By Evan Ackerman

Cloud Engines has unveiled a new version of their Pogoplug hard drive mobile access networker sharing thingy. Um, let me take another stab at that: Pogoplug (which we first saw last year at CES) is a little tiny computer that talks to USB hard drives and makes their content accessible from anywhere, and easily sharable with anyone. It doesn’t do anything that you couldn’t do with all kinds of major networking headaches, but that’s exactly why it’s so useful: you just plug it in, it works, and you’re done.

Version 2 of the Pogoplug features a redesign that incorporates a few more USB ports, making it easier to add multiple drives, although you can also use a USB hub to do the same thing. It comes on a weird pink sled, which personally I’m not a big fan of… I kinda liked the unapologetic functionality and smaller form factor of the original. There are also a host of new features on the software side, the most notable of which are automatic media syncing and global search, but you’ll also find new tools for creating and sharing media slide shows and other social features like a sharing address book.

The Pogoplug 2 is currently on pre-order for $129 (looks like the original version is still an even $100), which includes a lifetime of web sharing service.

[ Pogoplug ]

By David Ponce

The word on the street (meaning Peter Kafka from AllThingsD) is that Apple has been going around TV networks over the last few weeks pitching a $30/month subscription service that would make it possible to watch TV through iTunes. It’s not clear exactly how this would work. For instance, we don’t know whether this would make live programs available live or as a later download, nor whether you’d have access to the same kind of programming that you get currently from cable companies. This of course would depend on how many networks jump on board, a selling task left up to iTunes boss Eddy Cue. Rumor has it

“that if anyone jumps first, it will be Disney (DIS), since CEO Bob Iger has shown a willingness to experiment with Apple and iTunes in the past: In 2005, Disney was the first player to sell its programming on iTunes, via a-la-carte downloads. And Apple CEO Steve Jobs is Disney’s largest single shareholder, a result of Disney’s 2006 acquisition of Jobs’s Pixar animation studio. Apple didn’t respond to requests for comment.”

Whatever happens, Apple’s in a hurry as they’d like to launch this early 2010.

The question is, would you pay $30 for a service like this? Would you ditch your cable company? Everything is moving to the web as it is, so this seems like a natural and perhaps inevitable evolution for broadcast… but is it too ambitious, too soon?

[ AllThingsD ] VIA [ Dvice ]

By David Ponce

There really isn’t much to say about the above picture except that I love it, and that you can get it as a $20 T-Shirt.

[ Product Page ] VIA [ BoingBoing Gadgets ]

By David Ponce

[
Update: Turns out that while this image does depict an actual Facebook account, it wasn't written by Tracy herself but by someone from 4chan who gained access to her account. It's part of a larger attack by 4chan on Christians on Facebook. It's still funny as hell if you ask us, perhaps even more so now. Maybe not for Tracy though... -Ed.]

41-year old Tracy thought she was sending a private message on Facebook. She wasn’t. She was writing on her own wall. Big deal, right? Well, just read the above and you might be convinced otherwise.

Moral? Never. Have. Sex. Again.

I’m talking to you, Tracy. Oh, and aren’t you engaged anyway?

VIA [ Geekologie ]

By Evan Ackerman

When I reviewed the Eye-Fi wireless SD card back in May, one of the quibbles I had with it was that there was no way to decide which pictures you wanted to upload. The card would send ‘em all… Good ones, bad ones, naked ones, everything you take just goes. In fact, here’s what I said: “there isn’t any way to designate specific pictures to upload, or not to upload. But of course, there isn’t really a way to integrate that sort of functionality into the card itself.” Yep, I said that. Happily, I’m here to report that I’m an idiot and Eye-Fi is a genius, because they’ve made it happen: you can now selectively upload pictures from your camera.

It’s quite simple, really: using the online manager, you can set up the card to only upload pictures (or videos) that you’ve designated on your camera as locked. That’s it. The rest of the pictures will stay on your card for you to do whatever you like with. On my Nikon D40x, the lock button is right next to my thumb. It’s easy, it works, and as of today it’s available for free for all Eye-Fi cards.

