If someone asked me what my favorite gadget I bought and used last year, my smartphone would be my likely answer. I want to know if there was a gadget you got last year that might not be a big name. Here's my example:

Western Digital WD Livewire Powerline AV Network Kit

I've been using powerline networking devices for years now, and I'll be the first to admit: they're pretty bad. Often, though, they're the only recourse. About 5 years ago, when I was still living in my parents' home, my computer was set up in locations that just couldn't get WiFi. I finally stumbled across a Netgear product (the XE102) that promised a whopping 14Mbps transmission rate. Of course, you never get anywhere near that 14Mbps in real world use, but it was enough for web browsing and email. I then stepped up to the XE104, which had four ports on each unit and was 85Mbps. I still didn't get that speed, but now I could download small files

Flash forward to 2010. I simply had no way to get my home wired, and for some reason wireless just wasn't cutting it, no matter what I tried (and I tried at least four different setups). I was willing to try powerline again, but everything out there was still pretty slow and/or cost a hell of a lot of money (over $100 for each plug). Then I stumbled across WD's Livewire.

The Livewire is rated at 200Mbps (more on that later), it costs $99 for a two unit package, and each end has four ports, so at the home theater side I was able to connect my Tivo, my WDTV or Boxee, and my bluray player. Now, as I stated earlier, powerline never gives you real-world results anywhere near the rated speed, but so far the Livewire has been more than enough to get 1080p video streaming to my Boxee Box. I haven't had any speed issues whatsoever.

This product was a true surprise, a great value, and has really helped eliminate an annoyance I've had for quite some time. I am a big fan of the WD Livewire, and can truly say that I have nothing negative to say about it, which is rare for a CE device.

So, is there a gadget like this that you guys used last year?

On your wireless... did you try 5GHz? My parents place is a nightmare for wifi, some of the walls are 3'+ of stone and I was having a nightmare trying to use WDS to chain APs to give them coverage in most of the house.

I actually ended up using powerline for one segment, but I tried 5GHz (which in my experience at home - in a wooden house - never seems to go more than 20 feet). It just cut like butter through the stone, which I really, really wasn't expecting...

Next visit there will be putting in dual-band simultaneous APs, as their iPhones obviously can't take advantage of the 11a signal directly....

What sort of speeds you getting? I did have a "85Mbps" link between a room in the house and the garage but the throughput was awful. I assume because it had to actually travel all the way to the breaker panel and then back out again as they were on different circuits.

I can't really think of anything in particular that would be a secondary gadget though that I bought in 2010.

The Mikrotik 450G router I got for my FTTC line has been working great and much better than the Cisco 1841 I was using before. The 1841 costs several times more than the Mikrotik but only has a rated throughput of around 4Mbps with features enabled.

The Apple Magic Trackpad I got as a late Christmas present but was technically bought last year I've found to work very well. Not sure I'd blow £60 on it myself since its a bit expensive but if you do like multitouch trackpads then you'll like the Magic Trackpad.

My experience of power line products like that is that they generated a serious amount of RF interference on radios in the vicinity. Throughput was good, but since it caused so many problems elsewhere we couldn't continue using it.

I'd have to say my Mikrotik 750G is also my secondary gadget of 2010. You get a great set of features and good performance at a decent price. I'm tempted to get a pair of the high end models for work.

Yeah. The 450G I've got is complete overkill for the job its doing. I'm using a whole 13MB out of the 256MB RAM it comes with and I don't use any of the RouterOS L5 features or even L4 features. The 750G is more than enough for this and if I was doing it again, I'd get one of those instead and save my £££.

The plain 750 should even be able to run a full speed FTTC line. It is only 10/100 on the ports though but it does support baby jumbo frames.

Ooo, I like the looks of that 450G. I'll have to keep that in mind for setups where wireless isn't needed or could be separate.


I didn't try 5GHz for a few reasons. First and foremost: cost. I'd first have to replace my router, and most dual-band routers are pretty costly. Plus, I'd have to have a 5GHz option at the other end, so that means some sort of bridge and lastly a switch to support all the devices on the home theater side, including the bluray player that can't go wireless on its own and a Tivo which doesn't have a 5GHz wireless adapter (I think). This solution was a little simpler.


Do you mean radios like FM? If so, that will never ever be a concern for me. If not, I haven't seen any problems.


