Slashdot Mirror
Terapin Mine Review
Ian Bell writes: "Designtechnica has just posted a review of the Terapin Mine. This handheld device has a 10gb hard drive, ethernet port, PCMCIA port, USB 2.0 and a front display. On top of all this it has a Linux OS installed complete with scandisk and defrag. You can hook this unit up to your television to view pictures as well. I know that the stats on this unit sound great, but you would be surprised by just how usable it is. Click Here for the full review." Whether it's 10 or 20 gigs (the review mentions both figures) doesn't really affect the reviewer's conclusion.
scandisk and defrag on a Linux OS device? dont they mean fsck?
turn up the jukebox and tell me a lie
As the review states:
"its inconsistent performance coupled with its hulkish dimensions make it seem quite undesirable to those of us who can only afford to invest in a technology once."
They have the things needed stuffed in there, but did not have the budget to get it work, maybe it could work as opensource?
What could be cooler than a linux handheld? With 20 gb, ethernet and usb no less. I really need one of these. It looks like it is already slash-dotted...does anyone know which Linux OS is comes installed with?
FoundNews.com - get paid to blog.,
After all, they already have so many mines that whole organizations dedicate themselves solely to their removal.
sorry, you have to admit, it was a pretty obligatory offtopic/troll/bait post. and its getting boring always having 50 karma.
"Old man yells at systemd"
What a very strange name this thing has. A terapin is a turtle, and a mine is a place where you dig up riches.
So if you get one of these you will become rich with turtles?
there have been more and more linux based handhelds is this a new hopefull trend finally coming to light... or just a breif blip on the linux radar
Why didn't they just put a Linux Journaling filesystem on it instead of FAT32 ? Weird huh.
It seems to me that the author of this review is right about this, the lack of a FireWire port is quite lame.
Moving 10Gb thru USB at 12Mbit/s or LAN at 10Mbit/s takes a loooooong time indeed!
Try it! Library of Babel
One +2 posting, and the site is already slashdotted...wow.
Needless to say, I have not read the review, but the battery life on this sucker must be horrible! Either that, or you wear around a battery on your belt.
The features mentioned in the slashdot summary sound great, but I don't believe current battery technology can power such a package for any reasonable amount of time. I may be wrong, as I said, I havn't read the review, but I bet battery is what will make this unit suck.
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
From article: Maybe students aren't out of the closet and don't want people to know they're going to the Gay & Lesbian Resource Center
Student 1: Why didn't you take a free PDA? Student 2: Ummm.... I.... I'M NOT GAY!!! Student 1: Sure thing.
Offtopic, yes I know. But, since the site is totally /.'ed...
/usr/local/psa/home/vhosts/designtechnica.com/h ttpdocs/includes/sql_layer.php on line 29
/usr/local/psa/home/vhosts/designtechnica.com/h ttpdocs/includes/sql_layer.php on line 29
/usr/local/psa/home/vhosts/designtechnica.com/h ttpdocs/includes/sql_layer.php on line 29
/usr/local/psa/home/vhosts/designtechnica.com/h ttpdocs/includes/sql_layer.php:29) in /usr/local/psa/home/vhosts/designtechnica.com/h ttpdocs/mainfile.php on line 39
/usr/local/psa/home/vhosts/designtechnica.com/h ttpdocs/includes/sql_layer.php on line 231
/usr/local/psa/home/vhosts/designtechnica.com/h ttpdocs/includes/sql_layer.php on line 231
I've been one of the people who complain about the slashdot effect, lack of cached content, etc. etc.
But in this case, the guy did it to himself. With a database backed site no less... oh well....
Here's the havok that has been thrust upon his server if anyone is interested...
