Let me back up and start from the beginning. Remember when I wrote about the HooToo Tripmate Nano I bought for $20 from Newegg, 'cus I wanted to try out "cloud" concepts in my classroom? After using it, almost on a daily basis, I became more and more sold that this device was going to be solid and useable in a variety of situations. You know how during family get-togethers, everyone hurries to get there and then there are seemingly endless hours of boredom sitting around and contemplating your navel? You remember all those trips hither and yon during the summer where there are hours sitting in the car dozing or looking out the window hoping you see something interesting? Yup, that time was fast approaching. So I started playing around with the HooToo, powering it from various sources of electricity, ranging from cellphone adapters, to car-plugs and misc. other sources. I quickly learned that this thing draws so little power that can use darned near any USB (5v) source. I tried every single car-style plug I had and they all powered it fine. So on our trip to Caddo Lake State Park which ended up taking about 3 and a half hours when all was said-and-done, it allowed the kids to watch whatever I had on the "stick".
This was my other "revelation". Admittedly not huge, but a revelation none-the-less. I had started out using the HooToo with a USB flash drive because that's what my classroom use files were on. Of course, Word, PowerPoint, and Excel files don't take up lots of room, however, video files DO. I knew that people often bought software to "rip" DVDs into files that could be read on other devices, but I didn't want to go out and buy something I wasn't even sure was going to work. What to do? Why.... YouTube is the answer of course! A few videos later I came found a solution. Download a couple of free pieces of software: DVD Decrypter, and the well-known Handbrake, and even a software-phobe like me could take his own DVDs, strip out the encription, and rip the resulting file down to a size that was small enough to be truly portable. Now, it's not as easy as all that. You do have to "play" with it a little and see where the balance is "for you", between small file size and image quality, but it's not too bad at all. In the follow week or so after I figured it out, I "ripped" something like 60 of the DVDs in our collection! This is where my newly upgraded Ivy Bridge computer came into play. I was able to do it in half the time that my older machine would have taken. The typical movie ranged from a little under 1Gb to some that were just a little over. All in all, I was able to do the first batch of 20 and they were just a bit over 15Gb. I realized that at the rate I was going, the 32Gb stick that I had previously thought of as huge would be out of space pretty soon. Lucky for me though, we went to Costco about that time and they were running a sale on the Sandisk Cruzer Ultra 64Gb flash drive for $35. So, another 40 DVDs got ripped and put on it.
In the ensuing weeks, I tried everything. We connected to it from 2, 3 and 4 tablets/phones while watching the same or different movies, starting, stopping, skipping back and forth without issue. I even got my hands on my wife's old Motorola Atrix cellphone "emergency" battery that they gave her with that phone. Even that thing powered the HooToo Tripmate. It didn't just work: this slim little device that's only about 600mah at most, last somewhere between 3 and 4 hours.... after having been charged up 2 years ago and left to sit in the car the entire time since! Today, I tried to charge up the solar battery/charger my wife bought me 5 years ago to see if it would run it! Stay tuned on that.....
No comments:
Post a Comment