Newer Technologies Power2U - Part 1

By Bayle Emlein

Newer Technologies Power2U
AC Wall Outlet with USB Charging Ports

Now that I run my life via gadgets and I’m wireless, I spend half my time updating and downloading. The other half is spent looking for the power to keep my lifestyle going. Enter Newer Technologies with a USB port incorporated in a standard wall outlet. The Power2U outlet is a standard grounded two-socket wall outlet with the addition of two USB ports.

When I first started playing with Macintosh computers in the 1980's, Newer Technologies was making gadgets and gizmos and add-ons that improved the computing experience, added a new dimension, or just made things more interesting and fun. They’re still doing so. In those days before USB, almost every computer and every device had its proprietary inputs and outputs. Get a new computer or printer and everything except the connection to the wall would be new.

Fortunately, the USB standard means that even if I have a wired mouse, I don’t need to count pins before plugging it in. Enter Newer Tech with the Power2U outlet, an easy way to wire my house to charge up my USB gear without booting my computer. Or, as in my case, without having to figure out what to pull out to free up a USB port for charging.

The Power2U unit is a substitute wall outlet. That means that one must replace an existing outlet. Short of replacing all, or several, this involves some consideration about which outlet would be most convenient and accessible for charging, as well as which outlet is accessible for swapping. In brand new construction, no problem. In my cluttered, busy world full of racks and bookcases and shelving and cabinets, the choices were automatically narrowed considerably. Don’t want a charging station near the cat dishes, either. Ooh, wires: yum!

Fortunately, the receptacle I settled on is in the New Part of my house, upgraded to code at the very end of the 20th Century. The Old Part of my house was built about a century before and wired around the time of the Great War. The knob-and-tubing wiring was replaced mid-century, but the wall receptacles remained unimproved and shallow. Narrowly averting another major home improvement project, with some well-aimed pushing and shoving and folding of wires the receptacle space in the New Section was just big enough to accommodate the extra depth of the Power2U, needed because of the extra USB electronics.

I have free software to give away!!

We recently received a great offer and want to pass it on. I have three free registration codes for the full product and will give them to the first three readers who email me at chuckhajdu@gmail.com!! Here's the software:

With so many New Year’s Resolutions focusing on taking better care of your body, home and budget, why not show some love to your PC by resolving to clean up your hard drive? National “Clean Your Computer Day” is coming up again on Monday, Feb. 13, so it’s as good a time as ever to start taking care of your PC.

Computers can feel sluggish after regular use, installed programs and decreasing memory. This often leads to longer, frustrating start, load and shut-down times. TuneUp is committed to making this an issue of the past.

TuneUp Utilities 2012 is easy-to-use PC maintenance software - revitalizing your computer to give it that “just like new” feel and performance that is often lost after regular use and program installation. I would love to offer you a download code so you can review the product and I can even offer codes to giveaway to readers if you’re interested.

Some cool features:

The new TuneUp Economy Mode allows users to improve the battery life of their notebooks, netbooks and tablet PCs, as well as reduce desktop PC energy consumption—with a single click. With this, battery life is extended by up to 30% and heat levels are reduced – increasing PCs’ and their hardware components’ life spans.

The enhanced TuneUp Program Deactivator turns off programs that are not being used in order to conserve system resources and maximize PC performance. Users can ensure that all of the services, start-up entries, background processes and scheduled tasks of these disabled programs remain inactive until they are needed; the tool can then enable and disable on the fly.

The Continued Rise of Chrome

The numbers are in for browser use in December and Chrome continues it’s steady climb. Firefox has lost a bit of ground but the big loser is MSFT Internet Explorer.

Here are the numbers for December:
IE6- 7.3% (amazing!! MSFT has been trying to kill this version since 2009)
IE7- 4.8%
IE8- 27.3%
IE9- 11.5%
IE total- 51.9%, down 7.0% for the year
Chrome- 19.1%, up 0.9% for the month
Firefox- 21.8%, down 1.3% for the month

We expect this slide to continue and it won’t be very long before Chrome overtakes both Firefox and IE. MSFT is keeping it’s head buried in the sand and doesn’t seem to know how quickly their products are falling out of favor.

Personally, I use Chrome on some computers, Firefox on others and various other browsers on other devices. None of my internet use is with IE and I intend to keep it that way!

CES 2012 Prep

It’s less than a week until we all leave for Las Vegas and the biggest hi-tech show in the world, the Consumer Electronics Show. All of our staff have their credentials, and airplane and hotel reservations made. It’s one of the highlights of the new year for us.

This year’s show promises to be memorable for a couple of reasons. This will be the first CES that we’ve ever attended that will not have a Lunch @ Piero’s press event. Lunch@ has always been a highlight of every Fall Comdex and CES for us. Pat Meier-Johnson has always had a wonderful selection of small companies and large ones for us to talk to and learn about their new products and services. The world’s economy has really affected budgets for many companies and they have had to cut back significantly. Lunch@ may have been one of the casualties of those cut backs.

We’ll be covering CES with most of our staff this year. It won’t be like the last years of Comdex when we had almost a dozen reporters covering every aspect of the show but we’ll do our very best to cover everything important.

We’d love to know what our readers want to know about? What technology are you interested in?

Happy New Year

Today starts a new calender year and we’re looking forward to it. The year 2011 was a real challenge and we have high hopes for 2012. This may be the year where we can reverse the horrible slide we have been on for the past few years. The economy, world-wide, has been on a terrible down turn and we need to take drastic steps to get back on the right path.

We have been evaluating consumer electronics products for almost two decades and 2011 was the worst full year we have ever encountered. Normally we have a surplus of review products on hand but not this year. By Q4 we had several of our most experienced reviewers run out of products to review. This has NEVER happened before in our history. Is it a sign of the future or an aberration? We are really hoping for the latter.

We are normally a very optimistic group of people but the consistent downward spiral looks like it will continue. There is little enthusiasm from our staff for CES 2012 and that worries me. What if the whole economy is on a never ending plunge to the bottom?

Let us pray for a happy and healthy New Year.

Verizon Wireless $2 fee

By Chuck Hajdu
 
Well, that didn’t take long! Verizon Wireless announced their intention to start charging customers a $2.00 monthly fee if they paid their bills using certain methods. They weren’t going to charge everyone the fee, just certain users.

When people heard this news they went ballistic! In less than one day they had over 95,000 signatures on petitions demanding Verizon Wireless stop the change from going into affect. And it worked!

At least for now Verizon Wireless will not be charging the fee. It’s a victory for the consumer and it shows the power customers have in a capitalistic world. Consumers stopped the BoA debit card fee a few months ago and now they’ve defeated Verizon.

VIA VE-900 project request

By Chuck Hajdu

About a month ago we posted an announcement for the new VIA VE-900 mainboard. It’s a very cool little board that has some real power and can be built into any number of systems.

In the past we’ve built quite a few VIA kits, including server and desktops. We’ve received a sample board from VIA and 8GB of DDR3 1066 RAM from our memory vendor friends. We already have hard drives on hand from WDC so we’re just about ready to go.

The next step is to actually design our system and that is where we’re looking for input. What should we build? Here are a couple of things we’ve thought about in the past:

1- an ammo can computer using a surplus Russian 7.62x54R can with dummy cartridges!!
2- an engine block from a Porsche 928 turned into a coffee table computer!!
3- gutting an ancient 286 “luggable” and turning it into a usable computer again

We’re asking our readers to send us some suggestions. What should we build?