Warning: Too many connections in
Warning: MySQL Connection Failed: Too many connections in
Warning: MySQL: A link to the server could not be established in
Warning: Cannot add header information - headers already sent by (output started at
Warning: Supplied argument is not a valid MySQL result resource in
Warning: Supplied argument is not a valid MySQL result resource in
--
There seems to be scores of companies that are coming to the portable mp3 device way too late in the game. Is there enough market share to handle dozens and dozens of devices that do the exact same thing? Doesn't seem to be. My real question is, why hasn't anyone released a device similar to the ipod (in physical size, speed, and hard drive space) with a decent sized color screen that includes pda and cell phone capabilities? yeah, it would probably cost a pretty penny, but i think these things would sell like crazy and *nobody* has done it yet.
sig.
Okay, the link seems dotted so i can't quite access it right now, however based on the poster's comments, why in gods name would you need a defrag and scandisk program for this system. Particularly if it runs a derivative of GNU/Linux. Did they decide to run this system with a FAT partition and have linux run in a file? Or are they perhaps using standard EXT2 but referencing fsck? Reguardless, wouldnt a journaled filesystem (ala EXT3, ReiserFS, etc) been a more prudent choice? The nature of EXT2 makes a defrag/scandisk program useless. Obviously for a portable device they want the security of a journaled filesystem in case the battery dies, etc. Neet idea - needs better explination :P
(I muse at the difficulty of hacking this and converting this to ReiserFS or EXT3)...
-- -=innocent ramblings from the mind of an insomniatic programmer=-
It's not a linux handheld... It's a file store that happens to run Linux on the backend... But you're completely isolated from any of the OS by their software... Thinkgeek has been carrying these for a while now, but they're expensive.
Here is the user's manual, which has some good screen shots...
wizzy
Terapin Mine Review
Terapin Mine Review
In the last year or so we have seen a practical onslaught of hand held storage devices. The Terapin Mine is one of many such devices currently on the market. Boasting the Linux operating system, a 20 gig hard drive, and an impressive array of connectivity options, the Mine appears to be a unique entry in this extremely competitive industry. Practically a Swiss Army Knife of file sharing options, this Linux based behemoth would appear to be the clear front-runner on anyone's hand held wish list. With all that being said let us get down to the nitty gritty. Does this bad boy deliver or not?
Looks and First Impressions
Upon first opening the box, I was surprised to see what appeared to be an oversized protective carrying case for the Mine. It wasn't til I removed the item that I realized that in fact it was the Mine itself. To put it frankly, the Mine is huge. Weighing in at an impressive 1 lb and measuring 7" x 3.5" x 1" it will undoubtedly give your notebook computer a run for its money. The actual ergonomics of the Mine seemed quite fine with its various controls and ports located in a logical and intuitive manner. The sheer amount of connectivity options is staggering. Located on top is a 16 bit Type II PCMCIA card slot. The bottom contains a LAN port, a USB master port, and a USB slave port. Rounding it off is a standard head phone jack and Video Out. The absence of Firewire is a legitimate complaint though.
Specifications and Features
Size (HDD) 10GB
Dimensions 180mm (Height) x 90mm (Width) x 27mm (Thickness)
Weight 375gms
480gms (with 4AA Alkaline batteries)
Operation System Linux
Video Composite video out for still images (JPEG, BMP, GIF, TIFF, CRW, NEF)
Video Format PAL and NTSC
Audio Stereo Playback
Mono Recording (with external microphone, in WAV format only)
Audio Format MP3 and WAV
USB Master 1
USB Slave 1
10 Mbps Ethernet 1
16-Bit PCMCIA Type II Slot 1
Screen 16 Characters x 4 lines high contrast LCD
panel with back lighting
Power 4 x AA Alkaline batteries
Internal Rechargeable Lithium-Ion battery (Optional)
External Rechargeable Lithium-Ion battery (Optional)
Simple 3 front-panel buttons and 3 side buttons for all device controls
Upload and download from Digital Cameras (via USB or via PCMCIA Memory Card Adapter)
Display photographs and graphic files on a TV or projector
Rotate photographs
Upload and download MP3 Players (via USB or via PCMCIA Memory Card Adapter)
Removable HDD (Compatible with Windows 98, 2000 and ME)
Share via Local Area Network (LAN)
Receive attachments and send email
Auto online backup, download and upload
Online and FTP sharing
Online upgrading and diagnostic features
Setup and Use
Given the fact that the Mine is running the Linux OS, I was curious as to how fast the boot up sequence would be. The average boot up time was a mere 10 seconds....I wish my Windows box could do the same. The user interface for the Mine consisted of simple text options laid out in a no nonsense fashion. I suppose that the Mine's interface emphasizes readability and clarity but I found it to be rather plain and much of the precious LCD real estate was wasted. Navigating the menu's proved to be extremely easy. After a few minutes of playing around I felt confident that I had a complete run down of the Mine's basic features.
