Last Christmas (2002), I received a little black box called a TiVo and it totally changed the way I watch TV (I know, I sound like an ad, but it’s true!). Exactly one year ago today I posted to this blog about it. Now, one year later, my TiVo is a little bit cooler. For …
Two-year olds and technology just don’t mix: my daughter recently dropped my Kodak DX3600 and broke it. After hearing from Kodak that I could either send it in along with $125 to repair it, or trade it in for a discount on a newer Kodak digicam, I decided to shop around and get a new …
Living in Florida means living with power outages, especially during the heat of summer or wild electrical storms. This convinced me to at least try out a UPS. I currently have a single Belkin Home Office UPS 650VA. In my informal testing, it’s kept the wireless router, cable modem, and Linux server running for about …
If you’ve read most of this blog, you’ll have noticed that I tend to use my “toys” for a long time (I had the same mouse for 10 years and used my Sony Mavica digital camera for many, many years before upgrading). My monitor was in a similar position: I had purchased my MAG Innovision …
Now that I have a DVD player, what better thing to have than a DVD burner? After doing what I thought was decent research on the DVD writer alphabet soup out there (-R, +R, -RW, +RW, -RAM, etc.) I chose the HP dvd300i (though I did consider Sony’s multi-format DRU500AX). The HP drive is a …
My home theater setup was graced with both a DVD Changer and a TiVo unit this past Christmas. The TiVo is soooo cool. It’s basically a little Linux box with a hard drive in it that allows you to pause and rewind live TV and easily record your favorite shows using an on-screen guide. The …
My home theater setup was graced with both a DVD Changer and a TiVo unit this past Christmas. The changer is the Panasonic DVD-CP67S, a sleek, silver, 5-disc progressive scan unit with all the trimmings. In addition to DVDs, it will play audio CDs, VCDs, MP3 CDs, and Windows Media discs. Using the component video …
I found out quick that using the Microdrive along with my iPAQ to play MP3s on the road wasn’t a perfect solution. The Microdrive would only hold about 50 songs, suck the iPAQ’s batteries dry, and using Windows Media Player is not exactly my idea of fun. At the same time, I was looking at …
Since I have several gadets that use the CompactFlash standard for expansion media, I purchased a 340mb IBM Microdrive during a recent promotional offer ($50 rebate, so the hard drive, plus a USB CF reader, was only $100). This tiny, quarter-sized hard drive is amazing. Used with my Pocket PC, I can store a few …
My USB hub was a Christmas present. With the digital camera, wireless network device, web cam, and iPAQ all vying for the two USB ports on my PC, I was getting a little sick of constantly switching cables around. This powered four-port hub from Belkin solved that problem and brought the ports up onto my …