Titanium: VST and Contour Perifs Excel

VST Technology/SmartDisk (a sponsor of this site) has an excellent peripheral available for the Titanium PowerBook G4: the portable FireWire CDRW drive.

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The drive retails for US$400 and is bus-powered from the FireWire port. This means that you can travel with it without having to tote a heavy AC adapter – and even better – you can burn a CD while traveling on the Amtrak Metroliner! The drive is limited to a 4x burn speed, actually 4x/4x/20x (write, re-write, read), because both the power and data have to travel across the FireWire cable, but mobile technologists will appreciate it being bus-powered.

Also in this picture: an ultra slim 30 GB VST FireWire hard drive [US$879] that worked flawlessly capturing about 30 minutes of digital video from Winter X Games 2001 from a Sony CDR-TRV11 video camera using the included iMovie 2.0.1. Did I mention that iMovie ROCKS!?

Since TiBook only has one FireWire port, the DV camera was plugged in the FW hard drive which was plugged into the back of the PBG4, again flawless. iMovie may prove detrimental to my insomnia problem, however. Clear your calender before launching it the first time 🙂

To the right you can see the Contour Design Shuttle Pro, a cool USB peripheral with a jog/shuttle dial like the one on some Sony VCR remote controls and 13 buttons. The Shuttle Pro allows you to edit video in applications like iMovie and Final Cut Pro quite easily and can be used to control any application that uses the keyboard.

Some readers have requested the Go2Mac desktop pictures used in these shots, you can download them here.