As far as configuration is concerned this is handled through your PC as opposed to through the Mine itself. Using the USB slave port, I proceeded to hook the Mine up to my PC, which at the time was running Windows 2000 Professional. As expected, Windows immediately detected the presence of the Mine and assigned it a drive letter. Located on the Mine was an executable that allowed me to configure its various and plentiful capabilities. The configuration process was relatively painless although I did resort to the manual.
Testing
So far my experience with the Mine had been all smooth sailing. Installation and configuration was a breeze and the impressive feature set was begging me to put it to the test. Unfortunately, this is where the Mine truly distinguished itself from the rest of the pack. Here's what I found.
With the Mine still hooked up to my PC, I copied onto it a collection of MP3's and some images I took with my digital camera. For comparison sake I burned onto CD the same MP3's that I had placed on the Mine. The MP3's on CD sounded fantastic when played on my dedicated stereo but upon connecting the Mine, I was simply shocked at how mush the sound quality had degraded. I can only assume that in the D/A conversion process the Mine simply cannot compete with my dedicated CD player. I'm not talking a difference that only an Audiophile would notice, I'm talking a substantial decrease in the overall clarity and imaging of the music. This seemed pretty unfortunate since one of the main selling points of hand held storage devices is their ability to transport large volumes of digital music.
A little disapointed, I proceeded to hook the Mine up to my TV via the provided RCA connector. Taking into consideration the resolution restrictions of a composite connection, I was very satisfied with the image quality. Without any configuration on the users behalf, the Mine will automatically display your stored images in a slideshow manner. Just as I had gotten comfortable watching the images, a blue screen of death appeared indicating that the image to be displayed was corrupt. After several minutes of troubleshooting and several attempts at downloading the images onto the Mine, I eventually gave up without resolving the situation. The images seemed fine on my PC but simply would not display correctly when viewed via the Mine.
At this point, I was feeling a bit let down so I decided to try out one of the Mine's features that would be of most use to me. Via the USB master port, the Mine should in theory be able to connect and control a USB compliant device. This would be a fantastic option for anyone who has a digital camera and has felt the wrath of storage limitations. For the sake of this I broke out my Olympus C-3020 Zoom camera. Like the old saying goes "3 strikes and your out". For the life of me, I could not get the Mine to connect to my camera. Although it detected the fact that my camera was an Olympus, it failed to properly recognize its model.
Up until this point, the Mine had behaved flawlessly via USB. Every time I connected it to my PC it was detected immediately and mapped as a local drive. The same was not true when I tried to access it via my LAN. I followed the directions to the letter but I was never able to access it. Its FTP capabilities seemed attractive but failed to materialize during my test. If this process proves difficult for me I can't imagine the frustration that would be experienced by a less technology savvy owner.
Conclusion and Final thoughts
At this point in time it's hard for me to recommend the Terapine Mine to anyone but those whom are willing to invest in bleeding edge technology. On paper it boasts an impressive feature set and seems to offer more than any of its competition. But its inconsistent performance coupled with its hulkish dimensions make it seem quite undesirable to those of us who can only afford to invest in a technology once.
http://www.terapin-mine.com/terapin/index.htm
Linux Does have defrag but its very very buggy for the ext3/ext2 file system. fsck does not do a defrag.
keanmarine.com
Way too big, way too heavy, too much extra crap that's not needed for a portable storage device.
