Greenville Business Magazine 2010 February issue : Page 52
››executive lifestyles g gadgets izmos & in a place where it can be just a little allenging to pick up my favorite NPR stations. I’ve got friends for whom solutely impossible. Enter the NPR by Livio. Rather than relying upon waves to get your radio, this device ur existing internet connection. Unlike ased radio, there is no subscription e radio connects through either a tion to over 16,000 available internet k. If you have been living with a bad t you probably wouldn’t expect is that ows you to listen to stations far away, perhaps a home town radio station or a big city station that might yield an interesting, alternative take on the news, or which offers a local perspective on breaking news. With so many stations to choose from, we think exploring will be a favorite activity. The radio doesn’t require you have a computer, but you do have to have an internet connection either wired or wireless. And although it provides pretty solid sound from its internal speaker, you may want to connect it to your home stereo if you’d like sound that better fills a large room. BY PHIL YANOV Here’s a piece of software that can add hours or days to your life, especially if you are a using your computer in a public place. It might save you even more if you happen to be someone still using an unpatched version of Internet Explorer to do your web browsing. Opera is one of several alternative browsers we always recommend over the standard IE that comes on every Windows PC since Nixon. We recommend the alternatives because they’re typically far less likely to load and run bad guy software on your unsuspecting PC. In addition to the “I’m not IE” feature, the Opera browser is lean, good looking, and now offers an optional turbo boost that can dramatically speed up browsing when you’re using a slow connec- tion. If you’re mobile, slow connections are everywhere. Public access points can be overloaded, is you’re using a USB wireless connection, or connecting via your mobile phone, you are probably surfing at far slower speeds than when you’re at home or in your office. The turbo boost in Opera uses the Opera servers to compress and optimize web pages before they are delivered to your PC and the demonstrations of the technology at work show a threefold improve- ment. The software is free and there are mini, mobile and widget loaded versions available for download. 52 GREENVILLEBUSINESSMAG.COM | FEBRUARY 2010 Opera Browser NPR Radio by Livio
>>executive lifestyle - Gizmos & Gadgets
Phil Yanov
NPR Radio by Livio
I live in a place where it can be just a little bit challenging to pick up my favorite NPR radio stations. I’ve got friends for whom it is absolutely impossible. Enter the NPR Radio by Livio. Rather than relying upon the airwaves to get your radio, this device uses your existing internet connection. Unlike satellite based radio, there is no subscription fee to pay. The radio connects through either a wired or wireless ethernet connection to over 16,000 available internet radio stations including 800 from the NPR network. If you have been living with a bad signal, it’s definitely a solution to the problem. What you probably wouldn’t expect is that the radio in some ways feels like a short wave. It allows you to listen to stations far away, perhaps a home town radio station or a big city station that might yield an interesting, alternative take on the news, or which offers a local perspective on breaking news. With so many stations to choose from, we think exploring will be a favorite activity. The radio doesn’t require you have a computer, but you do have to have an internet connection either wired or wireless. And although it provides pretty solid sound from its internal speaker, you may want to connect it to your home stereo if you’d like sound that better fills a large room.
Opera Browser
Here’s a piece of software that can add hours or days to your life, especially if you are a using your computer in a public place. It might save you even more if you happen to be someone still using an unpatched version of Internet Explorer to do your web browsing. Opera is one of several alternative browsers we always recommend over the standard IE that comes on every Windows PC since Nixon. We recommend the alternatives because they’re typically far less likely to load and run bad guy software on your unsuspecting PC. In addition to the “I’m not IE” feature, the Opera browser is lean, good looking, and now offers an optional turbo boost that can dramatically speed up browsing when you’re using a slow connection. If you’re mobile, slow connections are everywhere. Public access points can be overloaded, is you’re using a USB wireless connection, or connecting via your mobile phone, you are probably surfing at far slower speeds than when you’re at home or in your office. The turbo boost in Opera uses the Opera servers to compress and optimize web pages before they are delivered to your PC and the demonstrations of the technology at work show a threefold improvement. The software is free and there are mini, mobile and widget loaded versions available for download.
Drobo
If you’ve got data you care about, but don’t have a big IT department and fancy servers to keep it all safe, then you might find that a Drobo from Data Robotics is a piece of gear you can fit on your desktop and will store all of your files, photos, and videos on a series of drives that offers more safety and easy expandability than older RAID drive systems. The website describes the core technology of the Drobo as BeyondRAID. What this amounts to is a sleek black box that lets you start with two hard drives of any size and then expand to up to four drives, all the while creating a failsafe environment so that should any one of the drives fail, your data is safe and the Drobo will let you insert a replacement drive for the failed one while the system is running and delivering your files. Drobo does everything from expanding capacity as you add drives, to self-healing around drive failures and data errors. The basic model supports up to 4 TB Drives, creating a system that could go to a whopping 16 TB. The Drobo is the toaster of hard drives. It is super simple to use, and provides peace of mind with an absolute minimum of fuss.
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