Wire

Belkin doubles down on wireless HDMI

Belkin today announced the pricing and planned availability for its FlyWire wireless HDMI accessory. The unit will eventually be available in two separate versions: a $1,500 multi-room unit set to hit in October, and a stepdown $700 model dubbed the R1, which is intended for single-room installations.

TheFlyWire wireless HDMI kit garnered a nomination for the Best of CES Awards back in January, where it successfully demonstrated the ability to wirelessly transmit uncompressed high-definition video and audio. (See a CNET TV video of the FlyWire in action after the break.)… Read more

Drobo gets faster and FireWired

One year after the first release of the first Drobo that won our Editors' Choice award, and a few days after the release of the beta SDK, Drobo Robotics today announced its second revision of the product.

For those of you who don't know, Drobo is the world's first, and for now still the only, solution for external storage that automatically and intelligently takes care of your data with minimal input from you. All you have to do is install the hard drives, which is as easy as inserting a CD into the CD-ROM drive. The Drobo protects … Read more

Inside CNET Labs 1: Nice and clean

Our very first episode! We get the real deal (according to us at least) on FireWire versus USB versus FireWire. Also Dong recounts his first trip to Subway (or is it the subway?) as Eric LOL's. Join us! JOOIINNN USSSSSSS.

Listen now: Download today's podcast EPISODE 1

Dong's Firewire vs. USB tirade

Compact external hard drives now spin faster, too

More and more vendors have been joining the bandwagon of pocket-size portable external hard drives and it's interesting to see how each of them manages to make their product unique in its own right. The G-Drive mini Triple from G-Technology is one example of this.

The drive sports a very rugged, metallic look with its aluminum casing that also works as the cooling solution. Despite having metal all over, the drive is still very light, weighing only around 9 ounces. Designwise, the G-Drive is compact, however, if the Signature Mini appeals to the ladies, the G-Drive definitely screams masculine. … Read more

Featured Freeware: FeedDemon and NetNewsWire

These well-crafted, standalone newsreaders makes an ideal choice for both novices who've never heard of an RSS feed and advanced users looking to put some oomph and flexibility into their reading habits. As the desktop clients for the online NewsGator, FeedDemon for Windows and NetNewsWire for Macs both can synchronize bi-directionally with their Web-based counterpart, making it easy to get your feeds wherever and whenever you need them.

Other useful features include a built-in Web browser that's built on Internet Explorer--sorry Firefox and Opera fans, tabbed browsing for when you need to open multiple feeds' Web pages, Watch … Read more

NewsGator introduces feed suggestions

NewsGator converted its popular RSS feed aggregation clients to freeware in January 2008, and now that seed has borne fruit: recommended fruit, to be precise.

Partnering with SenseArray, a collaborative filter from Uprizer Labs, NewsGator now offers live RSS feed recommendations from feeds that the user hasn't already subscribed to. Currently available only on the online NewsGator client, the filter pulls information from NewsGator as well as its sibling desktop clients, FeedDemon for Windows and NetNewsWire for the Mac so that users who synchronize their RSS data will be contributing to the list of recommendations.

Brian Kellner, NewsGator's … Read more

WD's new external hard drives: More data that takes less space on the go

I recently reviewed the OWC Mercury and SimpleTech's Signature Mini external hard drives. I liked the OWC Mercury for its versatility in connections and its top-of-the-market storage space. I also loved the Signature Mini because of its light weight and compact, chocolaty design. On Wednesday, Western Digital (WD) joined this race of external hard drives that are so small in physical size, yet so large in storage space, with its My Passport Studio series. I now am a little confused and don't know yet how to feel about this one.

Weighing only 5 ounces, the My Passport Studio … Read more

FeedDemon gets tweaked

Newsgator's FeedDemon, the formerly pay-for-play, now freeware, RSS feed catcher upgrades to Version 2.7 with one useful new tool and a flowering bunch of bug-fixes. The Mac version, NetNewsWire, has also been updated.

FeedDemon now lets users subscribe to multiple feeds at the same time, under the tool name Find Feeds. For longtime FeedDemon users, there are a stack of improvements that should be instantly noticeable to users who've raged against the occasional "flagged" feed drop and other problems synchronizing multiple configurations across several PCs and operating systems.

FeedDemon's biggest claim to fame in … Read more

How the RIAA looks for pirates

If you've followed the RIAA's antipiracy efforts, perhaps you've wondered how they find suspected pirates. Yesterday, the The Chronicle for Higher Education published an article in which an RIAA spokesperson--anonymous for fear of hate mail--outlined the organization's surprisingly low-tech methods.

The RIAA hires an organization called MediaSentry, which has developed an automated program that scans LimeWire for song titles that match titles of copyrighted material in an RIAA database, collects the IP addresses of the computers where these songs have been made available, then reports this information back to the RIAA. The article doesn't reveal … Read more