IOGEAR: Expand Your Connectivity



Mini mouse with 64MB flash... Almost clever. If only it was bluetooth...

Sony Ericsson T637



Considering that my phone didn't actually function as a phone, and the Motorola MPx220 has been pushed out to sometime in January, it was pretty clear that i couldn't put off replacing my cell phone any longer. So now i have the T637.

I like its screen. I really like how well it syncs up with the PowerBook. The camera is fast, easy to use, and completely worthless. The picture quality is staggeringly bad. But the most important thing about this phone is that unlike the unit it replaced, it actually works as a phone.

So i now rejoin the rest of the civilized world with a working phone that, thanks to iSync, includes a basic calander/task list, and address book.

Wiggy keeps telling me i need Salling Clicker and while i agree that this is incredibly interesting and novel software, i'm not sure exactly WHY i need to control my computer with my phone. I suppose if i used AirTunes a lot and wanted to make sure that music playback would pause whenever i answer the phone it might make sense...

Kenwood VRS-N8100

Home theater receiver with networking capability.
Streams audio, video, and still images from your PC via a Wi-Fi or wired network
Handles the following file formats:
• MP3, WMA, WAV, and Ogg Vorbis audio
• MPEG1, MPEG2, and XviD video
• JPEG, BMP, GIF, and PNG digital photos

This looks interesting. I wonder what the UI looks like?

15" PowerBook G4



I've been wanting a PowerBook for some time. More and more of my friends rave regularly about how much they love their Macs, I finally broke down and got one. It's pretty slick.

A9.com > Company >A9.com



Tivo for the web or just annotated online bookmarks?
Only time will tell.

Meanwhile MSN.com is fighting yesterday's war today by turning into USA Today.

PocketMouse(TM) Bluetooth



Pocket optical bluetooth mouse with scroll wheel!

Carbon Cannibal: Breaking it down for the hard drive

Ripping the 5GB compact flash hd out of the Rio Carbon for use in your digital camera.

HST Wallpaper


Helix Nebula


Cat's Eye Nebula


Wheels within wheels

wow.

Sir, there's no basement in the Alamo

While i think nothing of ripping off the bandwidth of large companies to make these little posts look vaguely interesting, i am not completely without scruples and because I don’t think it’s right to embed an image hosted on some guys personal website you're are just going to have to follow the link if you want to see what the caption means. I wont spoil the surprise, but yes, that is a Pee Wee Herman reference.

Averatec - 2400+ Notebook/ Portable DVD Player

A notebook with remote which is not that special...


But a notebook with built in dock for remote that is only $1050 after mail in rebate is kinda slick.

Picasa



If you run windows (and lets face it, you probably do), you need Picasa. It rocks. Between Windows Media Player 10 and Picasa, my desire for a Mac has just about faded. If google can hook Picasa up to a photo hosting site as good as smugmug.com and back it up with a gig or so of nice integrated storage (something like xdrive.com) i will be more than happy to get in line to fork over my $100 a year.

I'm not sure what this "hello" thing is, but it looks sort of... not... good. It's seems to be some kind of real time photo sharing tool, which couldn’t be more wrong. The last thing i want is to be interrupted in the middle of my day with some dork trying to force me to look at his boring vacation pictures. Nobody wants this. I don’t want to chat, i don’t want to share, i want to post my freaking pictures on the web in a nice layout that i pick from a template. I want Blogger for pictures.

Seriously Google, 100 US dollars every year if you give me smugmug.com backed by xdrive.com where i can have public, private, and files shared to specific google accounts. Think about it... if i need to make my friends get a google account in order to share specific files only to them, don't you think i'm going to do it? You could be the universal log-in that passport wanted to be but totally failed to become.

HP L2335 23" TFT



This thing arrived today, and I love it! I'm already completely spoiled by it. My two biggest fears were that it would look cheap and that it would sit too high. So i had been considering the new 23" Apple display even though it cost $500 more and only supported DVI. But both of these concerns were totally unfounded. The L2335 actually looks much better in person than I was expecting (it matches very well with the black and silver Dell monitor stand and black and sliver M-Audio speakers on my desk), and the height can be adjusted even lower than the Dell 2001FP that it replaced. I really dig the fact that this in addition to the standard DVI, VGA, composite video, and svideo, it also sports component video. The display is excellent, and i haven't found a single faulty pixel.

My only complaint is that it doesn’t have a USB hub (let alone a firewire hub). That probably seems like a pretty stupid complaint, but I've actually gotten used to plugging my camera and MP3 player into the 2001FP instead of messing around with the ports on the laptop docking station. What would be best, (and could easily be made available as an after market product for any TFT display that supports the standard VESA mount) would be to have the monitor stand itself have a firewire and USB 2.0 hub. That way I could set the device in the little alcove under the monitor and plug it into the monitor stand. This might be particularly handy for people into the web cam thing.
The down side to this is that it would mean having an additional power cord running to the monitor stand, but i could handle that for the convenience of having a discrete front facing hub, and it would be one less thing built into the actual monitor which is probably good.

DVRs, PVRs and HTPCs: The Battle For Your Living Room



If i wasn't so tired i would make some clever pun on the Blade quote about how there was a war going on and you all just live in the candy coated dream world of consumer electronics that work instead of down in the muck writing your own media players an an effort to get an HTPC play DVD ISO's over a network... But right now i'm still having trouble getting my transparent video overlays to work reliably, so i can't really be be bothered. Just go read the article, and know that while right now Tivo still kicks the crap out of everything else out there the future looks a lot more like the Kaleidescape System than a Tivo. Kenwood knows what's up, and i hear that the Onkyo's premium brand Integra Research is coming out with a new receiver you can slot new PCI cards in to add new features/functionality and one of those cards is video play back over TCP/IP...

So i guess what i'm saying is the war between DVR, PVR, and HTPC probably wont have a clear winner since the device that ultimately wins will be a little bit of each.