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...
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
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...
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...
SlotMusic cards look to replace CDs it appears as a means to purchase MP3 files in a physical form:
http://www.slotmusic.org/
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
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....
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.