Category: Gear

  • Thin is in but I’m not sure why

    Steve Jobs had a couple of widely leaked “surprises” to unveil at yesterday’s Macworld show. As we’d all read everywhere for the past few weeks, Apple added rental movies to its iTunes download store. The selection is a bit small and the 30-day delay from DVD release to rental seems ridiculous but, hey, these are…

  • It’s a heavy, heavy snow out there

    Wandered out today ’round my Needham, MA, home to give my Canon Rebel XT digital camera (complete with Canon’s wunderbar 50mm 1.4 EF lens) a cold weather work out in the umpty-umpth snow storm of the 2007-2008 winter class. If I had to categorize this dump of some 6 to 8 inches, I’d call it…

  • Clean the closet – before and after

    As I mentioned yesterday, we did a huge closet cleaning project recently. Here’s the before shot (notice the pile of 10 years of junk from the likes of Linksys, Apple, Fuji, Brother, Uniden and every other brand I’ve ever blogged about): And here’s the after shot:

  • Reclaiming an ancient PocketPC as a web browser

    Cleaning out the attic closet recently, I came across an ancient Casio PocketPC that I must have bought six or seven years ago, the Cassiopeia E-115. It’s a cute little device featuring a smallish, color touch-screen and compact flash card slot. My son was immediately interested in reclaiming it but we couldn’t get it to…

  • Ignore that cranky Mossberg and his Kindle whine

    I kept meaning to predict that Wall Street Journal gadget reviewer Walt Mossberg was going to pan the Amazon Kindle e-book reader because he’s hyper-sensitive to minor flaws. But life intervened and I didn’t get the chance. And, of course, now he has. Sometimes Mossberg is right on, but unfortunately with the Kindle, he’s far…

  • Kindle reviews by folks who actually have seen one

    Amidst all the misinformation about Amazon’s new Kindle electronic book reader, particularly coming from people who have never touched or used it, here’s a list of reviews from the fact-based segment of techdom: Gizmodo checks Kindle in the bedroom, on an airplane and atop the porcelain throne. Not quite a home run, just a triple,…

  • Ignore the static: Kindle is great for reading

    Wow, the new electronic book reader from Amazon, Kindle, sure is getting a lot of absurdly misguided and factually incorrect criticism. My fingers are getting sore from responding to such a tide of disinformation in comment boxes scattered across a zillion web sites. Just this morning, I’ve been writing a lengthy comment to a Kindle…

  • Netgear’s nearly identical powerline adapters

    After my recent whiny post about Netgear’s confusing line of networking adapters which run over your electrical wiring, a friend this week volunteered to take my medium-speed powerline adapters off my hands. So it’s on to the grown-up stuff: the supposedly 200 megabit per second bad boys. Annoyingly, the faster version has no model with…

  • Anyone wanna buy a used Airport Extreme?

    Had to expect this but, still… “Two peripherals also reached the Apple Store on Tuesday without a separate announcement. AirPort Extreme revision The AirPort Extreme Base Station introduced in January now adds gigabit Ethernet without a price hike ($179).” (via AppleInsider)

  • An Aussie answer to all bag lusters

    My wife thinks it’s hilarious but it’s undeniable that we gadget guys need bags, lots and lots of pretty bags. Well, maybe not pretty — you know, sort of manly, handsome bags. A bag for the camera, a bag for the phone, a bag or two for the laptop, a bag for all the bags.…