looked at various wee fan heaters and oil heaters but nothing seemed quite right for the project.  Then I happened to find a nice glass panel heater in the B&Q sale.   It seemed to tick all of the boxes: not too thirsty (max 1kW); compact; wall mounted; silent… and best of all it’s digital!

It’s ideal for the summer house, just turn it on and it quickly heats the room to the chosen temperature — 12c to 19c takes about ten minutes — then it just maintains that temperature for as long as you’re out there.  The loft insulation seems to be doing it’s job, as the heating element only comes on very occasionally once the room is up to temperature.

And now for the missing link… high-speed internet access!

Even though the garage is only a few meters from the house and approx 15m from the wi-fi antenna in the loft, the metal foil insulation used throughout the garage prevents a decent wi-fi signal from getting through.   I’d occasionally manage to get a connection from my laptop, but it was flaky.   And a connection from my iPhone… forget it!

I didn’t want to run a hard-wired Ethernet connection from the house, so I decided to set up a wi-fi repeater instead, taking the signal from outside the metallic cage and repeating it inside.   I’m already running the dd-wrt custom firmware on my main router and had read good things about its Repeater Bridge mode for this kind of task.   So, I decided to look for the cheapest dd-wrt compatible router I could find to act as the repeater.

I found an ex-display Buffalo AirStation WHR-G125 on ebuyer for £15 which was perfect for the task.  Once it arrived I used tftp to flash it with the latest dd-wrt Mini Generic firmware from the dd-wrt site, then followed this tutorial to set it up in Repeater Bridge mode.

All that was left was to give it a permanent mounting place in the garage.  The WHR-G125 doesn’t have any mounting holes as standard and I was reluctant to spend extra on the official wall mount, so I ended up strapping it onto the roof joists with a couple of zip ties.  The result: the garage now has it’s own SSID which broadcasts a nice strong signal to any devices out there and gives me reliable wi-fi in the garage and elsewhere in the garden.  £15 well spent I think.