Also released today is a new, uh, level? of Eye-Fi card, the Eye-Fi Pro. It costs $150, and is able to handle RAW files, as well as connect to a computer via an ad-hoc wireless network, i.e. no router necessary. These are certainly nice features, although RAW support at least seems more like a firmware upgrade, and it would be cool if Eye-Fi would push that option out to their other cards, even if it’s for a small fee, so that people who want to be able to upload RAW don’t have to buy a whole new card. I guess I shouldn’t really complain, though, since we’re getting the selective upload update for free.

[ Eye-Fi ]

As we’ve mentioned to you before, the Eye-Fi card is really a pretty brilliant idea. Digital cameras are neat little gadgets, but getting all your awesome pics from your camera to the computer and to the internet is still a stone age process that involves plugging cables into things and taking cards out of things and running software and pushing buttons and waiting around. It’s utterly ridiculous. Eye-Fi has the solution to this, with an SD card that includes a WiFi antenna that automatically sends pictures and video that you take directly to the internet and your computer, no cables necessary.

We’ve got a full review of the Eye-Fi Explore Video for you, right after the jump.

The Eye-Fi card is, simply, an SD card, just with a bunch of other stuff going on as well. The latest versions come in either a 2 gig SD or a 4 gig SDHC card, and they’ll work in any cameras that take the format. The cards have built-in WiFi antennas, and if you’re wondering how they manage to stuff that in there along with all the memory, just think about how much smaller a microSD card is. Anyhoo, as soon as you take a picture, the card connects to an available wireless network and fires it off to the internet, where Eye-Fi will forward it on to your computer or one of any number of picture sharing sites, including Flickr, Picasa, Facebook, Photobucket, YouTube, and a bunch more. Plus, today Eye-Fi is announcing that they’ve expanded their video upload capability (which already includes YouTube and Flickr) to Picasa, Photobucket, and SmugMug.

I know, all those options and capabilities sound really complicated, and I was expecting some major headaches when it came to configuring everything. But I was shocked, shocked I say, at how easy it was to set the card up. It was incredibly easy. Stupidly, ridiculously easy. It took me four minutes and fifty-three seconds from opening the box to having a picture magically appear in my Flickr account. This is impressive because the card had to connect to my (protected) wireless network, find my computer, get through my firewall to the internet, set up access to the Eye-Fi site, set up access to my Flickr and YouTube accounts, and then get all of that stuff to communicate. This literally took about 3 minutes of effectively clicking “next.” The other minute or so was spent configuring my D40x to not instantly enter sleep mode, so that the Eye-Fi card can upload while I wasn’t actively taking pictures.

Managing your card settings is done pretty much exclusively through the Eye-Fi website, with the assistance of a small application that runs on your desktop to download pictures to your computer. Through the website, you can set up network access for the card, add or modify picture and video destinations, alter descriptions and tags, and even do nifty things like view your upload history and set up RSS feeds of your pics. I don’t, as a rule, like to have applications running on my computer when I’m not using them. The Eye-Fi manager website will complain if you don’t have their little desktop application running (and you won’t get pics sent to your computer), but to do stuff like change upload tags and descriptions, it doesn’t seem to matter.

The only quibble I have with the online manager is that I didn’t seem to be able to change upload privacy settings through the Eye-Fi manager, which was unfortunate, since sometimes I’m happy to have everything show up public, but it would be nice to have an easy way to change it to private or family. As far as I can tell, the only way to do it is to remove your Flickr account, and re-add it to change the privacy option.

Even though card management is done exclusively online, the Eye-Fi web app doesn’t quite seem to work my iPhone. It gets close, but to (say) change a Flickr tag there’s a flash pop-up thingy that doesn’t fit onto the iPhone screen and it doesn’t want to resize itself. This seems like something that might be fixable, and it would be very useful to be able to change tags on the fly if you move from place to place. There is actually an Eye-Fi app for the iPhone, but while it lets you check on your uploads and upload from your phone, you can’t change any upload settings. And speaking of moving from place to place, the card will connect to unsecured networks to upload pics, but it doesn’t seem to like to, and uploads on the go were intermittent and took a while.