I don't think I've really done any testing, and I think it varies based on what's turned on in the home. I seem to remember transferring files from my PC to a drive attached to my WDTV, but I can't remember how fast it was going. I want to say it was around 11MBps, so that's about 88Mbps, which I'm perfectly happy with for my purposes. Like I said, I haven't had any bandwidth issues with the Boxee Box and transferring HD video.

Using Netcomm Homeplug AV "200Mb/s" I get 50-60Mb/s throughput (i.e. ~5-6MB/s) doing file transfers between a Windows 7 machine running a linux VM and a Linux machine which was a good enough upgrade from a bridged 2.4GHz 802.11g where I'd see about 20-25Mb/s or 2-2.5 MB/s. So about a quarter of the rated speed. I didn't see much improvement when both were plugged into the same powerboard so that's probably about the limit.

So based on those numbers if wireless worked you'd see about the same thing throughput wise.

What you're saying about throughput I doubt though. The signals are going at what about 1/3 the speed of light? Distance mainly affects latency not throughput. Do a ping test. On a LAN you should get ~1ms (or better) pings if working well enough. Maybe that's not what you mean but that's how I read it. Maybe you did mean that the longer length would cause more signal loss/slower speeds.

Huh? Whats wireless got to do with it?


I'm not talking about the actual distance. What affected me is that it was going through the breaker panel. The signal strength was affected when it had to go through circuit breakers. If I plugged the two units into the same circuit then I'd get significantly better throughput. One unit downstairs and one unit upstairs would have the same issues as having one unit in the garage. I never really looked into it that much but the only explanation I could come up with was that it didn't like the circuit breakers for some reason.

Houses in the UK are all single phase so I didn't have the issues that houses in NA would experience where the house can be fed with 2 phases.

I've got the DLink wallplug adaptors, also rated at 200mbit. At my place in Austin, I used them to connect my machine upstairs to the router downstairs. Most places in the (1979) house, the adaptors couldn't even run faster then my broadband there at 22mbit. Finally found 2 outlets that seemed to work a lot better, hitting about 26mbit. Ended up finding some flat Cat6 cable at Frys and used that to run the 25 ft distance from the outlet in the hall back into where my computer was set up.

Looks like there are adaptors out now rated at 500mbit. I wonder if the speed increases actually mean better speeds when replacing 200mbit units, or if they are doing something that only works well on high quality close lines. One thing is for sure, the tech has come a long way from 1999 when Gateway sold 1.5mbit Intel made versions to help people start their home networks. About all those were useful for was dial up network sharing.

There are models with wireless in the form of built in hardware or one or more Mini PCI slots but they're not really consumer boxes that are ready to go. You'd buy the board, the wireless card if necessary, an enclosure and then antennas. Probably not really what you're looking for in your case but very flexible if you do ever want to do wireless outdoors, as a big mesh or a long distance link etc...

If you don't need that much RAM, flash and the micro SD slot then you can get the 750G which Andy is using for quite a bit less. You get a plastic case instead of a metal case however and RouterOS L4 instead of L5 which is unlikely to matter for most people. You can run regular Linux distributions like OpenWRT if you wish as well and replace the RouterOS software which has a Linux core but you can't access it.

I'm quite pleased with my Eye-Fi Explore X2 SDHC memory card. I never jumped on the Google "free Eye-Fi card with purchase of Picasa storage" deal, but was intrigued by the utility and convenience of having a memory card that I'd (a) never have to take out of my camera to sync from and (b) never have to manually clear old photos/videos from. The geotagging feature is an added bonus that really helps me out (previously, my process for geotagging was either manual, or involved using exiftool to copy GPS tags from a picture I took at the place with my cell phone camera.) Now, within 30 seconds or so of taking a picture, it's uploaded on my file server at home, and then I just go into Picasa, clean things up, and optionally sync to Picasa Web (which still doesn't support hierarchical folders, grrr.)

It can also sync directly to Picasa, but I prefer to have a manual editing step in between, and don't want to pay to store full-resolution images on Google's cloud.

I do have some minor complaints, e.g. it'd be sweet if you could select *multiple* destinations for each image (currently you're limited to one "upload to a computer" operation and one "upload to an online service" operation, and FTPS is considered the latter.) But, the simple fact that I'll never have to worry about manually syncing photos and keeping free space available on my memory card is worth the $70 or so price tag.

And I still can't frickin' believe they squeeze wifi and geolocation capabilities into an SD card (yes, I know the geolocation doesn't actually use GPS, but still.)

