Hardware I like

(last modified 2009.01.29)
Below there is information on some hardware that I like.

Electronics

Lidl power meter
LIDL periodically sells a digital wattmeter for 9.99 euros. Very nice and reliable, measures power, energy, voltage, current and cos-phi.

Irradio DVB-T receiver and USB recorder
Irradio produces the DTR-331, a DVB-T decoder with the ability of saving the mpeg stream to a USB flash card (or disk ?) and also includes a card reader.

Other features are a SCART output, antenna in and out, and components output using a cable with 4-pin 3.5mm jack and RCA connectors.

The external power supply is a switching-type device with 12, 5 and 3.3v outputs, but probably not enough current to power a hard disk. The recording takes approx 40MB/minute (at least with RAI transmissions). Reports indicate that the flash must be formatted with FAT32 (or perhaps FAT16 as well) and recordings are split in files whose max size depends on the formatting.

Reports mention that the device is firmware compatible with the novalauson TD3. Another similar device is the Shinelco DTD113.