Patriot Gauntlet NAS caught my eye

Not sure whether I first heard of it via Reader, or whether it was on PC Perspective, though I believe it was the latter.

Its a small portable wi-fi storage container for a 2.5" hard drive or SSD. You can find a Presentation of the device by PC Perp's Ryan on their YouTube page.

Its all very well buying one of these, but I was interested in finding out how it could be accessed from an iPad 3 or a Nexus 7. Finding workable solutions for both platforms took a while.

I used Apple's Airport Disk to check things out, by connecting a spare 500GB WD drive to the USB port on my Airport Extreme Base station, and transferring some MP3 folders to it.

To cut a long story short, I was able to access these from the iPad using FileBrowser, which found the NAS drive with a quick scan of the Lan.

The Nexus 7 took a bit longer until I tried a free app called ES File Explorer A simple click on Lan, then Scan, enter User/pwd and away it went.

An educational experience, but with all the Airplay and Cloud solutions which are available, one must really need SSD speed in a real Gauntlet Node to justify purchase, unless you happen to be a 'technology nut' like someone I know!

Changed my mapping software

Several reasons made me leave Mindnode Pro and Touch.

First, there was no Android version, and no hint of one in the future..

Secondly,, I got fed up with the OSX version. The Inspector was constantly required to correct text size, node breadth, etc. grrr!

I found SimpleMind, which works great between OSX, iPad and Nexus 7, and most important, imports the Freemind map mm format, so I have easily exported the Mindnode maps I wish to transfer and synced them via Dropbox