Makey Makey! Invent… and play

 gadget, hardware  No Responses »
Nov 042013
 

Few months ago I bought a tool which is just… plain… incredible.
It’s a tiny cheap piece of hardware that will unleash your creativity in a way that I never thought possible.
With a funny name: Makey Makey
.
The original invention comes from a very special place: MIT, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
It’s hard to describe or even try to give makey makey a classification.
Basically it is a board able to transform anything into a… sort of keyboard!
And mouse clicks.
One video speaks one thousand words: look at my son!

[youtuber youtube=’http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxP7VNPD-OE’]

Warning! Once you own a makey makey you are in a tunnel, full of infinite possibilities!

If you wanna scratch the surface of what’s possible with this, check out this TED talk about it.

Are you a happy owner of a Makey Makey? Share your happiness using the comments of this blog!

Zalman Enclosure: spectacular idea

 gadget, hardware  No Responses »
Nov 022013
 

A couple of weeks ago I was at a customer site and saw a marvel of technology: a hard disk drive enclosure. A very special one. ZM-VE400 Drive Enclosure. Few shouts after, I ordered one. And I’m spreading the word spontaneously about this great product.

Of course it is a USB 3.0 HDD enclosure, but what makes it absolutely special is its ability to serve ISO images as… virtual CD/DVD to systems able to boot from USB connected DVD readers.

Useless to say that this precious tool made my life simpler by several magnitude orders 😉

I have installed a 500GB SATA disk, more than enough for the few ISO images I carry around when I visit customer sites. Custom Linux distro, rescue DVDs images, all the way up to DMG images of Mac software.

And when I need one of them, I just recall the image name on the convenient LCD display of the enclosure, press 5 to mount it and… voilà: the Zelman VE400 will behave like I just burnt the DVD fresh 🙂

But the great features of this awesome idea are not over: it can simulate a mighty “dual mode”. That is, mount an ISO (for example, a live Linux DVD) and once the ISO is booted mount the hard disk part of itself to save (again, for example) data from the system you’re not able to boot anymore.

Finally, you can protect your whole data with a PIN and encrypt the content of your hard disk… but be warned: you’d better do it before putting your data, or the operation will erase any existing data to prepare the encrypted hard disk.

Allo in all, so far this nice tool provided me a helping value comparable to several times its approx 60 euros price.

Enjoy,

RoarinPenguin