TechBlog from Sewell

For those of you who have been watching we recently added Timbuk2 and STM Bags to our line up. Now we’re happy to add Built NY the store.

Built NY is rad:
Not a very subtle title I know. Nonetheless, I’ve been very impressed with the Built NY bags. One of the nicest things is that they fit all sized notebooks. Lewis(co-worker) has one of those massive 17 inch Dell laptops and has had a really hard time finding a bag for it. He tried the STM and Timbuk2 bags but they just weren’t big enough for the massive girth that characterizes the 17 inch Dell. All the Built NY bags are made out of neoprene(yes that’s the same stuff that they use to make wetsuits). So it’s stretchy enough fit slightly oversized devices like Lewis’s fatty laptop or widescreen Macbooks. The fabric isn’t the only thing that contributes. Each bag has an hourglass shape. I think this has two functions, in my mind it fits more sizes because it has to stretch in the middle and not at the seams. The second is that the corners are left with extra cushion because there is more material there. So far we have quite a few laptop sleeves, notebook shoulder bags and camera/pda/mp3/cellphone bags. Each line comes in Black, navy blue, green and hotstripes(see exemples below).

I might actually pick up one of these sleeves to hold my Macbook Pro. I currently use a shoulder bag as a sleeve inside my backpack. It’s kind of silly but I like having the shoulder bag in my backpack on the occasion that I just want that instead of the pack. The sleeve would be a nice alternative because it offers more padding. The portfolio cases are really professional looking (see: maybe too professional for my casual “I found all my clothes at concerts” style). Eyner(co-worker) bought one of these as soon as we got them in and seems to have been enjoying it. He looks a lot more professional. It’s a good fit for someone going for casual professional look.

Camera/small electronics bags:
I can’t close this post without making a quick mention of the iPod pouches. They come in three sizes to fit iPods, cellphones, mp3 players, small cameras and other electronics.

Rather than using a clip or something you just loop the body of the pouch through the hole. It’s a lot like airplane baggage tags. It’s nice because there aren’t any moveable parts to break. So check out our new Built NY collection. We currently limit our line to the tech related products but may expand into thier other product lines if we see a future in it.

Lewis has outdone himself again. This time he added a product that puts the awesome skateboard to shame.

Allow me to introduce the Kingwin media enclosure. This media enclosure is an external hard drive enclosure for 2.5 inch drives, that will play all types of media directly to a monitor or TV. It has VGA, composite (through RCA) and S-Video connections. It also has two analog audio output connections for stereo sound.

It will handle the following file formats:

It will also support the following video formats: DVD files, MPEG4, Divx, Xvid, SVCD, VCD/VCD3

One cool application for this unit is that you can build your own movie playing kiosk. This is great if you have kids that tend to break stuff. Just lock this media encluse in a cabinet beside the TV, upload all your DVD’s to the enclosure, and never worry about replacing your DVDs again.

Our toshiba 1.8 inch hard drive enclosures will work with Toshiba 1.8 inch hard drives that are 5.0 mm thick. The enclosure itself will work with Thicker hard Drives without the lid on. Here is a list of drives that are skinny enough that you can use the lid of the enclosure.

Toshiba drives with the proprietary 50 pin interface can be connected to a Standard 3.5 inch IDE connection using the Toshiba 1.8 inch to 3.5 inch IDE adapter.

Our USB 2.0 to SATA/IDE Combo Adapter has a really cool feature. It can connect two different hard drives to your computer simultaneously. One hard drive will need to be Serial ATA while the other drive can be either 2.5 inch, or 3.5 inch IDE. It also provides power to each of the drives connected. The pictures below show how the power cables are connected.

The power brick plugs into the back of the USB to IDE/SATA adapter through a round DC power plug. Then a mini-molex power cable plugs into the adapter and provides power to SATA drives as well as 3.5 inch IDE drives. If you are powering a 2.5 inch drive, then you won’t need the molex cable. Isnt that amazing?

Faced with the proliferation of home and small business networks, the ever-present American dream of being able to do everything with one device has stepped up and given rise to the Intellinet SOHO Server Appliance. This handy little box is the small network jack-of-all-trades. It’s a stand-alone network device that requires no monitor, no separate OS, and only needs an ethernet connection to work its magic (and a power cord as well, for the extremely literal-minded among us). In exchange for these few things, the SOHO gives you a plethora of capabilities. It has a built-in NAS that allows you to connect a 3.5″ hard drive and use it as network storage, accessible from any computer on the network. It does print serving, file serving, routing, and email administration. In addition, it provides a shared internet connection as an internet router, complete with denial-of-service security, firewall, and VPN access. What more could you ask for from a small, unassuming box?

