This regular series features highlights from the week. Last week focused on Tech Field Day output, with lots of great writeups resulting from our November event. But there’re a few other interesting items included, too!
Amazon
The Best Black Friday Deals For Nerds Like Me (2010 Edition)
Holiday shopping in the USA traditionally kicks off with “Black Friday”, the day after Thanksgiving. Although not quite the bonanza it’s rumored to be, many retailers do offer compelling Black Friday deals. Here are my favorites for 2010.
ioSafe SoloPRO Review: Is It The Safest Place For Your Data?
It’s hard to stand out in the world of external storage devices, and doubly-hard to compete with the hard disk drive makers themselves. This hasn’t stopped folks like Iomega, Verbatim, and LaCie from trying to impress customers with flashy cases, software bundles, and clever functionality. But clever new twist on the external hard drive concept just rolled into the Pack Rat lair: The ioSafe SoloPRO is fireproof and waterproof. Cool!
$50 Off The Excellent Sony NEX-3 Camera
I’ve really enjoyed my Sony NEX-5 mirrorless camera. Since I wrote up my review in September, I’ve used it frequently. Sony recently posted a major firmware update which addressed many of the usability concerns I (and many others) had as well. My only concern is that the NEX-5 is somewhat expensive, starting at $649 with the “pancake” lens and $699 with the telephoto zoom. Now there’s some relief on the price: Amazon is offering the “little brother” NEX-3 for just $499 or $549, a $50 discount from list price!
From CAS to Cloud: Revolutionary Storage
Change is not a word normally associated with storage, and revolution is practically unheard of. Today’s modern enterprise storage systems and networks employ massive resources to do one simple thing: Emulate the basic hard disk drives used over three decades ago. But cracks are appearing in our mausoleum of fake disks: Application developers are discovering the value of object storage, and storage systems are appearing to support this need.
