Griffin’s iTrip FM Transmitter for the iPod has Benefits Beyond FM Transmitting

Posted on November 25, 2007
Filed Under Miscellaneous | 2 Comments

Griffin Technology’s iTrip FM Transmitter for the iPod has benefits beyond just wirelessly transmitting your content to your car radio or home stereo system. The device has a mini-USB port so you can charge and sync your iPod without Apple’s annoying proprietary cable. I move my iPod around a lot and I frequently don’t have an Apple cable where and when I need one.

The benefit of mini-USB is that it’s been adopted as a standard for both data and charging in many portable electronics devices, so you tend to always have a cable around. And if a cable breaks (it does happen) you just replace it with another one, cheaply.

You can find a new iTrip on eBay under $10 (not including shipping, but all-in you’ll pay under $18). I’ve seen iPod sync cables (especially in brick and mortar stores) for rarely under $15 and sometimes over $25.

Griffin iTrip

Mo’ Floppies Mo’ Problems

Posted on November 16, 2007
Filed Under Consumer Electronics, Miscellaneous | 3 Comments

I found a stack of 5 ¼” floppy disks while rifling through some old boxes today. The disks were labeled “Full Backup” and were from early 1991. The capacity of a double-density 5 ¼” floppy disk is about 1.2 MB. Amazing. Today I back up about 10.3 gigabytes, which is small by comparison to people who shoot a lot of digital photos or video. Doing some simple math (1 GB = 1024 MB, and let’s assume the floppy disk was full at 1.2 MB - I’m not going to try and find a 5 ¼” disk drive to check it), my data volume has grown 8,789 times the 1991 amount.

In another useless mathematical exercise, assume that a 5 ¼” floppy disk is 1.5 mm thick and (who would have guessed??) 5 ¼” wide. To hold my current backup set I’d need a stack of floppy disks 43 feet high or 3845 feet (about 3/4 miles) if placed end to end.

Finally, let’s assume that in 1991 it cost $20 for a box of 10 5 ¼” floppy disks (my memory may be way off, but unlike what my girlfriend tells me, I don’t live in the past), so $2 per disk. To store my 10.3 GB on floppies would cost $17,578 ($1,707 per GB). Today you can get a 500 GB hard drive for $100 (20 cents per GB). So buy this ridiculously rough measure, storage has gotten 8,535 times cheaper since then.

floppydiskfullbackup.JPG