Category Archives: Gadgets & Toys

iRex digital reader

Slowly but surely, e-paper-based digital book readers are going from strength to strength.
I’ve written before about the Iliad and several times about my Sony PRS.

iRex have now released their Digital Reader series – ‘the largest, yet thinnest e-reader ever’ – with a 10.2-inch display, and 1024×1280 resolution.

Starting at £469, though – that’s quite a lot of paperbacks…

Update: Plastic Logic have been showing off the prototype of their new reader at DEMO, as well.

Thanks to Stephen De Gabrielle for the links.

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Disk Dock

After having a couple of hard disks do slightly wobbly things recently, I’ve been thinking about backups again, and have just treated myself to a Drobo – a wonderful, if somewhat pricey gadget. Storage Supplies had the best UK pricing I could find for the Firewire version, if anyone else is considering one…

This device looks like an interesting option for making backups to be taken offsite, though:

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Datacase

It’s fascinating to watch people discover new ways of using the iPhone/iTouch. The fun, I’m sure, is only just starting. It’s the first widely-deployed device that has a multi-touch interface. It’s the first mobile device with really good accelerometers in it. It’s the first thing you can drop easily into your pocket that has such a beautiful screen. It has good connectivity and location-based services. It’s really easy to install new applications. And, significantly, it’s the first to combine all of these with a sophisticated GUI and operating system.

Sometimes, though, it’s the simple things that can be the most useful. People have just started realising that you can make your phone into a fileserver on the local network, which means (a) you can transfer stuff to and from your phone without using iTunes if wanted, and (b) you can do it from any machine on the network, not just the one you normally sync with, and (c) you can also just ask your family or colleagues to drop files onto your phone. Do you remember how, in the old days, we would carry around memory sticks that had to be plugged in?

The application I’m playing with, DataCase, appears on your network as an AFP and FTP server, which means you can just open it in the Finder or in Windows, and, as an aside, it makes the contents available over HTTP. Yes, it’s a web server. And we’ve certainly only just started to imagine the full implications of carrying a web server in your pocket…

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Joiku to the world

In the past (here and here) I’ve written about how I really wanted my 3G phone to operate as a mobile wifi basestation. I got excited when I discovered the early versions of JoikuSpot, and played with it, but it was very flaky.

Well, I’ve just JoikuSpot Premium is out, supports full connectivity and doesn’t depend on the web proxy that the ‘lite’ version used. I can now get 3G connectivity to my iTouch and my laptop at the same time. If you have one of the supported Nokia or Samsung phones, it’s well worth the €15.

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Rock (and roll)

If your neighbours share your musical tastes, or are very distant, this might be just what you need:

Now, wouldn’t a little light Vivaldi add the finishing touch to that garden party you were planning? You can pretend that the string quartet are hiding behind the rockery…

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Remotely Possible

One of the neatest apps to be released for the new iPhone/iTouch software is Apple’s Remote, which connects to a copy of iTunes running on a machine on your network and allows you to control it from the iPod.

This is great, but I seldom feel the need to control my computer from across the room. It lives in a very small study and, from across the room, I can reach the keyboard! I did, however, have an old Airport Express hanging about, and an idea occurred to me today… I plugged it into the back of my stereo downstairs:

and configured my iTunes upstairs to play through the Airport Express, and suddenly I had wireless control of my entire music collection at my fingertips.

But wait, it gets better… I found the Settings panel on the Remote application and it had grown a new feature: the ability to select the speakers you want to use:

So now, sitting on the sofa, I can browse my music located in another room, and send it to the big speakers in this one.

Very cool. Mmm… Those Airport Expresses on eBay start to look much more attractive…

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F.I.B

Oh boy! I so want one of these:

Flying inflatable boat

Arfon has a beautiful photo of one in action here, and there are lots more in the gallery on the Polaris site.

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The charger of the heavy brigade

I’ve just bought a new battery charger, which recharges standard AAs or AAAs in 15 minutes. You may be able to see the grill behind the batteries – for ventilation. Yes, this is a charger with a 60W power supply and a built-in fan, which cools the batteries as they charge.

It certainly seems to work as advertised, but does anyone know if there are implications, good or bad, for the life of your batteries if you charge them this way?

I bought it here, by the way.

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Homer page?

Neil Davidson from Red Gate software was visiting the other day, and since he’d seen my interest in the Iliad, he brought his along:

My brief experiments left me quite impressed. It’s beautifully manufactured and has the best e-ink-type screen I’ve seen yet. It has wifi, too, and I gather from friends that it’s rather more ‘hackable’ than some of the competition. And unusually, you can also write on it with a stylus:

Nice for notes & sketching, but you can also annotate PDFs.

Of course, there are downsides. Joe Newman tells me that it’s slow to boot, and the battery life is around 5 hours of reading… both of which are markedly different from my Sony. I guess you have to keep more bits powered up on the Iliad, to detect stylus contact etc, whereas the Sony uses almost no power at all until you turn a page. I felt it really needed a processor with double the speed, which no doubt would swallow a battery even faster. And, of course, the biggest problem is the price: at £400, it costs more than two Kindles.

Nonetheless, I think this, and not the Kindle, is really the shape of things to come.

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Rock and Edirol

I must be just the sort of customer Apple love, I think. Having had fun playing with iMovie, I long ago upgraded to Final Cut Express, and I’m a big fan of Aperture, their offering for those who need more than iPhoto.

This week I decided to splash out on Logic Studio, which is a substantial upgrade from GarageBand, and I’m looking forward to getting to grips with it. A key part of the decision was that it includes Soundtrack Pro which is an exceedingly powerful audio editor/mixer and has good facilities for creating video soundtracks. The package isn’t cheap, but some of the individual components used to cost substantially more on their own in the not-too-distant past. And hey, who knows when I might have to mix a 5.1-surround soundtrack to my home movies! One thing was clear, though, I really needed to replace my miscellaneous cheap mic pre-amps, phantom power units etc with a better audio interface if I were to make the most of Logic.

The default manufacturer of such kit for amateurs like me is usually M-Audio – I have some other bits from them, and their Fasttrack Pro USB interface was recommended on Gear Media Tech.

But USB is almost always an inferior technology to Firewire, especially if you’re concerned about latencies or the number of channels. It’s something PC owners often have to live with, but Macs all have Firewire, so I thought about the M-Audio Firewire 410, which you can buy from the Apple Store or, at nearly half the price, from StudioSpares. However, as I read up on this, people seemed divided on whether M-Audio are good value for money, or just cheap, and in addition, they had taken a very long time coming up with Leopard drivers for the 410.

So in the end, I went for the Edirol FA-66, also available from Studiospares. (It doesn’t need any drivers for Mac OS X.)

On my first quick experiments, I’m very pleased. It does everything I wanted and more. All I need now is some talent to go with it!

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eWriter?

Most people know about the Kindle and the Sony eReader, but what about the iRex Iliad? No, I hadn’t come across it either, but it has a few interesting features:

  • A great name
  • An even higher price tag than the others

but most importantly, and this could be especially interesting in certain professions:

  • You can annotate documents, as well as read them.

I’d like to try one out…

Thanks to Steve de Gabrielle for the link

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There are Blu-rays over the white cliffs of Dover…

For anyone looking for a backup medium, rewritable Blu-ray drives are starting to become quite interesting. Dabs have an LG one for £160 now, and that includes VAT!

The disks are 25GB or 50GB and come in write-once or rewritable form, but since even the cheapest ones seem to start around £6, you wouldn’t want to have too many write-failures!

Watch those prices drop, though… it won’t be long.

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