The time has come. My old and beautiful DVD player – a Pioneer DV-717 for which I paid £600 a long time ago – is starting to fade. It lost the ability to play CDs some years back, and it’s now regularly having problems with the scratches on rental DVDs as well, while other drives play them just fine. It was time to replace it. I could, of course, have bought a replacement at the supermarket for half the price I once paid for a region-free mod for my Pioneer. But they don’t make them like they used to – anything looks like a piece of junk when placed next to the 717. And, anyway, DVD’s are so last-decade….
Category Archives: Gadgets & Toys
Newnham News
My friends at Newnham Research have started to get some news coverage, from PCW and from ExtremeTech.
Their problem is that you really don’t get a feel for how well this stuff works until you see it in action – it’s hard to do it justice on paper. But it’s good to see that Newnham is coming out of stealth mode at last…
Thanks to Seb for the links.
The crackberry addicts’ den
I was at John‘s a couple of nights ago, and we both happened to check our Blackberrys at the same time. Tom, John’s son, laughed and grabbed a camera…
Blackberry and TomTom
Yesterday I updated my Blackberry 7100t to v 4.1 of the OS. I also updated the OS on my TomTom Go 500. One, or other, or the combination, means that I can now use the TomTom as a hands-free kit for the Blackberry, something which wasn’t possible before. This posting will probably be of very little interest to anybody not Googling for ‘TomTom Blackberry’!
The Blackberry update is not generally available yet, but one provider, Hong Kong CSL, had a version for the 71xx series. You can find links here. Note the bit about deleting vendor.xml . There are few obvious benefits on the surface, but quite a few under the skin. One thing I haven’t yet managed, though, is to use the BB as a modem for my Mac 🙁
iPod ecosystem
The NYT reports that the iPod accessory market is a $1bn business. And that’s without counting the
ultimate iPod accessory…
Leather memory stick
Is this, perhaps, the most stylish way to carry your files around? Well, it would certainly go nicely with my riding crop and hip flask…
Available from Red Envelope. Thanks to Adam for the link.
iWood if iCould but iCan’t
The iWood is a rather nice-looking wooden case for the iPod Nano.
Are you a slide rule enthusiast?
My friend Andrew asked today if I knew anywhere in Cambridge where he could buy a slide rule. I couldn’t help him (though I do own a rather nice one).
But I did stumble across the website of the UK Slide Rule Circle, an ‘informal group of slide rule enthusiasts’.
If you consider yourself a slide rule enthusiast – and who, in their innermost thoughts, does not? – then this might be just what you’re looking for…
Spanish Laptops
Here’s a bit of nostalgia. Anyone remember Digital? How about the AltaVista search engine?
I was browsing through some of my old mail and came across a message from the dim recesses of January 1998. I had just tried the AltaVista translation service to convert a
Spanish review of a Digital laptop into English. It did some wonderful things like occasionally translating ‘desktop’ as ‘tablecloth’ and I thought the results were
quite charming. Here are the first few paragraphs:
Portable, Compact and Powerful. Digitalis HiNote Vp 575
“An equipment of high benefits that competes seriously
with those of tablecloth – by Abel Manto’n”
To the good thing one is accustomed immediately. Portable 575 HiNote VP
stand for casks is so powerful, that one week whole without igniting the
desktop computer can be happened nor remembering for anything him.
One is a cacharrito of 3.4 kilos of weight, with 2.16 gigas of hard disk and
one piece that combines in the same space the disquetera and the reader of
D-ROM.
From the last name comes to him there bent to this machine of 765,000
pesetas in its standard configuration. The computer that we have proven bond
something more, because it included an extension of memory, happening of the
16 megas of the basic equipment to 32.
The memory difference, as already it has been written so many times, is
fundamental to shoot the yield. Unfortunately, the extensions of memory
accustom to being specific for each model and the prices notice it.
An equipment to taste.
Paltar to choose a portable one well is necessary to have precaution in
verifying how the tastes of user to three basic parameters adapt: the
keyboard, the screen and the mouse, that with the programs that run is
essential.
On the keyboard it is necessary to say that a little out of place have some
keys, mainly the one to suppress, the one of beginning and the one of aim.
Model proven had keyboard English, which always incomoda a little, but more
annoying is to have to look for key to erase, which it is where it is
without leaf return, and is an infrequent place. By the others, it is
written wonderfully.
The screen is irreprochable. 12.1 inches, active matrix and a fantastic
angle of view. Sure the graphical card, that has much to do, is a PCI of 128
bits (pure lujazo), of most efficient. It allows a resolution of until
1024×768 points, although doing a trick of panning. That is to say, it
creates a virtual screen that ‘ sale’ of the visible screen and moves on
this one when the leader of the mouse takes towards the ends. Recommendable
and the appropriate thing is to use the resolution of 800×600, with HD
color, that produces the best visual results, without trap nor cardboard.
iPod Nano
Like the small size of the iPod shuffle but wish it had a display? Today, Apple announced the iPod Nano, and the Mini has quietly vanished from the Apple site.
Oh, and there’s a Motorola phone with iPod functionality, but we’ve known about that for so long that it would be pretty unexciting even if you could get it from anybody other than Cingular.
It is the only phone I’ve seen with stereo speakers, though!
Matias Tactile Pro Keyboard
I loved some of the older PC keyboards – I remember the IBMs with their wonderful clacky sound and proper switches (rather than conductive rubber bouncing off a PCB). They cost about £100 but they lasted indefinitely. Apple and Olivetti were the same in the early days. But everybody has economised now, which is why I’m rather tempted by the Matias Tactile Pro Keyboard, which deliberately tries to recreate the golden days.
What’s important about IP telephony?
I suppose that, having worked on and off with VoIP for a little while, I really should have cottoned on to this earlier, but it’s only having it at home that has made me realise what will really be different for ordinary users in a VoIP world.
It’s not the lower cost, though that will be nice. It’s not that you’ll need fewer wires around your house, or that you’ll be able to make phone calls from your laptop, or that you’ll only need to buy one link to the outside world because your internet connection and your phone connection will have merged. No, I think the big changes will be that:
- You’ll be able to have as many extensions as you like for no extra cost. This means that the concept of one or two lines coming into the house may go away. Yes, your daughter will have her own extension, and she’ll be able to call her friend’s bedroom without blocking the line for everybody else. You’ll be able to call the kitchen from the basement, or call the basement from the shopping mall, if you so desire.
- Phone lines will be more like email addresses. And many of the things you can do with email addresses will apply to phone lines. So, for example, you can redirect them to point at other addresses. Or you can make one address ring several phones, which may be in different parts of the house or in different parts of the world.
All of this has been possible in the past, but it won’t be long before this is a standard facility that everybody will have at home if they choose to make use of it.
Feeds
RSS feed© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser
Recent Comments