Gibbs gets all environmental, continues e-bookishly, and concludes with a great NAS
We start this week with real, hardcore geekiness: The Great World Wide Star Count starts this Friday, Oct. 29, and runs through Nov. 12. This is an international citizen science event that encourages everyone to measure local light pollution and report their observations online.
Why does light pollution matter? Well, for example, it turns out that there is now not one U.S. national park that is truly dark at night – light pollution from nearby human activities spills for miles and there are many animals, for example amphibians and migratory birds, that don’t cope well (or at all) with having a night light on.
So, if you are concerned about the environmental impact of light pollution then head over to the Star Count Web site and get involved.
OK, back to computer technology: A few weeks ago I reviewed the Barnes and Noble NOOK, an e-reader that I quite liked. Just now I received a press release announcing the November availability of a version of the NOOK with a full color display called, with immense creativity, the NOOKcolor.
There’s little doubt in my mind that color is required for a great reading experience – after all, color illustrations and photographs aren’t exactly rare in books. Monochrome displays are OK when the material is purely text, but even then a color display allows for highlighting that actually highlights.
I’ve used most of the e-readers on the market and to date, only the iPad has provided an experience that was better than a real book. This is mostly because I can fine tune not just font size but also select my preferred background color, highlight in color, and so on. It’s a really great experience and that’s without considering the impact of rich content such as color photos, animations, videos, links to the Web, embedded applications, and so on.
Anyway, the NOOKcolor has a 7 inch screen, comes only with Wi-Fi (no 3G support announced) and 8GB of storage (which can be expanded). It also has built-in Facebook, Twitter and e-mail support and a new application called the LendMe App, which allows users to lend and borrow books to and from other LendMe users.
The impact color will have on the NOOKcolor’s battery life is significant: The original NOOK is spec’ed as having a 10 day run time while the NOOKcolor is quoted as having an eight hour battery life. And that is a disappointing reduction, but it could have been worse without an upgraded battery which would explain the NOOKcolor’s 4.2 ounce weight gain over its predecessor (the NOOKcolor now weighs in at 15.8 ounces).
There’s no doubt that weight is a problem for e-readers. Even that extra 4.2 ounces adds up when you’re lying in bed trying to hold your e-reader at a comfortable angle (this is an area where the iPad comes off badly … at 1.5 pounds it is considerably heavier than the competition, although I feel that this is an important part of my physical workout regime … your mileage may vary).
Priced at $249 the NOOKcolor looks to be a great e-reader for people who don’t need all of the bells and whistles, processing power, and extra expense of the iPad. That said, Barnes and Noble has also announced a forthcoming software developers kit for the NOOKcolor that will allow rich content in NOOK e-books, including audio, photos, videos, Web links and plug-ins. It will be interesting to see whether this makes the NOOKcolor competitive with the iPad.
Even if it did, I could also imagine having a NOOKcolor as a companion to my iPad. Definitely worth checking out if you’re in the market for a new e-reader.
Now, I have a question for you: Given its low price point and potentially high functionality, could you see a role for the NOOKcolor as a support for corporate documentation and simple data presentation needs?
So, this week I finally fired up a device I’ve had sitting on the queue for way too long and, wow, I’m impressed. The device is the QNAP (which stands for “Quality Network Appliance Provider”) TS-859U-RP TurboNAS network attached storage (NAS) server.
The TS-859U-RP is a 2U rackmount enclosure with a redundant power supply configuration and eight hot-swappable and lockable bays housing SATA I or II drives for a maximum of 16TB of storage. The drives can be configured as single disks, JBOD, or in a RAID 0, 1, 5, 5 with hot spare, 6, or 6 with hot spare configuration.
The 859 (as its friends call it) is powered by a 1.6GHz Intel Atom dual-core processor with 1GB of RAM and 1.6GHz Atom D510. This is paired with 1GB of DDR2 memory and 512MB of Flash memory for the Linux kernel making the 859 impressively fast in both operation and management.
Communications consist of two Gigabit Ethernet ports and it has two eSATA ports and four USB 2.0 ports that can support printers, pen drives, hubs, and a UPS. It also supports a dual IPv4 and IPv6 TCP/IP stack with Jumbo Frames, offers port trunking and NIC teaming (with multiple modes), as well as a DHCP Client and Server.
So far, this is a cool configuration, but the 859 really impresses when you take a look at the software it runs, the specifications of this beast are endless!
Where to start? The 859 supports the Common Internet File System (CIFS) with support for the Distributed File System (DFS), Apple Filing Protocol (AFP) version 3.2, Network File System (NFS) version 3, WebDAV, SNMP, FTP, Telnet, SSH, iSCSI, UPnP, and Bonjour.
It provides a Web-based File Manager, a Multimedia Station, a Download Station, a Surveillance Station for capturing IP camera streams, an iTunes Server, a UPnP Media Server, an Apache Web Server, and a MySQL Server
The 859 also supports QPKG Plug-ins, QNAPs version of a Linux package management system. Available QPKG software includes Joomla!, phpMyAdmin, WordPress, MLDonkey (a version of eMule), the Squeezebox Server, Tomcat, Asterisk, Python, and the Java Runtime Environment.
I could go on but you get the picture: This is an “everything and the kitchen sink” system and it works great! My biggest complaint is that someone at QNAP appears to be color blind as they have made the unselected tabbed display in the Web-based user interface lime green text on a light gray background – totally unreadable. Oh, and the fans are a little on the noisy side – this is definitely a data center device.
And that’s it, there’s really a lot to like about the TS-859U-RP; it’s priced well at just less than $3,000 for the frame without drives, it has more features than most people will ever use, it’s very flexible, it’s got a lot of useful add-on applications, and it’s well made. I’ll award the TS-859U-RP a rating of 5 out of 5.
Gibbs will be counting stars in Ventura, Calif. Your observations to gearhead@gibbs.com.
