What is this at the bottom of all the posts?

Co.mments–del.icio.us–Digg–Furl–Newsvine–RawSugar–Reddit–My Yahoo

Looking back on my post about Web 2.0. I talked about the social aspect of the new Web. There are several sites that now share or link to blog posts. On some sites users vote on the top story. On others it is posted as news articles. The end goal is to build traffic to your blog.

So try clicking on one of the icons below.

Tags: co.mments, del.icio.us, digg, furl, newsvine, rawsugar, reddit, myYahoo

ElekTex has come out with a new keyboard made out of cloth. There are no moving parts and it is even washable. This is perfect for typing out a long message on the Blackberry and giving your thumbs a rest. Or for those text messages on your cell phone. When you are done, just roll it up and put it in the carrying case. The communication with your device is via Bluetooth. So no wires to worry about.

First, let me wish all the fellow Dads a Happy Father’s day! This post is an update to one of my earlier posts about a great device I found called the bike hoist. This is a great device for storing bikes year round in your garage. It is very easy to use, even our 10 year old can get her bike down. It will hold up to 50 pounds per hoist. We have 3 hoists in our garage for our 3 bikes. The bike hoist it very inexpensive, about $35. You can find them on eBay, and some of the vendors give free shipping. There are heavier hoists available that will hold up to 200 pounds for canoes or kayaks.

The other device that I purchased recently was a bike rack for my SUV. I had looked at a number of units and they were all over $200. Then I came across one on eBay for $85. Again, the vendor offered free shipping, which is a good thing as it weighs almost 25 pounds. What I liked about this rack was that it can fold down at the hitch, so you can still get into your rear hatch with all the bikes loaded. They have racks that will carry from 2 to 5 bikes. The unit I received fits into my trailer hitch. Note there are 3 types of connections. A 2″ connection, a 1 1/4″ connetion and a ball connection. Check out your hitch before ordering.

This post is a follow up to my Listening to your iPod in your car post.

Once you load up you iPod there really isn’t any reason to have your CD player. There really isn’t any reason to move your CD’s from stereo to stereo in your house. You can have your whole collection play where you are. You can spend as little as $10 for a cable, or as much a $1000 for a high end system complete with a built in iPod dock. Starting with the least expensive. The iPod has a 3.5mm headphone jack. You can get cables that has a 3.5mm jack at one end and splits into 2 RCA jacks at the other. This is the easiest way to connect your iPod to your home stereo.  This will run you about $10-$15

 One step up from this is the iPod Dock. The advantage of this is that while is connects with virtually the same cable, it also allows for a power cable to be attached so you will not run down the battery. It also make it very easy to simply drop the iPod into the dock and listen to the tunes! This will cost about $40

  Both the solutions above will require you do connect to a speaker system. This could be a boom box or a full surround sound system.  The next step up is one of devices that I use. It is the JBL Onstage II. The sound that comes out of this small unit is amazing. The unit also comes with a radio frequency remote. An RF remote allows you to be anywhere within about 20 ft. of the system and control the iPod. This also makes a great set for travelling. No more CD’s to carry along with you. At the same time, there is an iPod jack in the back that allows you to connect to your computer to sychronize with iTunes. This costs about $150

 The JBL unit allows you to control the iPod, it is difficult to see the Playlist or the Artist name etc. Until DLO came out with Homedock Deluxe. This system will require a speaker system to hear the sound. But the best part is that it allows you to see the iPod screen on your TV! It also comes with a remote, but the difference is now, you can scroll through the menus, choose your playlists, or the artists, because you can see it all on your TV. This will run you about $150. This system will require a speaker system to hear the sound. 

 From there, it is a bit of a leap to the next systems. There are a lot of stereo manufacturers coming out with either iPod docks built in, or iPod cable connectors. One of the neatest devices I have seen is for the home automation specialist. It provides a dock in your wall that would connect to your home stereo system.  Each dock is $200

It is amazing how fast hard disk storage is growing in size, yet declining in price. It seems like less than a year ago that 40GB was all you would need. Then we started downloading digital photos, editing video, putting our music files on our PC, downloading podcasts, etc. Suddenly, everyone is running out of room.  The hard disk manufacturers have been quick to respond. I think the first Terabyte (that’s 1000 gigabytes) drive I heard about was from Buffalo Technologies. They came out with their Terastation home, which now goes up to 2 GB.  Enter the NAS. Or Network Attached Storage. Initially, these home units could be connecting to a network, but used some software drivers to make them available on a network. But as the technology advanced, and the prices came down. You started to see actual NAS units for the home. Vendors like Maxtor, Linksys and Netgear .

One of the newer companies out is Freedom9 with a very reasonably priced unit. With 4 drive bays you can mix and match. If you add 4×250GB drives you would have 1 Terabyte. If you add 4X750GB drives you would have 3 Terabytes. With this much space you could run some medium sized companies. Why multilple drives you might ask? It’s not just for space, but also for reliability. There are several different ways you can configure the drives. You can mirror them, so if one drive crashes, you would lose zero data.

What’s bringing on this storage revolution. Simple, digital convergence. Your photos, your videos and your music will all reside on your hard disk very soon. All of those files take up a lot of space. A regurlar DVD takes up 4 GB of space. The new HD-DVD or Blu-ray DVDs will take up 50GB of space…and that’s for just one movie. A music file today is usually recorded somewhere between 128 kb to 192 kb for decent sound quality on your iPod or MP3 player. But as we connect more systems together. Suddenly those files sound tinny over that $1,000 surround sound stereo system. So you up the quality to 320 kb. That music files goes from 4MB to 10MB. Then there’s TV. Today many of us have PVRs attached to our cable or satellite. Later this year, PCs will have cable card slots. This will allow you to connect your PC to your cable to receive digital and HDTV signals. A one hour TV show in HD will be about 400MB. If it comes with surround sound you’re looking at 1GB+. Let’s not forget about photos. Did you know that CD’s expire? Yep. The good one’s last about 5-10 years depending on the brand. How many of you bought the cheap brands, because they work just as well? Better start backing up those photo CD’s. I often wonder if archeologists 1000 years from now will be looking at our society and not be able to find any photographic evidence as all the photos were on CDs. So get our there and buy that NAS. Backup your data onto multiple drives… and don’t use CD’s for anything you want to keep for more than a few years.

Here it is. My own domain kevinbaggs.com. I have a lot to learn about the Wordpress blog style with PHP. It is much more complicated than the simple HTML style of Blogger. We’ll have to see if I can figure it out.

  I received my Valley Schwag package today! What is Valley Schwag?

 In Silicon Valley, home of the startup; companies hand out Schwag tomarket their brand. T-shirts, caps, pens, stickers and whatever else they can think of. For those of us non-Valley types, we can now have access to that same Schwag. Valley Schwag will send you a monthly Schwag package for $15 a month. They promise at lease one t-shirt per month, plus other Schwag.  I first leaned about Valley Schwag on the Techcrunch blog. They have been amazingly successful. Their first month, they sent out 60 packages. This month they sent out 1500. Yes, I admit, it is really for the true geeks out there. But hey, that’s what this blog is all about.

I received the email confirmation that I was accepted by Blogburst. Blogburst is a publishing/syndication service. They syndicate many blogs to newspapers across the US such as The Washington Post and the Houston Chronicle. When a post is used, you get a byline added in the publication. So I’m asking everyone for help. Send me post topics. Some of the upcoming posts I’m working on: Building traffic for your Blog Opinions on downloading music Staying organized with MS Outlook Do you have a Terabyte at home? So what technology do you want to know about? Click on the Comment link below and let me know.