Barb’s Connected World

Posts Tagged ‘Networking’

June 22 press release from Toshiba announces an effort to “ promote a new SD card that integrates Wi-Fi wireless communication with data storage capabilities. The forum, the "Standard Promotion Forum for Memory Cards Embedding Wireless LAN"^* has been founded by Toshiba and Singapore-based Trek 2000 International Ltd.. ‘

But they want to make this 802.11b/g and not the faster 802.11n (which is backwards compatible with b/g.

As any photographer knows, RAW files are huge, and even the JPEGs at Fine and Super-Fine resolutions are pretty big.

Eye-FI has done it right and offers SDHC cards that utilize 802.11n.

Why in the world would Toshiba (or anyone else for that matter) want to slow people down? This may be a price based decision. I sure have no interest.

D-Link has once again one-upped the wannabe hacker community by adding a feature that will make it a whole lot harder for the script kiddies to break into your router  programmatically.

The current crop of Extreme N routers now have updates available that add CAPTCHA to the login page.

You can’t be too secure.. Right?

The D-Link DSM-210 Internet Frame really is best of breed. Besides displaying images from various places on my network, or from its built in 1 gig memory, it does a really great job of displaying RSS feed snippets from blogs and such. Or weather reports, or images emailed to my online frame account from invited friends. There’s lots of content available from http://dlink.framechannel.com/ that can be displayed on the frame. Including the ability to view shared photo streams from flickr, facebook, webshots, photobucket, and more. MSNBC had a write up of Frame Media, which provides the online service for D-Link and several other companies.

The DSM-210 displays an RSS feed snippet

As much as I liked the Momento frame that I’ve had for a couple of years, it had a few shortcomings. It didn’t support WPA2 (only WPA) and the remote was a little flaky requiring multiple keypresses at times to enter a character at times.  And it did not see my mixed g/n networks (and couldn’t connect to them even if I entered the SSID and credentials manually). There haven’t been any firmware updates, and the Momento frame really isn’t readily available. It is important to note that the Momento I had here was pre-production, from the floor of CES.

The DSM-210, however, implements WPA2, sees all available networks, and the mini remote is extremely responsive. The frame goes into standby mode at night when I turn off the lights in my living room and starts up again in the morning when I enter the room. D-Link tells me that the frame will be available soon online and in the usual big box stores.

Over the weekend I received a DSM-210 ten inch widescreen format digital frame. While there are a ton of frames available, the only ones I’d consider for personal use must include a bulletproof way to stream content from my network, a way to upload photos to frame memory, and some kind of Internet streaming.

The D-Link frame, part of the Medialounge product family does all the above and more.

I’m pretty impressed. Besides handling the wireless streaming (which you’d expect from a wireless picture frame), the DSM-210 is very network savvy. Autosensing my DNS-323 NAS (which sports a UPnPAV media server) the network settings displayed this server as a media source. When I fired up a computer that previously was not used for media sharing, Window Vista detected the DSM-210 and asked if I wanted to set up Windows Media Sharing. Pretty slick.

The frame has 1GB internal storage and comes pre-loaded with some sample pictures. D-Link has a widget that works with Yahoo Widgets and lets you manage the content in the built in memory. Delete the samples and drop your own images onto the widget and they are quickly uploaded. In fact, the widget lets you manage multiple frames.

I’ve only just begun to explore the Online Content features. You can view photo streams from all the usual places (or set up your own from your hard drive or other RSS capable source). Plus there are channels for just about every interest. And yeah, I’ve got my local weather forecast set up.

I can email images to myself (even from a camera phone) and invite friends to email images to me as well at a special address (jpg format). This works pretty much the same as the analogous feature on the Momento frame.

If you want to keep your DSM-210 frame in your bedroom, you don’t need to turn it off at night. The frame autosenses motion or light and somehow activates itself when you turn on a light or walk into a room. I’m still investigating this feature to see just how it works.

The D-Link logo and some blue LEDs fire up for a bit when you first power on the frame but turn off automatically.

Here’s a quick and dirty picture of the frame right after I started a stream from the DNS-323 NAS box.

I like this hardware a lot. More to come as I dive deeper into the features.