Samsung 172N 17″ monitor

Samsung 172nIf 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 DX15F (a 15″ CRT) at a computer show in July 1993. So it was no wonder, almost 10 years later (sense a pattern here?) that it was starting to get dimmer and blurrier. Sounds like a good excuse to me to make the jump to an LCD monitor!

I selected the Samsung 172N, a black, thin-bezelled 17″ flat screen LCD. With its native resolution of 1280×1024 I have plenty of screen real estate, fonts are crisp and colors are good. The only annoying thing so far: one dead pixel, stuck on green (according to the Samsung site, however, a certain number of dead pixels are acceptable, so there’s not much I can do about it). Now I have a lot more room on my desk and the screen is farther away from my eyes … good news all around.

hp dvd300i burner

hp DVD300iNow 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 +R/+RW format rewritable drive, and I had read that these formats are compatible on 85% of the DVD players out there. I guess I should have considered the fact that my DVD player was made by Panasonic, who is one of the originators of the -R/-RW format. Ooops! As a result, the DVD movie collections I create on my PC won’t play in my living room (or my laptop for some reason). They play fine on my PC, of course, since they play on the same drive that created them. Anyway, I love having the large capacity (4.6gb) of DVD discs now for backups and such. Just beware when researching compatibility!

TiVo Series2 DVR

TiVo GuyMy 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 physical setup was a breeze (just like a VCR) and the software configuration only took about an hour. After that I was able to interact with live TV, set up a season pass (to record all those new episodes of “Farscape”, and search for new programming. There’s too much to write here, so visit their web site or the TiVo Community Forum for more information. This thing is great!

Panasonic DVD-CP67S

Panasonic DVD-CP67My 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 connections to my plamsa display (along with progressive scan mode) and the optical audio outputs to my receiver, I have great theater sound and picture.

Archos Jukebox Studio 20

Jukebox 20I 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 portable hard drives so I could actually carry around large files and applications, more than I could fit on CompactFlash.

Enter the Archos Jukebox Studio 20. This little gizmo has a 20gb hard drive in it and doubles as a USB hard drive and a portable MP3 player. It’s a little on the heavy side, and the user interface needs work, but it’s usable and the battery life is pretty good (rechargeable, too). It even has a line out so I can connect it to my home stero and have hours of music. I’ve got a little over 1,000 tracks on it now and still have gigs left over. There’s even an open-source project to write new firmware for it, called RockBox. Had the Windows-compatible iPod been available when I bought the Jukebox, I might have gone for that, but I am very happy with the device.

IBM Microdrive

IBM MicrodriveSince 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 hours of MP3s to take on the road. With the USB CF reader, I use it to shuttle large files back and forth between my work and home machines. Very convenient. I worry a little about damaging it, since, unlike regular CF cards it does have moving parts, but other than that, the technology is amazing.

Belkin USB hub

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 desk for easier reaching at the same time.

RoadRunner broadband

When I moved from Ohio to Florida, my new house was not in range for DSL service and I had to switch to cable: RoadRunner. Installation was not nearly as smooth as DSL since the cable tech had to run a new, dedicated, cable line into my home office, but after that, everything was fine. It seems to be faster than the DSL I had in Ohio, and according to SpeedGuide.net and DSLReports.com, I am getting better throughput. Having sampled both DSL and cable, now, I’m hard-pressed to choose one over the other. They both seem to be excellent ways to get high-speed access to the internet.

Logitech QuickCam Pro

Logitech QuickCamOnce I got broadband access, I decided to try out one of those eyeball-shaped Internet cameras. I chose Logitech’s USB QuickCam Pro. It was a snap to connect and configure: install the software, plug in the USB cable, and you’re up and running. Using SpyCam I was able to set up my own WebCam! It can also work as a motion-detector (recording video for a few seconds when it detects movement), an interface for immersive video games (something I’ve never tried), and useful for video conferencing (I personally use Eyeball Chat).

Orion XT6 telescope

Orion XT6This is technology of a different sort, but still cool. While in Arizona earlier this year on vacation, my wife and I stopped at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff. The visit rekindled our childhood interests in astronomy. For our combined birthdays, we bought an Orion XT6 Dobsonian: a Newtonian reflector telescope with a 6″ mirror and 1200mm focal length. So far we’ve had a blast observing the Moon, Saturn, Jupiter, and nearby stars.