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The Gadgets Page has added a Twitter account to our arsenal of weapons. Every post will have a link on Twitter and any random gadget thoughts I have throughout the day will show up there as well.
You can follow us here:
You should especially follow us when we are at CES or the other big gadgety events throughout the year because a lot of the cool stuff that we see there will show up on the Twitter account before we get a chance to write a full entry about them.
The Gadgets Page is a proud sponsor of this month’s CodeAway! They had a pretty good sized group of people show up!
You can find out about more gadget related events at CodeAway:
A special thanks to the employees of Rocky Mountain Pizza for getting the party started with Rock Band 2.
You can see all the photos here:
Dave added photos to the CodeAway Group. If you have any photos from the event, you can add them here:
It was so much fun this month that I can’t wait until next month! See you then!
May you have a lovely Christmas and may you receive all the gadgets of your heart’s desire!
Take the time to enjoy your family and the other important people in your life. What’s the point of having cool gadgets if you can’t show them off to anyone?
😉
The Gadgets Page sponsored a geek-together in Salt Lake City, called CodeAway. You can see the photos here:
We were able to try out the new MarioKart Wii. It turned out to be a fun game, even for people who had never played before and a challenging change for those old pros who had never played with the Wii Wheel.
A special thank you to Rocky Mountain Pizza for allowing us to invade their banquet room for four hours and play video games and eat lots of pizza!
NakedJen was so nice to come to the party. She’s a recent transplant to Utah from Santa Cruz. Kevin Fitzgerald just came to Utah from a small town near San Luis Obispo, so I sat him next to Jen so she could give him pointers on getting adjusted to Utah.
Here’s a self portrait of me with Jen.
Toward the end, we received a visit from our favorite tech recruiter, Robert Merrill!
Scott Lemon was streaming some of CodeAway live using his Nokia 75. It’s a great demonstration of Qik and the Nokia. The audio is kind of scratchy, but it gives you a good idea of the fun we were having:
Sheri took some photos as well. You can see them here:
This one is my favorite:
Left, go left! by designsimply from Flickr
In the end, I would like to thank all that attended (and spread around the Link Love):
If you live in the Utah area, you can find out about fun geeky events like this at CodeAway. It looks like the Gadgets Page is going to be sponsoring CodeAway for a while, so you can find out about all the fun after the party here!
Some people can never have enough screen space – for example, gamers and system administrators. With more and more applications (such as watching videos) using a computer’s full screen, various devices are beginning to appear designed to give you a bit of extra space for a list of incoming email, IM alerts, server status messages, or the latest stock quotes or sports scores.
One of the nicest we’ve seen so far at CES is WidgetStation from Emtrace Technologies. WidgetStation is a clock with two LCD screens, each of which can display different “widgets†such as clocks, email lists, weather reports, or calendars.
Widgetstation is scriptable by advanced users and they plan to have a wide variety of widgets available online. The nice thing about this unit is that it is an independent low-power computer itself, with a WiFi connection – it can sit on your desk displaying your calendar and stock prices even if your computer is turned off.
Now the bad news: Like many of the products at CES, it isn’t available yet. According to Emtrace, the product will be available in the second quarter of 2007, with a price of about $250. I hope they make the deadline because I would find this product very useful, although the price would have to go down before it became practical for people who aren’t information crazy like myself.
Logitech’s mm28 Portable Speakers are a pair of portable flat-panel speakers in a single case. They may look a bit strange, but they’re a great lightweight way to play music from your iPod or other music player on the go. They also sound surprisingly good for their size.
Read on for our full review, which looks at the mm28’s features, audio quality, battery performance, and value for the money.
As gadgets go, this is one of the easier ones to use: there are no controls and no digital display. Just a Power button with a nice blue LED, and a 3.5mm cord to plug into your audio player. There’s no volume control, you just use the player’s volume setting.
The cord is just over a foot long, so you’ll need an extension if you want to separate the speakers from the audio player—but for typical use with an iPod or other portable device, it’s just the right length. The cord conceals neatly in a groove in the back of the speaker case.
