Gadgetory

welcome to handy tech under a hundred episode eight we're just about anything can happen as long as it happens for under hundred dollars and also isn't lame we never let anything lame on this show which oh you're gonna go there you you want to go there alright alright that's it I'll throw down here are three unassailable arguments for my socks and sandals are the world's most optimal Footwear one the coarser HX 1,200 I power supply delivers 80 plus platinum efficiency for quiet efficient power and corsair link digital for advanced monitoring and control click now to learn more about here so our first handy item of the day is one that would have come in handy many times at the office when we've resorted to hanging cables out the sides of our systems using the Frankensteined remains of ripped apart external hard drive enclosures or crossing our fingers and hoping one of those USB to SATA adapters will manage to supply enough power to the drive we happen to be trying to read from this is the Thermaltake black X I honestly have no idea how to pronounce it so I'm going to go ahead and call it the blacks the concept is simple but quite frankly most of the options on the market are just not very good and my personal blacks has served me so well that we reached out to Thermaltake about equipping each of our editing stations with one of them for quick ingesting a footage shot directly to an SSD we actually have a few cameras that do this but the application of these badboys goes way beyond pulling files off of cameras they're great for troubleshooting borked pcs so you can try to fix issues or pull important data off with out or working OS they're great for archiving data if you use hard drives kind of like VHS tapes and if you pay a bit extra for the duet then it's even more flexible because you can use it as like genomics drive enclosure with two mounts instead of one for your usual nightly backups or whatever else the case may be drive compatibility is a strong point for the blacks with only our native 4k Sector Seagate Enterprise Drive stumping it and if I had to complain about anything else it would be that the dual drive one doesn't feature separate power switches for each Bay so adding or removing a single Drive will momentarily disconnect the other Bale though I've yet to see a dock that handles this any differently item number two today is a totally fun one from Tek cheese and it's actually kind of a variety of items we have here with a common theme ultra small driverless programmable keys for your PC or for your Mac now the original concept was kind of a unique PCB business card with a micro controller on it where each of the keys spits out some information about the manufacturer when you press it then from there came the tech Keys programmable card which unlike the business card and thanks to the 7 by 24 LED array built right into the board can be easily reprogrammed by holding down program for 2 seconds selecting the key you want to program then using the arrow keys to select which characters you want cool right not as cool as the tetris game Easter Egg that I'd be lying if I said I didn't waste a bunch of time tinkering with at my desk while I was supposed to be writing this review anyway neither of those are really finished products intended for end users although you can buy them along with cool key caps on their site exposed PCBs are not a safety hazard with low amperage 5 volt power to them but they're certainly not durable so let's take a look at the one keyboard and the three keyboard that these earlier experiments inspired the concept is simple - sweet little aluminum housing from nude C and C with a PCB mounted to the bottom that gives you either one or three fully programmable keys that can be used for anything your heart desires from single inputs to frequently used passwords not that I'd recommend that particular use to Windows or program specific shortcuts to long micro change with modifiers like ctrl + Shift just hold down any one of the buttons for four seconds with a text editor like notepad open on your computer and watch as the instructions for programming the device appear magically which leads us to the magical device that allowed us to take the following footage walking up and down stairs with an iphone check out how steady that looks isn't walking footage with phones usually total crap how is he doing oh all right there's nothing oh there's nothing magical about a gimbal but this particular one is affordable easy to stuff in a bag and just a downright cool little mobile accessory it's called the stable cam and it's about the size of a folded umbrella and works a little something like this you slide your phone into the smaller or the larger the surprisingly slip resistant slot depending on your device's thickness then you decide if you want to film at body level or down low or up high then you hold the device horizontally by the grippy ring and pull the weighted end out until it balances you put the whole thing up right and then you nod your phone left or right until it pretty much holds still then holding it like this and supporting the bottom shaft with your little fingers it is off to the races the whole process does take a minute or two every time you want to balance it but considering the difference in the results it's pretty safe to say it's worth the extra effort if you're into not having your phone video footage look like total rubbish the footage you're looking at right now was actually shot on the galaxy s6 edge at 1080p 60fps then that was slowed down to 30 for even better stability pretty cool huh so closing out this video the last thing is the full disclosure part that I like to include with handy tech the blacks actually a number of them for our new office was provided by thermal tape but I already owned one that I'd picked up for myself a couple of years ago and the stable cam and tech keys were both provided by the manufacturer without any obligation to review them if I didn't like them but I did so here they are guys thanks for watching like this video if you liked it dislike it if you thought it sucked leave a comment preferably on our forum which is linked in the video description if your feelings are more complicated than this also linked in the video description you can buy a cool t-shirt like this one give us a monthly contribution if you think what we're doing is awesome and you want to or tit or just change your Amazon bookmarked one with our affiliate codes whenever you buy any of this stuff on Amazon not that all of it necessarily is available on Amazon not really the point whenever you buy stuff on Amazon we get a small kickback thanks again for watching it as always don't forget to subscribe and follow and all that good stuff