Honestly, my favorite secondary gadget for 2010 was a Epson flatbed scanner ($40 when they had it at Fry's, $90-ish currently at Amazon). I scanned hundreds of negatives from when I was Mr. High School Yearbook Photographer and dumped them onto Facebook. Then I sat back and watched the tagging/untagging storm. Lots of fun.

Sure, the negative scanner isn't what you'd call production quality. I ran my scans at a resolution roughly equivalent to what I get out of my 12-megapixel Nikon D700 and the resulting scans were depressingly fuzzy. You could tell that there's film grain that could well have been resolved, but the scanner just wasn't sharp enough. Or, more likely, didn't have enough depth of field to resolve the whole negative, which has some curvature to it, despite the plastic frame holding it.

However, for the resolutions on Facebook, it just doesn't matter, and none of these pictures matter to me enough that I want to, say, rent time on a more expensive scanner or pay for expensive third-party scanning services.

I guess its doing it based on rough location from visible WiFi APs looked up in something like the Google or Skyhook DB?

What happens if you're in an area without WiFi or free WiFi? It just batches them all up automatically for when its next got internet access or do you need to tell it to go upload?

I didn't know that you could upload to your own server. That was one of the things that discouraged me from looking into the Eye-Fi cards as I always thought you had to use their service.

The Eye-Fi cards aren't available here in the UK but thats not too much of an issue to pick one up next time I'm over in the US. I'm just wondering whether it'd be worth me getting one since it probably won't have WiFi anywhere except at my home...

I mean anything that used radio frequency communications: wifi, video senders, FM, DAB, the works. Other people appear to have had the same problems as well. Luckily I don't need it anymore.

Honorable mentions for other secondary gadgets:

- Cree LR6 LED ceiling lights: My wife hates the color cast of CFLs and I hate the buzz of their cheap electronics. I had bought a bunch of halogen lights, which look great but burn out too fast and put out way too much heat. The solution? LED lights. One Cree light is roughly $70 (plug: good prices and prompt shipping from needabulb.com, who is now regularly spamming me with coupon codes and such; bug me if you want one), putting out the equivalent light of a 60W halogen bulb while only consuming 10.5W (comparable CFLs consume 20+ W). They're supposed to last 20 years, and judging by the massive aluminum heat sinks, they took this goal seriously. I've deployed these things all over the house. My next mission is going to be replacing all the halogen bulbs in our landscape lighting, which collectively consume ~1kW.

- Honeywell's solar timer programmable light switch. I have two of these now, one driving the front porch lights and the other driving some indoor lights. You tell it your lat/long and it figures out when sundown must be. You can then set programs like "turn on at sundown and turn off at 10pm." They even auto-correct for daylight savings. Unlike some cheaper timer switches, these ones have the additional benefit of an internal rechargeable battery, so you can truly install them and forget about them.

- My wife was sick of seeing all the assorted electronics around our TV set (amp, TiVo, etc.). They're all now hidden in a cabinet, but what makes it all work are two gadgets: an IR remote repeater and a temperature-controlled fan kit, which turns on by itself when the cabinet gets above 85F. Both easy to set up and they just work.

Right -- it uses the skyhook data.



Yeah, it does a batch upload the next time you have wifi. I think there's a limit on the number of "private" wifi networks it can use (32 of them, IIRC) and then it can use public / free hotspots, and also any paid hotspot accounts you might have access to.


Yeah, me too -- I don't know if FTP is a relatively new addition, but I didn't remember seeing anything about it when I first heard about the cards. I'm leery of using plaintext FTP on public wifi networks, so I'm glad it supports FTPS as well.


Yeah, like I said, the main thing for me is I don't have to yank the card out and pop it in my laptop to sync to my file server. That alone would be worth the price even if it only worked at home and didn't do any of the uploading on remote wifi networks. The fact that it does, and handles geotagging, makes it even more valuable.

You just leave your camera on in playback/view mode or something until its done? How do you tell its done anyway?

Sounds pretty handy if so. I use the USB cable to transfer however so the home transfer part may not be quite as useful for me. I'll have to think about whether it'd be worth getting one.

Looks like they're available in Canada as well which is handy as I'm going there soon for a trip.

I'll stick with CFL until LED bulbs of comparable brightness come in at $20 or less per bulb. And even then they've got to beat CFLs power consumption by more than 2x. At $70 per bulb and only 60w equivalency, they don't stack up very well to some 18w CFLs I'm using now. The 18w models are out about as much light as a 75w incandescent. A 23w can easily replace a 100w bulb. Colour rendering/temperature varies from brand to brand and model to model, so it's not impossible to find something you like. None of my bulbs produce audible buzz of any kind and they were all, except the ones I just bought, relatively cheap.