The mm28 comes out of the box ready to use – just add batteries or plug it in, turn it on, and plug in your music player. The transparent plastic cover folds out and doubles as a speaker stand, which works well. This is one speaker that won’t fall off the table easily.
The speaker case is 11″ by 4″ and just over an inch thick.
The mm28 speakers sound great. The NXT flat panel technology claims to “significantly enhance bass performance,†and I have to agree—they have great bass for such a small speaker. You probably can’t get better bass this portable without a subwoofer. The entire flat panel seems to vibrate with the bass frequencies, and I could feel the table vibrating under them.
One nice surprise is that the bass is pronounced even at low volumes, unlike cheap speakers that you have to crank up to hear it. They’re very pleasant for casual, quiet listening. Of course, they also get loud. They were easily able to fill a room with sound when hooked to my iPod nano. (The nano’s highest volume setting caused a bit of distortion, but at that point they were quite loud.) The high end sounds quite good too.
As expected from a unit that combines two speakers into one case, the stereo separation isn’t the best. You can still clearly distinguish both channels, though, even from across the room at higher volumes. With 8″ of space between the two speaker cones, it actually has better separation than most of the portable one-piece speaker sets I’ve seen.
All in all, the mm28 has a great overall sound and I can listen to it for hours without being annoyed.
Speaking of listening for hours, the mm28 runs on four AA batteries, and Logitech claims a 45-hour battery life. It hasn’t been 45 hours yet, but they’re still going strong after at least 10 hours of listening. I’ve had to charge the iPod nano twice in the course of testing them. They also include an AC adapter which eliminates the need for the batteries. Value and Conclusion
The mm28’s MSRP is $79.99, and it’s currently $64 at Amazon. This is not a cheap speaker set, but the quality has impressed me enough to say it’s worth the money. I’ve listened to similar one-piece units from Creative and JBL, and the Logitech definitely sounds better.
The only thing the mm28 is lacking is a convenient dock or clip for my iPod—that would make it the ultimate boombox replacement. If you need a set of stylish portable speakers and don’t mind the price, look no further.
Disclaimer: Logitech provided us with the mm28 speakers used in this review.
![Adobe Premiere Elements 2.0 Video Editing [DVD]](http://images.amazon.com/images/P/B000AP89UI.01._SCMZZZZZZZ_.jpg)
In the end, I bit the bullet and bought Adobe Premiere Elements 2.0. Of all the software, it worked with all video types and didn’t crash once, no matter what I tried to do with it. With this product, I feel like I can do so much more than the others. I feel like it has more capabilities than I will ever really need.
The fact that I have enjoyed Photoshop so much is another reason I was willing to plunk down the 100 bucks. I always have been able to do anything I’ve needed to do with Photoshop, it just took me a while to learn how to use it. I find the same true for Premiere, except the ease of use has been amazing.
To evaluate Adobe Premier Elements, I downloaded the trial version just like I did with all the other software I tested. The trial version is a little crippled because it adds a watermark to the upper lefthand corner of the screen if you burn a DVD or use and NTSC exports. It let me do a lot of editing and exporting with no watermarks, however. I was able to create this video using the trial version of Premiere Elements.
The title at the beginning was a pre-made title that was one of many that Premiere provides. I created the entire video in less than half the time it would have taken me to do it with QuickTime Pro. Of course, it costs three times the money, but you really get what you pay for in this case.
I tried burning a full-length DVD and the warnings that they give are not exaggerations. It took over eight hours for my computer to encode and burn the DVD. This seems a little long considering that there is other software out there that can encode and burn a DVD in an hour or two using the same computer, but the DVD that I made worked in my Xbox and the DVD by the treadmill, two very picky machines that will reject DVDs without reason at times.
I’ve been really happy with Adobe Premiere Elements and I plan to use it for all my video editing. As soon as I learn to use it for capturing video from an old-school VHS machine, I’ll give you a step-by-step review of the ease (or frustration) of that process.
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