New Toys!

I have a couple goodies waiting at my mail service!

First is a Contec CMS-50E Recording Pulse-Ox monitor, the other is a 4Gig "Eye-Fi" SD card with built-in WiFi. I'm going after the numbers that my box can't give me, and I'm going to try a new way to get the numbers it CAN give me.

I worry about wear & tear on the SD card in my machine from popping it in & out. Every few days to a week isn't bad, but over a couple years the friction, plus the chances of an oopsie build up. I may have to relocate my WiFi access point, but the path between the System 1 and the current home of the Netgear box is pretty clear. I hope to be able to report on results first of the week.

And if it fails, there's always our digi cameras, but 4gig is kinda small. I keep a 32gig card in my Nikon Coolpix P500 - a great unit for videos during trips to the dog park. Aside from dogs, our park's lake is inhabited by several types of waterfowl, plus a few muskrats, some otters, several beavers... and a moose or two is not at all uncommon along the trail. While I haven't seen any there yet, there is always a possibility of bears, and a couple winters back some wolves were making trouble in the local parks & trails, going after dogs.

And of course it's a pretty spot. You really wouldn't know, making the walk, that you are smack in the middle of a quarter million people. My ability and appreciation for walking the lake a few times a week with Pascal is one of the ways I can tell that, while I haven't had one of those "miracles", wearing the hose IS making a difference for me.

I'm very interested in whether the eyefi thing works.

Well, this is really quite nice! The Eye-Fi card of course needs to be plugged into a computer to set it up for connecting to your home's Wifi - so it comes with a card reader, too!

The Contec puse Oximeter comes in a very nice metal case, with a USB charging adapter (let's see, one for each of our phones, for each Kindle, the cameras, the camera battery chargers... I must have a dozen by now), lanyard, USB cable, and i dinky CD with the software. The unit is barely bigger than the clamp on the wired unit the sleep center used.

More to come, after everything gets charged up, set up, and run for a night...

Well, don't anybody rush out to try the Eye-Fi card thing themselves. I have a message in to their support folks, but it appears that the thing is programmed to ONLY transfer video and picture files. The process also seems to be needlessly complex even for that, with a lot of the program oriented towards slurping your camera's pics to an online server - which certainly isn't desirable for medical data!

It could be cool for vacationing, though, if you stopped in to Starbuck's each day and turned your camera on, all your pics would be available online when you got home. But why not just buy a card big enough to hold them all? I imagine videos take a while to upload - better order two mochas.

Bummer.

I know the EyeFi Pro allows for more file formats to be uploaded, they may suggest that software upgrade. The only problem I see is that with a camera the file is created in the camera buffer and then saved to the card, after that the EyeFi has free reign to upload. I am not sure how it would handle files that are being written to over and over thru the night.

As I recall the card is programmed to upload to your PC (before any optional uploads to online servers). Maybe if you only turn off the PC software in the morning it would work as the file is no longer being written too. You still have the issue that the file is not new, just updated so it may not work.

As I understand it, even the files supported with the pro version are still only picture files (RAW files rather than just jpeg's) so it probably wouldn't work. That'd be sweet though, wouldn't it? Daily data dumps to the computer? Now that I think more about it this probably wouldn't work with ResScan either since it has to read from the card.

Randy

Don't you hate it when morons invent something really cool and then go out of their way to screw it up?

The 4 (and gig version are SDHC cards not SD cards. Only the 2 gig version is an SD. I expect most older machines won't work with SDHC cards. I'm not sure the newest ones can either.

-tim wrote:The 4 (and gig version are SDHC cards not SD cards. Only the 2 gig version is an SD. I expect most older machines won't work with SDHC cards. I'm not sure the newest ones can either.

My S9 and PRS1 machines both work OK with all the SDHC cards I've tried.

They may not take advantage of the extra space, but they do work.

ekubaskie wrote:
It could be cool for vacationing, though, if you stopped in to Starbuck's each day and turned your camera on, all your pics would be available online when you got home.

I think you can do that without any hardware, and without going to a wifi spot if with your cell phone camera, with the new Dropbox features:

Dropbox Update Adds Automatic Photo Uploads

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2403655,00.asp

On the heels of the Google Drive launch this week, rival Dropbox has unleashed some new photo features that allow for automatic uploads from almost any mobile device.

Android and also for iPhone:

The iOS update lets Dropbox users manually or automatically upload photos and video from the phone directly to the cloud using Wi-Fi or cell connection, according to the iTunes Store. Once your content is uploaded, you can skim through thumbnails in the gallery view.

Regards, Nate

Anyone read about the Toshiba Flashair card? It seems to be what we can use to easily access the files without removing the card.

Should be available in the US soon, already available in some countries.

Well, that's it. After some back & forth with their support staff (nice folks, but a little clueless) they said it outright. The device, one of the best ideas I've seen recently, is crippled by intent. It will only transfer jpeg & mpeg files - unless you pay double for the pro version, in which case you can do RAW picture files - but still only pics. Sorta like buying a car that will only drive to the grocery store and not to your office.

We plan to take a laptop or two on vacation, along with a handful of USB drives.