I just installed recessed fixtures in my family room yesterday which use GU24-based CFLs. The fixtures which came with bulbs, were $20 each. As a comparison, I can buy a six pack of GU10 halogen fixtures with bulbs for under $40 (but they burn at least 50w each ).

I have LED strips under my kitchen counters and I'm not happy with the colour reproduction at all. Fine for general lighting, but if you look at a piece of meat under them be prepared for some gross-looking results. These are not department store LEDs either - sourced them from LEDtronics.com over a year ago.

The only non-efficient lighting I have in my house right now are 2x 50w halogens in the range hood, three incandescent 40w bulbs in the dining room and master bedroom (they're on dimmers). I'll be looking to replace the dining and master bedroom fixtures soon, so we'll have to see what kind of lighting goes there next. At the very least I'll have to get dimmable CFL for the dining room if the fixture can support the correct base - those are like $20 each, ugh.

My iPhone incidentally is my favorite secondary gadget of 2010.

If you care about making sure the photos are all transferred, you do need to leave it in playback mode (and keep it from powering down if it's set to do so.) The eye-fi service lets you set up notifications (email/SMS/Twitbook) for when items are finished uploading, and it also lets you associate the card with a desktop/laptop running the "Eye-fi center" software that will show you progress as the photos upload (on my Mac, I see the photos and percent complete appear in a mini popup window under the menu bar.) That's not really useful except when you're at home and near your computer, of course, but it is kinda fun to see them pop up on your screen a couple seconds after you take them.

Ahh okay. Seems pretty good then. I'll have to go look at it when I'm over in Canada. If I do get one then it'll probably be the Explore X2 you've got. The Adhoc support in the Pro X2 could be handy but I don't see myself using it that often and the raw support is useless as I don't have a camera capable of doing raw anyway

I love the Eye-Fi! I keep trying to get my mother and aunt to use them, but it's a hard sell. I keep telling them how easy it is and how they'll never have to figure out how to transfer their photos from their cameras again, but for some reason they're still so skeptical. Then again, my aunt was the type that never took her photos off her camera. She would just show them to people on the LCD.

I am also amazed at how they fit WiFi into that thing. It doesn't seem like it should be possible! It makes me wonder why everything doesn't have WiFi in it


And frankly, you simply can't use the Eye-Fi for RAW. The files are just so big and take way too long to transfer. For a while I was shooting in RAW+JPG, but the RAW files just made the transfers take forever, so I turned it off. Just JPGs though, even at the highest quality, don't take too long to transfer. Still, you have to find the setting in the camera's software that turns off the power saving mode. It was buried pretty deep in my Olympus E-PL1. Then you have to remember to turn the camera off. A couple times now I've left the camera to transfer, forgot to turn it off, then went to take pictures and the battery was dead

Great picks, guys! I like hearing about these things.

These.

tanstaafl.

Cool idea.

SD cards already have a processor inside them to handle the SD protocol and to talk to the actual raw flash chip inside. The Eye-Fi card has a processor that is capable of doing WiFi and a tiny WiFi transceiver + antenna as well. All of this stuff has been miniaturised already for other purposes so putting it all into a big SD card package isn't that difficult.

Micro-SD cards use the same sort of controllers and they're pretty powerful controllers at that. The difference for Micro-SD is that the controller isn't packaged up first. Its just a bare silicon die that gets put into the card.

You can see the insides of an old Eye-Fi card here.

LED light quality is all over the map. Suffice to say, you get what you pay for. These Cree fixtures are incredible, with a CRI of 90, versus much lower CRIs for CFLs. Cree also sell a more expensive fixture, the LR6-DR1000 which consumes 12W and is a good match to a 100W halogen bulb. I put two of them in our breakfast nook, which we like to be bright in the morning.

Trying to sort out the cost/benefit is non-trivial when you consider not just the one-time install cost, but recurring electrical costs, A/C costs (to remove the heat generated by halogens), and replacement costs (I've had many of the CFLs I put in two years ago start burning out on me). I guestimate that my investment starts paying for itself in 3-5 years.

Of course, in 3-5 years, LED lights will be much brighter and cheaper than they are today. Also, the lack of mercury vapor is a decided point in their favor that will ultimately drive CFLs out of use.

It's a big place over here, but if you're going to be in/around Ottawa then let me know!