So you like music. A lot. In fact, you have a stack of music CDs so big that, if each CD were placed end to end, the line would reach halfway to the moon. But now you have a new 60 gig iPod capable of handling all those tunes, and it would take an eternity to rip all those CDs to your hard drive in order to listen to them on your new purchase. Or you’re a radio station. Either way, enter the Baxter Batch Audio CD Ripper. This sweet little box of goodness lets you throw up to 25 discs onto a spindle. Hook it to your computer, tell the ripper how you want it (format, bit rate, etc.) and let ‘er rip (pun intended.) The Audio CD Ripper even pulls the ID3 tags down from the internet for each disc, so you don’t have to go through the grueling monotony of inputting all that album info. All this functionality comes at a fairly steep price, but if you have enough CDs and not enough patience (or you’re a radio station) this could be a godsend. Anyway check it out at our SewellDirect.com webstore.

A while back my brother gave me a beautifully old IBM Thinkpag 380. It has a 486 cpu. It was running Win95 on 16 MB of Ram with 500MB hard drive space. One day i was floating in the incomprehensible void of the bios, when I noticed a picture of a PCMCIA card in the boot menu. I grabbed a Compact Flash card, put it in a Compact Flash to PCMCIA card adapter.

Booting from a CF card can make your boot quicker, since there are no moving parts involved. Also, not as much heat is generated. Another biggie is that less power is consummed. In other words, my battery life is much longer.

Another cool thing about Compact Flash is that it is extremely lightweight. Compact flash cards are at least 10 times lighter(the drive in my laptop was about 30 times heavier than the CF card I used). If your arms are becoming apathetic, you just may want to swap out that HD for a CF.

The moral of the story is this: Compact Flash cards are lightweight, have no moving parts, reduce heat, and increase your battery life. The only downside of CF is that it hasnt reached the same sizes as regualr Hard Drives. In other words, do’nt plan to store all of your songs on your computer if you only have a Compact Flash card.

If you want to hook up a Compact Flash card to your desktop computer, you will need a CF to IDE adapter.

We had a customer call in today who had purchased a Macally PCMCIA 4 in 1 card reader from another company. The customer had purchased the Macally card reader to use with a 1 GB SD flash. When they received the card reader, they plugged it in to their laptop. To thier utter amazment and horror, it did not work. So they contacted the people they purchased from, who told them that 1 GB SD cards were not supported.

Well, they returned that card, and called us to ask if are card reader had the same problem. I didn’t know if it did, so I tested it out, and it worked. So, if you have had the same problem on another PCMCIA card reader, be assured that our card does work with 1 GB SD cards.

5 in 1 PCMCIA Card Reader

We now have an IDE to Serial ATA converter. The naming convention can be confusing, but now we have both solutions. Connecting a Serial ATA drive to an IDE motherboard, or connecting an IDE drive to a SATA motherboard. (which we have had for some time)

Our SATA to IDE has been a popular product, for those who are connecting and IDE Drive to their new SATA motherboard, however its harder to find an adapter for a SATA drive to an IDE interface.

There is a lot of demand for these adapters, from Hard drive Cloning, data recovery, or if you just found a great deal on a large capacity drive, but don’t want to upgrade your motherboard.

http://sewelldirect.com/IDE-to-SerialATA-Converter.asp

We recently had a customer that had ordered a 1.8 inch USB 2.0 Toshiba Hard Drive Enclosure. Their Hard Drive had a female connection, so we thought it had the same interface as all other 1.8 inch Toshiba drives. It turned that the interface was completely different. Rather than having a 50 pin female connection, it had a 68 pin female connection. It was a Hard Drive made for plugging into PCMCIA slots. We do not carry any enclosures for this type of drive. Because they are not as common as other drives, I imagine that there aren’t any enclosures out there for this product, but maybe I’m wrong. The one model of HD that we know has this setup is the MK2001MPL.

If you would like to hook up a Toshiba PC Card Hard Drive to your desktop computer, then try using a PCMCIA to PCI adapter.