In testing, the card was damn fast on my home network. I took a bunch of 10 megapixel JPEGs on my D40x, and it took about 30 seconds for the card to get started uploading. After that, pictures took about 10 seconds each to show up on my computer. It took a little bit longer for the pics to make it to Flickr, but 20 pictures were up there after about 5 minutes. You don’t have to worry about taking additional pictures while an upload is in progress; Eye-Fi is smart enough to know if an upload was interrupted, and will try again later for you. Uploading a 1 minute video took about 8 minutes to get from my Canon PowerShot A2000 to my computer, and showed up on YouTube about 30 minutes later (it was a 100mb uncompressed AVI).

The Eye-Fi Explore comes bundled with a geotagging service from Skyhook. Skyhook uses WiFi access points to provide a location, so getting a fix is probably going to be good in a city, decent in urban areas, and impossible everywhere else. Pictures I took in Golden Gate Park, for example, got geotagged as outside the park (about 50 meters off or so), because that’s where the card was able to find a WiFi access point that Skyhook could use. So it’s a nice service that kind of works some of the time, but don’t expect reliable GPS-type accuracy and keep in mind that it costs about $15 a year if you don’t buy the most expensive Eye-Fi card.

Now, just to make this a fair and balanced review, I should mention a few things that I don’t like so much about the Eye-Fi card, but in a way, neither of them are flaws in the product, just inconveniences that you should be aware of before you buy one. First of all, the Eye-Fi card uploads ALL of your pictures, whether you like it or not. There isn’t any way to designate specific pictures to upload, or not to upload. But of course, there isn’t really a way to integrate that sort of functionality into the card itself. I did some testing to figure out how long you have to delete a picture that you took before it gets uploaded, and on my home network, the Eye-Fi card would start uploading after 5-10 seconds, but not complete if I deleted the image from my camera within 30 seconds. So, you have a little bit of leeway in reviewing your pictures, but don’t wait too long.

The other issue with the card is that it only works when your camera is turned on, and it sucks up battery power doing its thing. Not a huge amount of battery power, but still. I reflexively turn my camera off when I’m not actively taking a picture, and that prevents the card from uploading anything. Even if you train yourself not to turn the camera off, most cameras will enter a power save mode after some amount of time, and that will also stop the card from uploading. One solution is to alter settings to keep the camera on as long as possible, but not only does that waste a lot of battery, it’s no guarantee that the card will be able to upload all of your pictures if you take a bunch. My D40x has a maximum idle-on time of 30 minutes, and if I take more pics than the card can upload in that time, I have to remember to push a button on the camera to wake it up again so that the card can continue uploading. Some newer cameras like the Nikon D60 and D90 are able to recongize Eye-Fi cards and manage their power settings accordingly, which is very cool.

A nice feature of the card that helps to mitigate the fact that you have to leave your camera on is that you can enable notifications when your pictures have been uploaded. Eye-Fi can send you a message via email, SMS, and/or Twitter to let you know that your pics are all done, and you can go turn your camera off.

Okay, I guess there’s one more thing I don’t like, and it’s the price. A regular 4 gig SD card, brand new, is like $10 nowadays. The 4 gig Eye-Fi Explore is $100. It kind of seems like somebody got a focus group together and asked them, “how much would you barely tolerate paying for this thing,” and $100 was the magic number. But you know, I might even go as far as to say that it’s worth it. I wouldn’t have thought that I would feel that way, but Eye-Fi just saves so much more time and effort moving pics around than I thought it would, not to mention the whole issue of having to back up your pictures online, which gets done automatically for you.

There are currently three different models of the Eye-Fi card, some of which are substantially cheaper, including the Eye-Fi Home ($50, only sends pics to your home network) and Eye-Fi Share ($60, adds web sharing, and also video for another $20). The Eye-Fi Explore, which is the card I tested, includes geotagging and 1 year of WayPort WiFi hotspot access for $100. Additional years of WayPort are $15.

You can buy Eye-Fi cards directly from the Eye-Fi website, or as of today, in Best Buy and Apple stores.

The Good:

-Easy to set up
-Works exactly as advertised (and quite well)
-Simple web management with lots of sharing options

The Bad:

-Expensive
-No power management in most cameras

Overall:

It’s a brilliant product, especially if you take a lot of pictures and like to share them online (and/or back them up). It’s expensive (expensive enough that it might end up being a significant percentage of the cost of your camera), so consider the Eye-Fi Share, which doesn’t include hotspots or geotagging but costs $20 – $40 less.

