Review “Today’s digital VCR replacement” is how the UK manufacturer Digital Vision describes its new GiGo Freeview set-top box. Designed to sell for less than £70, the device is a granny-friendly PVR with an unusual feature that will appeal to geeks (at least to this one). Unlike the majority of PVRs on the UK market, the GiGo records TV in a way that makes the data readily transferrable to your PC for editing and re-encoding.
Digital Vision’s GiGo DV-DTR1 USB PVR
This is because it’s a PVR without a hard disk drive. Instead, it’s equipped with three USB ports, so that programmes can be directly recorded to USB flash drives. Alas, drives aren’t supplied but, as the GiGo records MPEG-2 files, a typical movie takes up 2-3GB, so a minimum 4GB drive is recommended.
You’ll also need the flash to be the high-speed transfer type, and formatted as FAT32. Flash memory discounts down to around a quid per GB these days, but the media is still significantly more expensive than VCR tapes. However, the quality and reliability is orders of magnitude better, and of course USB flash drives are a lot more manageable. Read the rest of this entry »
Review It may make its money shelling shedloads of its security centric USB Flash drives to organisations like the NHS, but Sweden’s BlockMaster believes the rest of us likewise need memory sticks with a high level of data protection built in.
Leaving aside for a moment the question of whether you really want to keep confidential personal information on a gadget that’s so easy to misplace, it’s certainly the case that if you do lose a USB key, you don’t want whoever finds it to have a nose through your files.
BlockMaster’s SafeStick: small, metal clad and with integrated encryption
Enter BlockMaster’s SafeStick, a compact black metal USB Flash drive with on-board hardware encryption which won’t mount its storage space until you’ve correctly entered the password.
Insert it for the first time, and up pops a read-only partition containing the password entry program. Our review unit had had a password pre-set, but it proved easy enough to change it to something with more than eight characters and with at least one captial letter and one number. Read the rest of this entry »