No, you should have seen it before you claim that it's too heavy and too big.
I just went to CompUSA during lunch break, and had it on my hand. It's very ligh, and fit into my hand very nicely. It's slick too.
Unfortunately, like all display model, it does not work. No battery, no shit. So I don't know about the sound quality.
An advice for retail store managers: Please have your floor models work properly (put in the god danm battery, if needed), and loaded up a couple of mp3 so people can test it. It would be a quick sale for gadget afficionado, like me, who tend to jump on this kind of things impulsively.
The 10G disk and a display are compatible with an all-day battery life. iPod is rated for 10 hours.
So it depends on the current draw for the USB port, the Ethernet and so forth.
Since the site is gone for the moment, here are some quick links:
Web Site:
www.terapin-mine.com
Purchase:
http://www.thinkgeek.com
Reviews:
http://www.digitaljournalist.org
http://www.edgereview.com
http://computers.cnet.com
You can learn some about it (and buy it) here
Recalling the recent Ask /. about the perfect PDA feature list, I thought these guys had make my wishes come true. I was slightly bothered by the suggestion that the device had a harddisk, though, because I feel that devices with disk drives (or any moving parts for that matter) eat batteries like there's no tomorrow.
Trying to follow the link in the article soon led me to conclude that the site had been slashdotted, but hey, there's always google! A couple of minutes later I still didn't have any further information on the battery life, nor about input methods. I did find out that the device seems to have a ridiculously small display that makes it mostly useless for me. Maybe adding a couple of bucks to the ~ $ 500 it's listed for at geek.com could give us a QVGA color display and boost battery life (I'd rather have 10 times the battery life with a CompactFlash card than 10 times the storage space with a harddisk). Maybe the day I'm going to buy a PDA isn't that far from now...
---
The nice thing about Windows is - It does not just crash, it displays a
dialog box and lets you press [OK] first.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Oops.
CNET ran a review. They got less than two hours on a set of AA batteries.
Here are a few other reviews of the Terapin Mine.
Terapin Technology - Mine Product Reviews.
Is it too much to ask for a goddamn lithium battery on this thing? I mean c'mon people there is no way that I could transfer 10GB over a 10Mb network and this thing have a long enough battery life to stay alive. I would gladly rather see firewire replace the ethernet as some have already suggested.
-Jeff
Trolling, trolling, keep those /.ers trolling! Rawhide!
its great how pornography industry has finally gotten its hooks into linux portables.
MARIJUANA, SHROOMS, X: ONLINE?! - E
This really isn't news. The product has been on the market for a really long time. I remember reading about it last year. ThinkGeek.com has had it for sale for months. Why do we always post such old news?
Well, enough trolling, I do have a legitimate question that perhaps a few here have resolved. I've looked into this and other devices as an easy way to carry around a lot of my work, since I tend to bounce from using a computer at home, at work, and on campus. I have control over the computers at work and home, but not on campus. From what I understand, you would need to load certain drivers or other software to get this device to work with Windows, which is what they have on campus (please correct me if I'm wrong). So, since I can't load the drivers, I wouldn't be able to access any of my stuff stored on the drive when I on campus, right? Is there a solution to this? How do some of you carry large amounts of data around (other than zip disks or burned CD-ROMS)?
Who said Freedom was Fair?
How can you make an accurate assessment of its weight without the battery?
47% of all statistics are made up on the spot.
sweet, the display does four whole lines of text!!
___
The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason. --Ben Franklin
Or if you have no intention of ever printing the photos out, you can just set the camera to save them as 1MB jpegs. They look exactly the same on the screen and are way way smaller.
stipe42
On top of all this it has a Linux OS installed complete with scandisk and defrag.
[root@cerberus root]# scandisk
bash: scandisk: command not found
[root@cerberus root]# defrag
bash: defrag: command not found
Sh*t, my Linux is not complete ...