[ Eye-Fi ]

By Evan Ackerman

Back in March, we wrote about a service called OnLive, which outsources gaming hardware to “the cloud,” i.e. makes it someone else’s problem. G.ho.st (which I will herein refer to as Ghost) does sort of the same thing, except with an entire operating system.

‘Ghost’ is an acronym for Global Hosted Operating SysTem, and it’s a sort of virtual computer that lives somewhere out there in the intertubercloud. You access it, in its entirety, via nothing more than a web browser. When you do, Ghost gives you a virtual desktop, complete with programs, file storage, and yes, even the internet (inside the internet). The programs available on Ghost are all open source, but you should be able to mess around with most types of files, including MS Office files. You get 5 gigs of file storage on your virtual computer, along with an email address and the capability to aggregate your other email accounts via POP3. You can keep the rest of your files synced between Ghost and other computers with a small desktop application.

Ghost is a completely free service, and they aim to stay that way. They make their money through affiliate advertising; when you click (say) a Google ad link while using the Ghost browser, Ghost gets paid. The upsides to a cloud desktop like this are many, the chief one being that you can have “your” computer available anywhere with little more than a web browser. Files, email, bookmarks, even cookies… Ghost keeps it all in one place for you. All you need is internet and you’re good to go.

[ g.ho.st ]

By David Ponce

Everyone loves a mashup, right? Check this out.

It’s no news that major labels are distributing their music videos on YouTube. It was a long time coming, but they finally saw the potential in distributing their stuff on one of the most popular platforms on the planet. Yay! It’s all good except for one thing: what if you’re one of those people who’s constantly asking himself “Hey, what are the kids listening to these days?”. You laugh, but I’m telling you, there’s a whole demographic who’d love to know what’s hot on the charts, watch the videos, but just does not have the time to look it up.

That’s where a site like Playcharts.com (careful, autoplay on) comes in. They’re not doing anything revolutionary, unless you consider organizing information the stuff of the Gods. They take five popular charts (Pop, Rock, R&B, Dance and New) and post the YouTube clips in order. Simple as pie, but useful as hell.

Now, I bet you there’s a thousand sites like this one, and I’d love to see them in the comments. But for yours truly, it’s a first. And yeah, the autoplay is annoying as anything, but right now it’s just a minor annoyance.

[ Playcharts.com ]

Thanks Christian

Yesterday I wrote about the unfortunate demise of Muxtape, and while the site might be dead (I doubt it will ever return in its previous form) the idea isn’t. It looks like a similar site called 8tracks could possibly be a suitable alternative to Muxtape for those of us in withdrawal. While Muxtape allowed users to upload 12 different tracks for their playlist, 8tracks seems to be limited to… wait for it… 8 tracks, just like the old cart format. Of course in the ‘end days’ of Muxtape there were thousands of playlists to choose from, which was a big part of its appeal, so hopefully 8tracks will enjoy similar growth and popularity before the day ‘you-know-who’ comes knocking. And as the The Red Ferret Journal points out, after 8tracks there will inevitably be another, and another, and another…

[ 8tracks ] VIA [ The Red Ferret Journal ]

I don’t care how big your MP3 collection might be, sometimes you just get tired of the same old stuff, and that’s where Muxtape came in quite handy. For those unfamiliar with the site/service, it basically provided a 21st century way to create a ‘mixtape’ of different songs that anyone who visited the site could listen to. Once an account was created you could upload 12 songs (they all had to be from different albums) which would be stored via the Amazon S3 service. The site itself then provided a simple and clean way for anyone to stream and listen to your Muxtape tracklist.

Well I’m not sure when it happened (I used Muxtape as late as last week) but this is what you see when you visit the site now. “Muxtape will be unavailable for a brief period while we sort out a problem with the RIAA.” Since the site first appeared I wondered how they managed to avoid any ‘dealings’ with the RIAA, but instead of worrying I decided to just enjoy it as long as I could. There is hope though that the site is not gone forever, since the following message was posted to the Muxtape RSS feed yesterday: “No artists or labels have complained. The site is not closed indefinitely. Stay tuned.” So for the time being I will remain cautiously optimistic.

[ Muxtape ] VIA [ Gear Diary ]