A Little Ludwig Goes A Long Way

Quad-CF PCI Controller from Addonics — Brett mentioned this in his comment on my macbook air, what a cool little product, add an SSD to any PC.

Just ordered Amazon.com: Advance Wars: Days of Ruin: Video Games based on the NYTimes review today. Have to wonder — when will we see a DS with wireless integration like the Kindle? I don’t buy games that often, cartridges and manuals are a pain, why can’t I just download the games wirelessly?

A Little Ludwig Goes A Long Way: Not too happy with my Drobo — I did finally get a support call with Drobo and they got it working. I had to go twiddle a BIOS setting having to do with legacy USB support. The Drobo folks claim this is the BIOS manufacturer’s fault and assert that other mass storage USB devices will fail as well. However I have had no problems with a variety of generic USB housings and with a LaCie box so I don’t think the Drobo folks have this really figured out yet. Additionally the Drobo software decided to grab drive M for their use which was bad as I already had a network drive mapped to M. So that was chunky and painful.

The box seems to work fine now tho.

Midi Madness — some wildly cool devices here that I would never use.

Why do all power strips have to be so ugly? I saw one in a downtown window that appeared to be a tower of cast stained concrete and it looked great. Why can’t you buy these anywhere? I am sick of the crappy plastic choices available. There is innovation to permit more transformers to plug in, and innovation to be more “green”, but why can’t these things look better? Is molded plastic really the only choice?

• Pacemaker — handheld DJ system. Absolutely no use for but I admire it
• ATP Photofinder — tag all photos with geocodes easily. Cool.
• Toshiba Portege G — not even a remote need but these just look cool
• RCA ipod competitor with wireless headphones — the phones are cool
• DVR in a pen. with bluetooth. Just because

TechForward: Guaranteed Buybacks for Consumer Electronics — via Marginal Revolution. Ideal for someone like me who surfs the wave of the latest technology.

• The Gadgets Weblog: Wacom Bamboo Fun — I’ve always wanted a tablet.
• Painter’s Pyramid — actually seem highly useful
• 160Megapixel camera — on the road to gigapixel cameras
• Sandisk TakeTV. this keeps calling out to me as the way to get home movies down on the tv.
• 8 core macpro with decent graphics options
• Garmin forerunner 405

Pioneer’s Kuro Plasma Will Deliver Absolute Black — Contrast Ratio Is ‘Officially Irrelevant’ | Gadget Lab from Wired.com — I’d like this, I hate the grayish emissions from most of my screens.

Too bad for them that their black has already been trumped — new “blackest” material — “You could think of a material that basically collects all the light that falls into it” — oh my gosh we are manufacturing black holes now, I knew this nanotech stuff was dangerous.

Data Robotics, Inc. | Knowledge Base — these things are getting fab reviews but

• my PC won’t boot with it attached — apparently there is some bios tweak i can do — yuck
• and even when i can see it, the pc doesn’t recognize it as a drive

the hardware seems nice but this is too much trouble.

Reversing Everything: Hacking the Kindle part 3: root shell and runtime system — minesweeper! photo viewer! screencap! easter egg! all kinds of great stuff here.

• Q-Chord — looks like a blast
• Self-tuning guitar — I think I actually need a self-playing guitar

• The Kindle is awesome. The awesomeness is due to the wireless delivery of books. And the fact that I can browse Amazon at my PC and direct books to my Kindle with one click. (Similarly, the Unbox/Tivo integration is awesome for the same reason — Amazon is silently building a great asset here). The book selection is soooo much broader than that for the Sony Reader.
• Call of Duty 4 is awesome. the ranking/challenge system keeps you engaged. Haven’t cracked the UT box yet, so entranced with COD4 – must get to 5-star general.
• Stupid little RC helicopters that we got are fun. Available from lots of vendors. Pretty uncontrollable, watch out lamps!

Everything else is awesome too! I will blog it all in the fullness of time.

Probably crazy but we are trying to coerce an LG Viewty cellphone to work on ATTWireless — good tips here on how to get internet configured — Re: LG KU990 (Viewty) – Setting up Internet? – LG – Wireless Forums from AT&T

• Headphone Guitar Amp For Quiet Shredding — these are very useful
• I wonder if I could run jam sessions through these
• Amazonmp3 beta of course.

• Fujifilm Professional Photography – Products – Cameras – Digital Cameras: Fujifilm IS Pro — UV and IR photography, awesome.
• Blaupunkt car stereo accepts flash media — this seems pretty cool.
• Infolink GE phone — landlines start to catch up finally with cell phones for data services
• Car power strip — pretty handy. And plug one of these flashlights into one of the sockets.
• Sliding bolt combo lock. No more keys for the shed.
• Red One digital videocamera. Clearly overkill for anything I will ever do in my life.
• One headset to rule them all — skype, landline, cell. I am actually confused how this really works but seems cool.
• A bizarre little lamp from philips
• Night vision monocular

My Sony – Reader broke, Brad Feld has documented my support experience. Thankfully Sony was responsive and finally got it right, I have a brand new reader now and can get back to using it. I really like the device, and hopefully Sony will get the whole purchase and support solution right for everyone.

• BibMe – the fully automatic & free bibliography maker (MLA, APA & Chicago) — very cool
• Geni — i’m not really into family trees but this is actually kind of fun. I wish I could link trees with other users.
• Mobile google calendar — i stumbled on this yesterday on my phone. nice.
• Rich points to the sites to let you track private planes
• Retrevo – gadget search. Don’t know if this is useful yet or not.

Via Rahul at JB, All Things Distributed: On the Reliability of Hard Disks. Fascinating. A 6-10% failure rate for hard disks, wow.  Another great argument for redudant storage.

• Need a new tiny PC for carrying around — OQO 2.0? One of the small Sonys? I don’t need a desktop replacement, just something small for classroom/cafe use. If it is big, I won’t carry it.
• Need to set up an Amazon store. Maybe for Halloween.
• Microsoft Robotics Software — interesting, tho it requires download of so much crap.
• Mic zooming HD cameras.
• The annoying need for notepad paste. I do this and it’s graphic friend “paintbrush paste” all the freaking time.
• How to get slickrun to activate with Windows-R
• Photostamps. Personalized stamps. Another good halloween or xmas idea
• Aboutus. Intriguing.