Gadgets – Page 4

iPod Photo

New iPod Photo announced. 40 & 60Gb versions and for not too shabby a price. Looks good and would be a definite buy if I didn’t have an iPod already. Main issue for me is that Apple’s support of existing users is pretty shabby. I love my iPod but some fairly basic updates wouldn’t have gone amiss – heck – I can’t even play back tracks without any gaps between them. These kind of features should be in as a basic minimum. Good to see battery life quoted at 15 hours though. Don’t know if I would get much mileage out of viewing photo’s on the screen…a more practical screen will probably be found in the next version due in March. I would however love to see the album art while my mp3’s are playing. Very cool. Still…won’t be upgrading. Also odd to see the new U2 special edition iPod more prominent on the Apple website over the new iPod Photo.

Finally, iTunes 4.7 is now available. Probably with updates for new iPods only….hey-ho.

Aiport Express

Apple have announced the Aiport Express which looks to be the ideal solution for easily adding wireless to your home. Coupled with the new version of iTunes you can stream music to any speakers. A good example can be seen here. This is really tempting. What would seal the deal would be a laptop and then I could be sitting in the garden surfing to my hearts content.

But then reality kicks in – the weather isn’t good enough to justify the outlay as I would get a day a week if I’m lucky in the great outdoors. I’ll stick to my guns and upgrade the desktop later in the year. My current pc is 3 & 1/2 years old. In fact this is my oldest pc so far without an upgrade. With Half-Llife 2 & Doom 3 later this year, it has to be done.

Sony Portables

mp3 support

Sony have announced two new media players. Key is the mp3 support – hopefully that means the PSP will support mp3’s as well.

Whats The Time?

A question I’ll be asking less of now as I’ve finally taken delivery of my new alarm clock. As befits a gadget lover, the Starck clock looks good, has remote temperature sensors, tells me the highest and lowest temperatures recorded, has remote time setting and most importantly tells the time. Lovely.

New Gadgets

A couple of new gadgets announced for the Cebit show in Germany. Kiss 568 – 80Gb hard disk, DVD recorder and links to PC – lovely. And the swiss army knife with a USB Key? Useless, but nice in a geeky gadgetty type way.

PC Upgrade part 2

The pc upgrade is complete and I finally got round to doing a backup. And it worked!! One outcome of the upgrade was how slow XP took to shutdown (startup was fine). A quick Google found a great XP tips site – shutdown is only around 15 seconds now.

Only annoyance is how noisy my processor fan is. A Zalman Flower would solve it, although a motherboard upgrade and a new chip is far more tempting. As well as the flower.

PC Upgrade

Not posted for a while. The new disk for the pc arrived but as per usual the Windows re-install was far from smooth. XP has always worked fine but for some reason the install disk kept failing at certain files. Turns out the files were placeholders for future apps, but it was niggling all the same. Then some of my hardware wouldn’t work and the drivers, even though built into XP, wouldn’t install. Switch hard disks and the hardware was fine. Grrrrrrrrrr.

Had to mess big style with registry and also drop to safe mode and copy the drivers cab file over again. All pretty straight forward (except it took a couple of hours to get to this point) but if I was a novice I would be stuffed.

So 120gig drive works fine, and I gave into temptation and bought an external caddy for my old disk so that I have a good backup solution for the first time in years. Not that I’ve backed my data up yet…….