Apple’s new Mighty Mouse has gotten huge press for being the first two (actually three) button mouse from Apple ever. Does it live up to the hype? We’ve had ours since the day they hit the shelves, and it’s time to report.
This watch (Casio – LA11WB1A) was around when I worked at K-Mart in the late Eighties. I remember selling one to a nurse who wanted a practical watch that would do everything she needed during her busy day. This one more than filled her bill. All she really needed was the seconds displayed. Casio is still making it in three designs: black (pictured), silver and gold. It’s nearly the perfect digital watch.
Features:
Tragically Missing Features:
This would be my watch of choice if it had a light. I could overlook the pre-set timers and the lack of the date displayed with the time, but I need to be able to see what time it is when it’s dark. I actually owned the gold version when I was in high school. I broke two bands before I finally lost it to the third band (fell off my arm unnoticed and lost forever).
In my search for the perfect digital women’s watch, Casio has come out ahead of all the other brands. This watch has been gracing the arms of women all over the nation for twenty years. What do they expect us to do at night?
After looking on the Internet for it, I realized that the medium isn’t ready for watch shopping yet. I can’t tell the size of the watch from the tiny thumbnails that they provide. Las Vegas sports much more shopping opportunities than I have in Salt Lake City, so I was hopeful for the Labor Day weekend. Maybe I would find my watch.
Here is what I want:
I want a watch that is pretty, feminine and useful. Those sparkly watch hands on my Citizen EcoDrive are pretty, but they don’t tell me much information. I want more from my wrist-top computer. I want it to be useful AND good looking, and I’m willing to drop a lot of money on this purchase.
That’s why I was hopeful for Las Vegas. They have so many luxury and designer stores there. I was sure that TAG Heuer or Tissot would have what I was looking for. I just needed to find it.
After looking at every watch store in the Las Vegas area, we came up worse than empty. I was crabby with so many of the clerks, but the snooty lady at the biggest watch shop was the only one who deserved it.
“I don’t think this Nike looks good enough to be a dress watch.” I said reluctantly. It was only $80 and I could have bought it for fun, but it wasn’t any better than the $7 watch on my wrist.
I saw the clerk roll her eyes. She said in a thick accent, which I suspected was fake, “If you want a nice dress watch, you won’t find it in digital. Buy a Citizen.”
“I have a Citizen. It takes me an extra five seconds to tell time with it. I want digital with a nice metal band.”
“What you want is too big for a women’s watch.”
“This watch is digital and it’s small.” I held up the $7 Armitron. It has all the functions that I want. It’s just ugly. It looks like a sport watch. “If they just put the innards of this into a nice watch, then I would have what I want.”
“If you want a dress watch, you need to buy a nice brand. I have one with a stopwatch.”
“You do? It’s a digital?”
“No, it’s not a digital. It’s an analog stopwatch.”
I didn’t say anything else. I realized that the woman is used to selling watches to fat old women who are more interested in how many diamonds are on the face. It’s a shame, too. I was willing to drop a load if I could only find what I wanted. I’ll probably end up buying a Suunto. If it has to be ugly at least it can tell me the temperature and predict the weather.
JVC is first out of the gate with a hard disk based camcorder that records in the MPEG-2 format of DVD. No tape, no mini-DVDs, and up to 24 hours of recording at a time. But as everyone who buys a camcorder finds out, the devil is always in the details: How fast and easy is it to export the video and create a DVD, and how much is it really going to cost in extra peripherals and software to do it? We put this camera to the test. (Continue Reading…)
I currently use a Microsoft Digital Media Pro Keyboard, which I reviewed in June. At the time, I noted that the ergonomic keyboard fad appeared to be over—it’s rare that I see one of the split keyboard designs in stores.
Apparently I was wrong, because Microsoft has announced a new ergonomic keyboard. The Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000—I just love Microsoft’s down-to-earth naming style—will be available this month and features a split-key design along with improved “curves and arcs.†It also includes the zoom slider featured on the Digital Media Pro keyboard, which I just realized I haven’t used since installing mine three months ago.
I’m also pleased to report that despite costing $65, this is not a wireless keyboard. I’m not a fan of wireless keyboards—as far as I’m concerned it’s just one more battery to replace—and lately all of the high-end keyboards have been available only in wireless models.
Since I’m a keyboard nerd, I’ll be sure to take a closer look at this keyboard when it arrives in stores.
Apple introduced the ipod nano today. It’s an updated version of the iPod mini with 2GB or 4GB of flash-memory storage. It’s basically a smaller, thinner version of the iPod mini, complete with a color screen. It goes for $199 or $249 depending on the size, and best of all, it comes in black.
No technical revolution here, but Apple’s iPods do tend to drive the rest of the MP3 player market, so expect to see lots of thin, white and black music players in a store near you soon.
They also announced an iTunes phone, for what that’s worth. My Treo 650 can play hundreds of songs already, so I’m not too excited about that one.
The stock stereo system in my car is probably the most proprietary system on earth. It was used for only a few years in only a few makes of German cars, and there are literally no 3rd party components or options that can be added to the system. It uses a fiber-optic loop, so there’s no way to adapt typical audio components to it without creating a custom fiber-optic bus adapter. This is exactly what Dension did when they came out with their ICELink Plus I2O adapter for the iPod.
I had an iPod (or rather, my wife had an iPod) and I am a geek, so I had to get it connected to my car.
Amazon is running a promotion saying that they’re offering the Apple 20GB iPod at “a price so low, we can’t show it to you.†I’m pretty sure their contract with Apple doesn’t apply to me, so I’ll tell you the price is $239, quite a bit less than my ancient 5GB model cost a few years back.
Considering that the 20GB model is still $299 at the Apple Store, this is a pretty good deal. Apparently all of the competition from other MP3 players is finally catching up with Apple’s prices.
DVDs have rapidly replaced videocassettes as the format of choice for home video. But making your own DVDs with video from a camcorder is far from easy. Understanding the process helps.
There are basically three methods you can use to create DVDs of your home movies. Each method has its advantages and drawbacks, and none of the methods has a clear lead in the market. The three methods are:
I’m considering a new digital camera, and my current favorite is the Panasonic DMC-FZ30, which just started shipping in the US. It has a 12X Leica zoom lens, 8 MP sensor, and an anti-shake system—my compact Panasonic has the same system, and I can take great pictures despite shaky hands.
From the early indications, this looks like a great camera. The only potential concern is noise—this review at DCResource includes some examples of noisy photographs, but they don’t look unacceptable to me. More importantly, there are some much better photos out there.
The noise issue comes down to the difference between consumer (or “prosumerâ€) digital cameras and digital SLRs. Since the SLRs are getting cheaper, cameras like the FZ-30—which costs about the same as a bottom-end SLR—are being scrutinized more closely. I’ll write more about these issues soon.
Since this camera is my current obsession, I’ll be posting more details and links as I continue researching it. (Last week I called that “wasting timeâ€, but now that I’m writing here I get to call it “researchâ€.)
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