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What’s NXT in Screen Technology: The TCL 50 Pro

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Tested Technology’s first smartphone review nearly a decade ago reminds me that we’ve come a very long way with the technology. But also that progress in this domain seems to be winding down. Phone manufactures are using novelties like and foldability to keep customers interested. TCL has added a smattering of AI to the phone we’re examining here. But their unique selling point is what they’ve done to the screen. And it doesn’t involve folding.… Now read on…

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Unraid Revisited with the LincStation N1 (part 2)

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While we wait for the major Unraid upgrade that will allow us to dispense with our pseudo Unraid array, we’ve been making a few cautious changes to the LincStation N1 installation we described in part 1. And although it remains without data redundancy, we’ve increasingly come to rely on it for media storage and deployment across the LAN. This isn’t as stupid as it might sound. One of our key “cautious changes” is the implementation… Now read on…

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UnRAID Revisited with the LincStation N1 (part 1)

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Tested Technology is approaching 2024 somewhat cautiously and frankly with little sign of optimism from a socio-political global perspective. But let’s look on the bright side. We’re back with Unraid! Regular readers may remember that in 2020 we published a series about our adventures with the Unraid NAS system, running on an out-of-warranty 8-bay QNAP server. The hardware held together just long enough for our 5-part series but in the early months of 2021 its… Now read on…

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More TOS 5 Adventures; More Drive Bays (Part 5)

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We concluded part 4 with all four of the F4-223 NAS’s drive bays populated and a very respectable total of around 22TB of securely redundant storage. “Redundant” means that any one of these drives can fail and we should be able to recover all our data. We also mentioned in passing that although the F4-223 is more than adequate for its primary function as a network storage device, its hardware limitations unfortunately won’t allow us to… Now read on…

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More TOS 5 Adventures; More Drive Bays (Part 4)

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In part 3 we fully populated the F4-223 with four drives. A deliberate mish-mash of wildly different capacities to test the limits of what Terramaster’s asymmetric TRAID system makes possible. Not particularly recommended, but it works well: at the time of writing, over the last couple of months this configuration has given us a consistently reliable network-attached storage of just over 7TB. Yes, we’re wasting the talents of that last 22TB Seagate IronWolf Pro we… Now read on…

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More TOS 5 Adventures; More Drive Bays (Part 3)

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At the conclusion of part 2 we left the Terramaster F4-223 with a new drive in the fourth bay that we were unable to incorporate into our storage pool. This meant that we couldn’t build a volume on it and therefore couldn’t use to house our data. A NAS isn’t a toaster or a pencil sharpener, one of those appliances that is supposed to “just work”. There is a brand of computer that sometimes claims… Now read on…

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Listening for the Silent Killer: Part 2, The Withings BPM Core

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In part 1 we looked at a low cost blood pressure (hypertension) monitor from Emporia, typical of its class and built around commodity components. As such, it represents a revolution in home health care, enabling anyone of relatively modest means easily to keep an eye on this important health parameter. How important? The World Health Organisation estimates that worldwide about 1.28 billion adults between the ages of 30 and 79 have hypertension. And nearly half… Now read on…

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More TOS 5 Adventures; More Drive Bays (Part 2)

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It’s time for some drive expansion. We left the Terramaster F4-223 in part one with just two of the bays populated with a  pair of 1 TB drives. But we’re using the BTRFS file system and have chosen Terramaster’s TRAID asymmetric RAID configuration. If we’d chosen to use any of the conventional RAID configurations, to increase the size of our storage pool we would have had to fill the remaining two empty drives bays with… Now read on…

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Listening for the Silent Killer: Part 1, The Emporia BP51

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If you take any notice of these things (or even if you don’t) May is International Blood Pressure Month. It’s here to remind us of a key factor in our health. Tested Technology has written up TENS machines and breathalysers as well as hearing aids and smart watches. But this is one important class of medical equipment we haven’t yet discussed. Blood pressure monitors that can be had for just a few tens of pounds… Now read on…

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More TOS 5 Adventures; More Drive Bays (Part 1)

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Our review of the Terramaster 2-bay NAS and its TOS operating system at the end of last year concluded with our plan to graduate to a 4-bay Terramaster NAS. Among other things, this would allow us to explore the novel flexible drive array system the company calls TRAID. The Chinese manufacture has now very generously donated its newest model, the F4-223 and we’ve spent many weeks exploring its possibilities.  Donations of this kind enable us… Now read on…