The latest product to use the DisplayLink technology is Samsung’s 2263DX, which is, I suppose, a monitor and a half.
I haven’t seen one in the flesh yet, but it looks cute. Ideal for buddy lists, twitter status, today’s calendar…
Category Archives: Gadgets & Toys
Surreal Safety
Here’s a fun way to increase your visibility when cycling at night:
It’s called Monkeylectric, and a search will find various other videos and photos.
The gorilla in the room
Michael and Laura today gave me a fabulous present. It’s a Gorillapod, a beautifully-designed device which lets you put cameras – or other things with similar mounts – almost anywhere.
Here it is on my bike handlebars:
We had fun today thinking of other things to do with it.
And I mounted my little Ixus on it and recorded video in unusual places. (Such as the view from the top of my head while walking home from lunch – I got to see what the world would look like if I were several inches taller)
If you need to find a present for someone with any interest in photography or video, I’d strongly recommend one of these. It’s fantastic. It’s also very tactile – a great stress-relieving executive toy…
UK readers can get them from Amazon.
Delusions of grandeur
I think my iPod has ideas above its station.
I got a new car today. It’s rather nice. And it has an iPod adaptor cable.
When I plugged the iPod into this gleaming tonne-and-a-half of throbbing sports-tuned German engineering, it said, “Accessory attached“.
HP enters mini-notebook fray
The ASUS EeePC has been a great success. Next week, HP will start shipping a similar machine and, yes, the lowest-cost models are also Linux-based.
Using the Sony eBook Reader with a Mac
About a year ago I wrote about my experiments with getting a Sony PRS500 Reader talking to my Mac.
Quietly, over that time, it’s been getting easier, as Kovid Goyal has turned his rather unexcitingly-named libprs500 from a basic command-line utility to a full-featured GUI application, which can do things like capture RSS feeds and format them for the Sony. It still has some quirks, but is well-worth checking out, and it runs on Windows, Mac and Linux.
Rollermouse
My friend Aideen brought an interesting device in to show us the other day. It’s called a Rollermouse, and it’s a combination mouse and wrist-rest:
The black bar rolls up and down and slides left and right to move the mouse, and you can click it too if you prefer that to using the buttons.
Now, this looks (and sounds) a little strange, but it worked amazingly well. I saw it and was skeptical, and tried it and was impressed. They’re rather pricey, but if you suffer from RSI, or just want a mouse you can easily use in bed, this might be the thing…
Bet you didn’t think of this…
In this day and age, you can get almost everything in a USB-connected form.
I must confess that this was something I had never even contemplated, though.
Thanks to Brian Lemaster for the link
Putting the ‘i’ back in iPlayer
One of the most interesting technology developments of the last couple of weeks has, it seems to me, attracted very little attention. The BBC’s iPlayer, which lets you watch most of the last week of BBC TV if you’re in the UK, and a subset of it if you’re elsewhere, received early criticism because it didn’t work on anything but Windows.
Now at least some of it works on other platforms, but the latest one is the most interesting. It now works on the iPod Touch and iPhone. I now carry around in my shirt pocket something which gives me an eminently watchable archive of the last week’s TV, as long as I’m in range of a wifi network. The iPod Touch is a great video player and now, for free, there’s a huge amount of stuff available in a rather high-quality format.
Only a very few years ago, the idea of having any access to an archive like this would have seemed amazing. But having it on a beautiful slab a few millimetres thick is almost sci-fi. I just wish I had the time to watch any of it! But we do live in most interesting times…
ASUS joins the USB-enabled monitor crowd
“Hard to go wrong with a little bit of DisplayLink” says Engadget.
Isn’t it nice…
…when your wishes are granted?
In September I wrote about how I wanted my 3G phone to become a wifi router so it could provide internet access to surrounding devices like my iTouch.
Today I discovered Joikuspot, which, if you have the right phone, is well on the way to being there, though it’s strictly HTTP-only at present. But it does mean that I can use the wonderful browser on my iPod Touch when I’m not near a wifi connection. And I can do so over 3G. Which in some ways makes it better than an iPhone…
Geek gifts 1
If you know somebody geeky enough to run a Linux desktop, they’d probably like a Tux Droid. It’s like a Nabaztag for hackers…
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