A tiny drive that holds billions of bits

Tuesday, June 15th, 2010

“Dude, someone’s snapped the end off your USB stick.” That’s what you’d probably say if you saw the new Lexar Echo ZE flash drive sitting on my desk.

Yet I can assure you, as one dude to another, that no one has. What you see above is the whole thing. Somehow, while I was briefly looking the other way, flash drives have become so compact that the entire device is now basically the size of the plug. (more…)

Ubuntu disappointment and data disasters

Tuesday, November 4th, 2008

Ubuntu 8.10 made its appearence this week, and while everybody was busy touting the network manager’s new-fangled ability to handle mobile broadband connections, what nobody seemed to be mentioning was that it doesn’t actually work very well.

The networking manager is brilliant. It’s a nice clean interface that shows you all the internet connections on your computer, whether that’s Wi-Fi, mobile broadband or any other. It works fantastically well for Wi-Fi, putting Vista’s overly fiddly version in the shade. 

Mobile broadband is an entirely different matter, though. We have three USB dongles in the office – hangovers from our mobile broadband comparison feature. Of the three, Ubuntu refused to recognise the O2 dongle even existed, and while it acknowledged the BT dongle, it had absolutely no idea what to do with it. In fact, lucky number 3 was the only one that worked, but it worked beautifully. We just plugged it in, selected the 3 option and off we went. No need to install software or drivers of any sort. Great stuff, but country to popular opinion, one out of three is actually bad. (more…)