Little Logos

On loan to me this week is a cute little gadget - the Eye-Fi. This is a SD card with built-in wireless that you can program with your wireless network settings and account information from your online photo provider (in my case Flickr).

So all you do is set the card up by plugging into your PC and use the manager software to tell it about your wireless network and your online photo account. Then you put the card into your camera and it talks to your PC, your online account or both. Pretty simple and easy to set up.

It does just work, and it is pretty cool to see your photos suddenly appear online. But there are a few points that are worth making..

In a “normal” home-style wireless environment where you are using a passkey only this card will work as advertised. In more enterprise environments where you are taken to a webpage or you use an account/password for authentication then this card will not be able to be configured. So, in an environment you control (like your home or the home of friends and family) this will work fine but for roaming use you will have problems configuring the card for direct wireless access. Access to your own PC will still be possible.

Another point, I generally take a lot of rubbish photos (yes lots) and so an upload to my flickr page for all my photos is not something I want to happen automatically. But auto-upload to my iphoto while I am walking about is kinda cool.

Not sure if I will buy one yet. I may if the cost of the card is not much higher than a regular 2 gig card.

So the photo here was taken tonight, and untouched by cables, was uploaded to iPhoto on my laptop and to my Flickr account. Then I went to Flickr, edited the photo online to crop it and linked to it on my blog. Easy.

I had been using CD wallets to store all our CDs and DVDs but while they are good for taking into the car I was finding them a pain to cope with an ever growing amount of disk media.

I wanted something which could:

• cope with taking CDs in and out of storage easily
• be able to easily see what was in the store
• be able to insert CDs anywhere in the store
• store CDs upright not flat to prevent warping
• be simple enough for the kids and adults to live with

I think I now have this sorted. Welcome the Kensington Sleeves and Box system. This is a transparent box which holds aprox 100 CDs in (double-sided) removable sleeves. 2 movable separators are also included.

Now I can take one or more CDs out of the box while keeping them in their sleeves, this way they stay more protected while on the desk. I can also move them to a different box later for archiving. But the best thing is the ability to add new CDs to a collection you can “file” them into the box wherever you want. Letting you easily work with your own categories and systems.

The sleeves have a little slot at the top for a label (packs come with labels). I found that it was easier to use 2 rows of labels folded together to get a little more stiffness - making insertion a little easier.

Also for the music CDs and some of the games I was able to remove the rear insert from the original box cut the spine and use this for a label. Again, cutting this double the width of the spine and folding over makes it easier to insert into the label slot.

For some things like music or (older) games I have been storing one CD per sleeve with the booklet in front and CD in back. For other things like backup archives I sometimes store 2 or 3 CDs per sleeve.

Currently we have 3 boxes but I think I will get another 2 or 3 while they are available.

I can recommend this as a cheap and functional CD storage system (AUD $15 for the box inc 50 sleeves, and $8 for 50 sleeves only).