Review Horizon

Introduction

I am a long time AT&T subscriber, not because I particularly love the company, but because in my area, the competition sucks even more in terms of signal strength and coverage. While AT&T’s signal is relatively decent outside the house, inside the strenght is atrocious, my iPhone 4 gets only 1 line and 50% of the time the call is dropped. I called AT&T many times to complain to no avail. You can imagine my surprise when I got a letter from AT&T a couple of weeks ago stating that they are having a promotion for a free 3G Microcell and I immediately jumped in the car and drove to my local AT&T store to get one. One our later, my new gadget was unpacked, installed and activated. I did use it for almost three weeks now and the conclusions are described in this AT&T 3G MicroCell Review. Read More…

When you are looking to get DVR functionality for your home, you have several options: Get a cable box, a satellite box, a TIVO or build your own. If you are reading this review, you are probably thinking about building your own and we’ll gladly lend you a hand.

One of the most popular tuners for the last couple of years are coming from a company called SiliconDust. They are the manufacturer for the wildly successful line of network connected TV tuners called HDHomeRun. The main selling point compared with let’s say a PCI-E capture card is the capability to share it over the home network between several computers at the same time. Just plug-it in on your switch and it should be available to any computer on your network. What is even better, several units can be added to increase the available units pool, they are automatically allocated on demand to the computers on your network and it is fully compatible with a large number of DVR / media packages available on Windows, Linux and MAC machines and, also compatible with XBOX 360 when used as an extender to Windows Media Center.

HDHomeRun is now at Revision 3 codename HDHR3 and it is smaller, lighter and even cheaper, all while Read More…

If you ever had to make a lot of data accessible on the network, there are several solutions available: You can use NAS (network attached storage) units, you can use dedicated servers as well. The disadvantage of a dedicated server is the power requirements as the electricity bill will be considerable for 24/7 operation. Newer NAS devices are build around embedded processors are are quite frugal in terms of power needed, but are not necessarily cheap. In this article I’ll review probably the cheapest NAS available on the market, the Seagate FreeAgent DockStar Network Adapter model STDSA10G-RK, and we’ll also discuss about what makes it such a good deal.

1. Unpacking

Seagate packed the adapter in a completely environmental friendly box which is a nice touch. Inside, you can find the main unit, the power adapter and a network cable. The manual is very sparse but for its intended use you don’t really need it. Read More…

I bought the Buffalo Nfiniti Wireless-N WZR-HP-G300NH router because my good old Belkin started to die after about 2 years of heavy usage and I also got a pretty good deal from Amazon. I looked around for a while for a decent N router under $100 that also had Gigabit ports and some kind of NAS functionality and WZR-HP-G300NH seemed to fit the bill. If you look on the WEB, you will also find out that it provides DD-WRT compatibility which is certainly a bonus, and it is claimed that it provides a higher transmitting power than other routers on the market. Let’s put these claims to test and see how it performs.

Read More…