Cheers

Awesome! Next year: A plug to hook into the implant the aliens put into your brain stem.

Looking at the dates and flights, I'll probably be over in Canada around June time so its still a little while. I'll be mostly around Toronto for my trip unfortunately. Never been to Ottawa but really should one day.

Okay, tell more, tell more! Use PM if you prefer!
I am frequently in Toronto (family), especially around June.

Biz or Pleasure?

Cheers

That is odd. I have five power line ethernet adapters around the house. They cause no problems with FM, DAB or wifi for me.

The abilities of them vary a lot between brands, maybe the interference does too. I only use Devolo now after having bad experiences with some other brands.

Apparently they all cause major problems for your local radio ham though

I have the comtrend ones, because apart from the recent "brittle plastic" problems they've had, they got decent enough reviews. They're also used by BT for the vision boxes, so new boxed sets pop up on eBay a lot and can be bought real cheap if you're willing to wait and pick up the right set.

The Comtrend ones are notorious for RF interference (particularly noted by radio hams as Andy points out) and I have noticed this with my old peavey bandit 112 guitar amp, in my old flat when I wanted to use it I had to power off the Comtrends otherwise I'd get a constant stream of beeps coming out of the amp.

I'm a big fan of them though, they work perfectly here for us - which cannot be said of our "broadband".

Yeah, I don't have these problems either. Then again, FM isn't used in this household

Best secondary gadget for me in 2010 would be the iSpot. The 4G service was ok, but what was really nice was the hackability of the device. Out of the box, I had to hack it just to get my iPad to work, due to their MAC filters not being quite right with the initial release. While nowhere near as convenient as having WAN service built into a device, having a $25 data plan along with no contract was nice. It's not seeing any use for me in 2011 though, as the 4G WiMax network Clear built for LA isn't reaching me here in south Orange County.

Was just saying that my powerline runs at about one quarter of the rated speed and wireless about one half. i.e. 85Mb/s powerline is roughly equal to 54Mb/s wireless.

Just how I read it - you were saying it had to "travel all the way to the breaker panel". Any sort of extra impedance (i.e. switches/breakers) in the lines will most definitely affect signal quality and thus throughput. I'm not in the US and yes we have similar single phase systems.

Ah okay. I was getting ~16Mbps through the powerline kit from inside the house to the garage. Side by side, I was getting about 30Mbps but that was right on the same mains extension strip.

I'm using 802.11g to bridge it at the moment. I tried 802.11a but whatever is in the walls really attenuates the signal. I really should just drill a little hole somewhere and feed a wire through then not need to worry about it.


Eh. Poorly worded. My bad.

How are you guys checking these speeds? The non-scientific test I ran was to simply copy a file over the connection using TeraCopy and keep an eye on the bitrate to get a rough average. Do you have a specific tool for this purpose?

I used iperf.

One side runs a server:


The other side runs the client:


Two machines which are connected via GigE to the same switch. It doesn't hit the disk at all for anything so it should be fairly close to the theoretical maximum for that link with those parameters assuming nothing else is using the network.

One side is using conventional PCI with only a single link so if I run a dual ended test where it tests speed in both directions at the same time, I get limited to 430Mbps + 638Mbps which is 1068Mbps and for some reason it uses 1000 instead of 1024 when calculating bps so its actually 1018Mbps which is just under the 1064Mbps (133MBps) that a 32 bit 33MHz conventional PCI card can do.



The other side is 4 lane PCI-e but the only other machines I've got which are PCI-e all run ESX so I'd need to run it on the service console.

I presume it depends upon the manufacturer. The ones I got were on the 'Today Only' section of the Scan website, can't remember who made them.

Are you ready for the move to ESXi?

Yeah. I don't run anything in the service console anyway so losing it isn't a big deal.

All the ones I've seen have used an Intellon chip inside. You can query it for statistics and also set the passwords etc... There is a Linux tool as well if you don't/can't use the Windows one.

Pleasure. Just visiting some friends from university. Some of them were at my university for a year exchange program and a few others emigrated to Canada.

I'll be in Toronto from 2nd to 22nd June and some weekend during that I'll be "cottaging" i.e. in a cottage somewhere. You really should come up with a better or different name for that as that means something completely different in the UK! Probably not something you should search for whilst at work if you're trying to work out what the UK meaning is...

I lived in Toronto for 5 years, and had several friends with cottages. I've never heard the term before -- it was always "going up to the cottage."

Yeah. I think I'll adopt your phrase instead.