More Electronic Toys!

The pool water temperature has been great the last few days, even struggling to a little over 23° one afternoon.  But it is close to a little under 22° most mornings when I grab a quick dip after a bike ride.  It has been cleaned and the pool's inside walls have been all been swept down getting ready for the warmer weather.

A trip to the pool supplies shop is about a week or so away now.  But after being of no cost over winter, this first off spring chemical update will probably be around $50 worth, heaps less than the spring treatment the chlorine pool back in Melbourne used to be.

I have had Computer Club this morning (Saturday) and again it was fairly quiet.  Trish is getting over the 'straight sets exit' of her footy team last night but is not overly disappointed as they have had numerous close calls throughout the year, just managing to hold on in some matches.

Most PC's these days have only a few of the faster USB3 ports to allow much faster uploads and downloads from a PC to an external hard drive.  I have been keeping my eye open for a multi USB 3 hub like in the picture below. 

They usually cost around $25 so when I saw one for $11 I grabbed it.  Unfortunately when I read the deal more closely a little later after placing the order I discovered the one I bought didn't have the power adapter making it virtually useless.

I had an old 3 port usb2 hub and fortunately the power pack from it works fine on the new multi port USB 3 hub!  I was lucky!

For some time I have been dithering over the value or not of getting a "4TB Cloud Hard Disk Drive".  They can be expensive with a RRP of over $300 but usually available just under the $300.  I discovered they had been on special once before for around $200 so I have been hanging out for that sort of discount again.  The other day it was available for local pickup for $239.  Not the real cheap price I wanted but I relented and bought one.

I have spent much of today 'setting it up'.  The drive is connected to the modem router and stays on 24/7.  It is like have a 4TB drive attached to your PC, laptop, tablet, android TV box or phone.  All devices can 'talk' to it and swap files to and from it.  It is a very nifty device.

It is a lot of money though but then you can't take it with you.

For storing and then streaming video files to the android TV boxes it is just perfect!  I believe it can be accessed from outside my home network as well.  There is a program which creates a 'special web address' that you can click on from anywhere and then download that file to your PC.