Lets face it, anyone visiting this site has an interest in smarter ways of consuming information, and often if your a real hobbyist you wind up with a ‘system’ over here to run this , and box there to run that, all taking up space , raising your electic bills , reducing WAF and increasing home admin duties.
For me , the need to leave a workstation or a laptop running to download something , run my VOIP PBX or some other ‘always on’ task, results in large amount of computing power to do the simpliest tasks. Or put it another way , a sledgehammer to crack a walnut. The good news is that a new wave of more powerful and flexible ‘plug’ based computers are appearing on the market place with offerings from Tonido and from Marvell .
These low cost ($99) plug in units can be put to a wide range of computing tasks and because they use only 5-13watts, and are arguably one of the smallest practical form factors , keep those energy bills down and WAF levels up.
Highlights for the Tonido unit include :
Energy efficient green device
Convert your USB drive to Network Attached Storage
Extend your TonidoPlug with new apps from Tonido App store
Access your TonidoPlug using own URL (http://yourname.tonidoid.com) via Dynamic DNS
Share and sync files, photos and music without uploading
Drag-and-Drop file and folder uploading to your TonidoPlug from Windows
Listen to your MP3s from anywhere
Download Torrents to your USB drive from anywhere
Search and download your files
Manage your calendar, contacts, and tasks
Keep a personal blog, capture and store web snippets
I’m going to be trialling a unit in the next few weeks as an always on replacement for my VOIP PBX, so watch out for a following posting of how well that goes.
Read more on these devices and the uses people are finding to put them to over at plugcomputer.org
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