Hi everyone, In this post, we will be seeing the LG SP80NB80 Optical Drive. This is an external USB DVD drive sold on stores like Best Buy and Target in the United States. This drive is capable of reading CD and DVD, including CD-ROM, CD-R, CD-RW, DVD-ROM, DVD+/-R, DVD+/- R DL, DVD+/-RW and DVD-RAM. It can also write to CD-R, CD-RW, DVD+/-R, DVD+/-R DL, DVD+/-RW and DVD-RAM. The drive is powered by USB and uses a Micro USB connector. Unboxing…
Hi everyone, Today, we will see the ICY DOCK Ultra Slim ODD + 3.5″ to 5.25″ Front Bay Bracket Adapter. This is a bracket that allow us to add an Ultra Slim 9.5mm Optical Drive and a 3.5-inch Hard Disk Drive or Solid State to the 5.25-inch front slot some computer cases has for a 5.25-inch optical drive. If you have a 9.5mm optical drive instead of a full-height 5.25 drive, or need to add an additional 3.5-inch hard disk…
Hi everyone, Today, we will take a look at the Apple USB SuperDrive. This is a CD and DVD drive sold by Apple. The current model is A1379. This DVD drive can read and write all standard CD and DVD formats. This includes CD-R, CD-RW, DVD+/-R, DVD+/-RW and DVD+/-R DL. This drive compatibility is limited to some models of the Mac. However, it is compatible with Linux after using a special command line. I’ll talk about this on another post….
Hi everyone, Yesterday, I installed a new Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) into my main machine. Unfortunately, I had some problems when attempting to encode videos to AV1. However, it is easy to solve when we perform the following steps. It seems that we must use Intel-provided packages in order to enable the full use of the hardware. Barely using ffmpeg with Ubuntu’s default packages will show a couple of errors which are fixed when we install the intel packages. Note…
Hi everyone, Today, I have installed a new Graphics Processing Unit into my main machine. The card I chose is the Sparkle Intel Arc A750 Titan OC Edition. The reason for choosing this card has to do with video encoding, with its Intel Quick Sync component supporting VP9 and AV1 encoding. AV1 encoding is slow on the CPU itself, so having a GPU capable to do that is great. It is also able to encode to H264 and H265/HEVC. It…
Hi everyone, Today, we will be seeing another SSD. This time, it is the 500GB Samsung 870 EVO SSD. This is a 2.5″ SATA Solid State Disk that can hold up to 500GB. It is marketed as having a write speed of up to 530MB/s and read speeds of up to 560MB/s. While new computers makes use of the newer NVMe slots to install a Solid State Disk, it is also common to install SATA SSDs on older hardware, or…
Hi everyone, Today, we will be seeing the CERRXIAN Micro USB OTG to Mini USB Cable cable. This is an On-The-Go (OTG) cable that converts from Micro USB to Mini USB. Useful applications of it includes being able to use a USB Hub with a Mini USB connector with a Micro USB phone or tablet. Before USB-C became standard, older phones and tablets used a Micro USB port. These devices usually only had a single Micro USB port that besides…
Remember the Netbook days? We can still find out some small laptops in the market, particularly laptops in the 11.6-inch range. This is the case of the ASUS E210 laptop. Small, lightweight, with a basic processor that allow us to do basic tasks on the go. This laptop is currently on Sale at Best Buy locations in the United States. Its sale price is just $100 dollars. You read that right, just $100. At that price, you get the following:…
Hi everyone, Today, we will see a second product essential to my 2.5gbit/s network conversion. This product is the ULT-WIIQ USB 3.0 to 2.5 Gigabit RJ45 LAN Network Adapter Cable. As the name suggests, it is a USB 3.0 to 2.5gbit LAN adapter. These adapters are useful for use on laptops, or on machines where we do not have an available PCI Express slot to install one of those cards, like the IOCREST PCI Express x1 to Dual 2.5gbit LAN…
Hi everyone, Today, we’ll start one of the products I got to upgrade my home network to 2.5gbit/s speeds. It is the IOCREST PCI Express x1 to Dual 2.5gbit/s LAN Card, using 2 Realtek RTL8125B chipset. The reason for this upgrade is that my current ISP (Internet Service Provider) company provided me with a new modem to replace my previous one which had a single Gigabit Ethernet port. The new modem is basically the same, except that it now uses…