:wq
Why do you need 4 megapixel, TIFF images for vacation shots? I mean, if you're doing pro work for magazines or something I understand... but I take 1600x1200 JPGs, which look great printed on 8.5 x 11, and I can store 150-250 on my 128MB card. (Depending on compression) Or, if I don't intend on printing them out, I take 1024x768, and can store about 600, or even slum down to 640x480, and store almost 2000! :)
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
I *like* the USB master port. I think the terapin is ridiculously priced (particularly when compared to the Archos Recorder 20 - USB 2.0, smaller form factor, 20Gb,lighter and plays *and* records mp3s).
The USB master port is a killer feature though - if it works as expected. In principle that should allow it to be directly connected to any slave device (eg: a digital camera) and data transferred. Seems like it would be extremely handy for backing up PDAs, and digital cameras.
That has to be the most broken link I've ever seen.
Talk about being slashdotted HARD
are they running their webserver off this thing? it's all f*cked up!
-------- -praktike
Give me a break, like no one has ever seen a battery before. The real problem is that usually the display models are fake empty shells of the real deal.
I personally like to zoom way the hell in. I like my uber zany levels of resolution, you apparently don't. Therefore, congratulations, technology has provided you with a product that you never have to replace.
And to continue your nonsensical logic, why don't you just decrease your rez to 32x32, you can store a crap load and you don't even need to waste cycles making thumbnails.
My question to you is, why do you care that other people want higher rez pictures?
Exactly. How can someone tell how a device feels weight-wise if it's just the case? You can't. A lot of portable devices have half the weight in the battery.
47% of all statistics are made up on the spot.
I'm sure I'm not the only University of Maryland student/alum to see this and think for a second that someone at UMCP has just produced a new handheld and named it after the school's mascot.
Go Terps!
one hundred twenty
is just enough characters
to write a haiku
I personally like to zoom way the hell in.
I suppose you have one of those $20k professional digital cameras where the optics don't limit your resolution no matter what kind of film you use. Yes sir, nothing like using the highest resolution film in a $75 fixed-focus camera.
able watching the images, a blue screen of death appeared indicating that the image to be displayed was corrupt. After several minutes of troubleshooting and several attempts at downloading the images onto the Mine, I eventually gave up without resolving the situation. The images seemed fine on my PC but simply would not display correctly when viewed via the Mine.
I've run into image problems from MicroShit lately. Specifically, their imaging softwar produces broken bit-map and tif format images. I would not have used said software had the TWAIN interface to my parallel scanner worked with any other software as it once did ... antother story. The images produced would not open in Paint Shop Pro under Doze, nor would their tif files. The GIMP was equally puzzled with the images under Debian, but Electric Eyes pulled through by ignoring the errors. From there the images could be ported over to reasonable formats like jpeg and portable net graphics. Needless to say, the format errors must be intentional as there has been NO IMPROVEMENT or real change in these ancient image formats.
Simarlly, I expect M$ to play Digital Rights Denial tricks on portable devices. Look forward to this happening to CD burners as the fools think they own the world.
As for the camera control problem, no new here. All those damn USB devices are different and painful to configure. How could it be any different with M$ threatening to silently retaliate against anyone friendly to Linux?
There you have it folks. It will be difficult indeed for any company to overcome these problems universally, even with 10 gigs of disk space for drivers. M$ will continue to change formats, and this will continue to make others, including themselves look bad.
Show me a WinCE device that does half of what this one can. Microsoft's backers will fight to the death to keep people from being able to create, move and share their movies and music. Microsoft will go along with it, as long as they keep getting to resell paintbrush on a yearly basis.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
>It's a file store that happens to run Linux on the backend...
That was my fealing when I got it almost a year ago. It is a really neat gadget, with good batery life, that technically does everything it says. You should look closely at the manual before purchase. With decent User Interface this would kick A**. However I haven't used it for anything but transfering files from work to home for the last 3 months.
