Pogoplug the Makers of the fluffy pink USB Sharing device have branched out to include a new product – one that runs on your Windows or Mac computer and allows you to share everything across the web – your own cloud as it were. They have two version, the free one which allows you to see all your files and if you pay the $29 Upgrade Fee – play all your music and video’s. Head over to PogoPlug Site and check it out.
Been a fan of Wallpapers, a kind person send called Marie Asselin sent me an email telling me of this fantastic product. Wallcast is a PC/Mac application that transforms your computer wallpaper into a dynamic collage of photos from you, your family, and your friends. It periodically updates your wallpaper with a mix of pictures uploaded online, with the Wallcast iPhone app or via email. My founding partner and I both have family members and friends scattered across the continent and overseas; we created Wallcast to facilitate the quick sharing of pictures on a support that’s seen everyday yet is often forgotten, the computer wallpaper.
Synology have a low end product for sharing USB Hard Drives ( as well as printers) which is called USB Station 2. You can buy this product for £79.99 – I am not sure of USA Pricing at this time. This uses the same OS as the rest of the Synology Range (DSM 3.0) so you can use it as a download station, share printers across the network and even plug in a USB Wireless network card and make this thing wireless. You could spend the same money for a Print sharing device and it may look and act like the PogoPlug (except it is not shocking pink) but is in fact a full blown NAS – just with USB Speeds for the drives.
Having used these devices now on a daily basis across a handful of machines, used most of the services it has to offer and even added some extra packages, I wanted to write a post about how I felt this was holding up and was it living up to the hype or was it starting to crack under the pressure? This is written with one users in mind (me) across computers running Windows 7, Linux and Mac OS X – the main aim of this was a shared Music, Movie, Backdrops collection, example been if I add some wallpapers, all the computers can use them as required.
The Synology DS110+ is a One Bay NAS Box aimed at the small to medium business market. It comes supplied with no hard drive (you fit your own capacity), has an eSATA and 3 x USB ports to add additional storage to the device plus it is fitted with a gigabit Ethernet port for high speed data transfer.
After messing with this device for a week now, I felt it was only right that I add my thoughts on how it has been going. I wanted to show the good, the bad and the downright ugly sides of this device. What you can also see is that so far I have not returned this to the store, it is either because I am lazy or I feel it *might* turn out good in the end – let us see.
I am running Mac OS X 10.5. 6 and through the long history of the updates from 10.5.0 till now there has been a problem with seeing Windows Shares on the Mac Finder. The way it should work is simple enough, you open a window showing your drives and listed right there would be all the shares it has found but the list remain empty meaning you have to do this the hard way.
