As part of my growing flash light fetish, I picked up the Surefire Executive Defender E2D flashlight. It's a small flash light that fits in the palm of your hand but provides serious utility. At 60 lumens of brightness, it will light a dark area extremely well. It is also designed for self-defense with enough brightness to blind an assailant immediately. The front and back are reinforced with a very very solid steel that is slightly surrated to ensure that anyone you whack it...
One of the more interesting devices I saw at CES was the Weather Direct series of weather info gadgets. These stand-alone devices pick up 5-day weather forcecasts and display them on an LCD screen. While not necessarily something I would have at my home, it is something I plan to pick up for the cottage. www.lacrosstechnology.com
I have a new cell phone and I absolutely love it. LG's new Env is an amazing phone that I prefer considerably to the iPhone. The phone has two keypads. The one you see to the right also opens up into a pretty decent sized QERTY keyoard. For me, the highlights of the phone are: The keyboard. I can use this to send meaningful text messages, IMs, email, etc. Navigation. It is the best GPS navigator I have ever used. Thanks to its seamless Internet integration with navigati...
http://www.nest.com/living-with-nest/ Anyone out there get a Nest? I was thinking of getting one for our cottage up north. It’s a “smart” thermostat that will hook up to the Internet and let you monitor and change the temperature from remote (along with a zillion other features). But I wanted to find out if anyone has this and whether they liked it or not.
So we’re in the process of setting things up so that a series of computers runs the lights, audio, televisions, heat, etc. We’re using Control4 and so far, I’m mixed on whether I like it or not. It has both an iPhone and iPad app which is a major plus. But its user interface (in those apps) is terrible and ugly (ugly to the point of being distracting). Given the popularity of Control4, I wonder if I’m missing something given how awful and primitive it seems to be so far....
I’ve long stopped using the highest settings on my cameras because there’s really no quality difference that I can tell other than when I want to zoom in and crop a piece. On cameras, we need a new spec to help us know what quality image we can expect. In the meantime, check out this Ars article on the topic: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2009/03/why-weve-reached-the-end-of-the-camera-megapixel-race.ars
SlotMusic cards look to replace CDs it appears as a means to purchase MP3 files in a physical form:
http://www.slotmusic.org/
The Canon Elura is quite fantastic so far but I've only had it a few days. It is tiny. Really tiny. The screenshot doesn't do it justice. It's not much bigger than my Little Elph camera that Canon makes (sheesh, you'd think I worked for Canon, I guess they're just on the ball). What I don't like about it is that it is a bit too complex. It's a little awkward to control since it's so small. My biggest gripe with it is that it is not easy to record video to the computer. I wa...