The MP3 playing capabiltys appear as a after thought (does sound good, more later.) It runs like a single task OS. You can either use it as a ftp server, or as a MP3 player, or connect it wirelessly, or USB connect it to your PC, or copy from flash card... You must navigate through menus, to turn each on. Then you must quit that task, and navigate again through the menus to do something else. It doesn't rember where you were when you powered down, or powers it's self down (only after battery is dead, no other settings.) So if you plan to use this as a MP3 player in your car (as I did) You need to hold down power button for several seconds when you leave your car. Then when you return you must hit 5 different keys, no key buffer so don't go too fast, to get it to play a song again. And forget about the random play, it is not very random. If you put all your songs in this, and just start the random play each time, you'll never hear 50% of your collection, because it always selects a song near the beginning of your list, then jumps in a manner that you'll never hear the song at the end unless you listen to every other mp3 file first.
I do plan to connect it full time to the battery of my car. That way I can leave it on and just hit pause (my cigarete lighter turns off with the key.) Also mp3 is ver susceptable to power line noise. Make sure you don't connect this guy to the same power that gets any noise from your amp's...
Concerning the review, why was there no mention of CPU clock speed, memory wait states, cache size, RAM, or any of the other statistics that any self-respecting geek would require?
This looks like just another Win32 brick with either WINE or a dual config, and the reviewer told me nothing about what it is actually capable of.
Ummm, it's got an ftp server. Plug it into your local network and go to town. Does iPod do that for you? WinCE, ha ha ha! You might also try a shell escape on the ftp prompt like:
! ls -lh
to see what comes up. Sounds more portable than a key fob, and yeah hacking it would be cool.
Sadly, I'm not buying any $500 devices anytime soon. My poor man's answer to this has been to take plastic Quick (the drink) boxes and cram hard disks in them with some packing foam. Yeah, it's ugly and I have to open the target computer's case, but the hard disks are spare. It works great with older laptop hard disks which fit into the smaller boxes. My wife laughted at me for not knowing my quick drive was acutally in a Quick box. Eh, so what. Mounted media custom Debian installs, here I come. Perhaps I should call it the Quick Liberator?
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
As a professional photographer I feel like I am qualified to ask... What the hell does any of this mean? How can you have a "$20k professional digital cameras" that uses film? First of all, professional digital cameras now cost around $5K (while still expensive it is doable) and secondly, they DON"T USE FILM AS THEY ARE DIGITAL!!!!!! The second statement you make defies translation or explanation. Please start over in kindergarten as you apparently missed the point.
I have this piece of dog poop... runs linux and...
Linux OS installed complete with scandisk and defrag
Kinda like Windows?
I doubt the model had the HD either which would also carry a significant portion of the weight.
--Buzz
/. article without the obligatory IABCWT post!
Does anybody else think this thing looks ugly compared to other handheld devices?
Geez, at least they could have made it circular or maybe added some interchangable plastic skins.
The device looks like an oversize old cellphone with no keypad.
The MP3's on CD sounded fantastic when played on my dedicated stereo but upon connecting the Mine, I was simply shocked at how mush the sound quality had degraded.
So much for using oatmeal as a storage medium. Back to the drawing board.
Read the review. It's barely usable at all.
What's the difference between a $100 SLR and a $5000 SLR? Not a whole hell of a lot, all the cost is in the optics.
Which is why I'm wondering why the person I was replying to was storing 4.4 megapixel images when the optics in his digital camera likely couldn't resolve to that level.
I could be talking out of my ass, but it seems to me that a $300 digital camera won't have great optics on it since all that cost is in the CCD and hardware.
Uhh, this device did not get a good review. MP3 playback was muddy, the TV-connected image slideshow kept crashing, it couldn't recognize the model of an Olympus digital camera attached via USB, and it was unreachable through its LAN connector. Final judgement? Not recommended to anyone except the gotta-have-it gadget crowd.
" Way too big, way too heavy, too much extra crap that's not needed for a portable storage device."
The reviewer agrees with you on every point there, and also adds that it lacked one thing it really should have had - a Firewire connection.