The Samsung tho feels rock solid, a great body. The flash unit is slick. I am still grinding thru all the controls and don’t have an opinion yet on them. But one feature stands out — the AMOLED screen is gorgeous. Great contrast, vibrant, good in daylight. Really beautiful.

Now I just need to pick up some lenses for it — like the long zoom lens

And bags of converters of all types. Audio. Video. Male-to-female. Female-female. Splitters. Joiners. You name it.

With all these cables and converters, I needed storage solutions just for them. Bins, racks, etc. And I had to keep it all ordered so I could find stuff.

I am throwing it all out. Moving to a JIT system for cables — I’ll buy what i need on the fly. Because having a massive inventory of spares has never saved me a trip to Fry’s or a Newegg rush order. I always need the one connector I don’t have.

But dammit, the in-ear gel plugs pop off constantly and get lost. 

Speculation: the tangling of the cord actually protects and secures the removable gel plugs. Mathematicians, get on this one. (Or alternatively – the gel plugs actually attract the cable and encourage tangling, this seems less likely.)

And if so, then earbuds actually conform to a universal law. The sum of tangle frustration and lost plug frustration is constant. The greater the tangling, the less likely you are to lose the plugs. The more plugs you lose, the less tangling you get. 

Rich, please advise on shredders next.

• LED showerhead with remote control. Wrong on so many levels.
• Barking USB Dog. Just because you can make something, doesn’t mean you should.
• RoadKill Rug. High fashion in parts of West Virginia.
• DIY Liquid Nitrogen Generator. A thousand and one uses.
• The Thing Quarterly. No need to pick out an unusual useless trinket for your dad, let The Thing send him one regularly.
• Screw the Weber grill, get him a Fuego modular outdoor kitchen

I remember back in my first job, working on automotive electronics strategies, someone asked me “how small can a CD player be” and to me it was clear — size would be dominated by the media and the controls, not by the internal electronics.

When we started buying PCs and TVs and cellphones and other gadgets, their sizes were dominated by internal considerations — tubes and motherboards and drives and power supplies and electronics and antennas and all kinds of crud. And we are still in the last stages of this — desktop computers are still big boxy things, many laptops are big chunky things. But thanks to Moore’s law, the electronics are in the last stages of disappearing, and with them the big clunky power supplies, and awkward big antennas, spinning disks, etc. The gadgets we carry will have their sizes driven by human interaction needs, and those damn batteries (getting batteries down in size/weight is a hard problem).

Which is why I think questions like “Which will win, the Kindle or iPad”, or “Will the iPad replace notebooks” are ultimately not very interesting. When gadgets all are lightweight and no bigger than they have to be, and electronics are basically free, and connectivity is ubiquitous, you’ll carry all kinds of these things around or have them in your house and not worry about it, just like we never worried about books vs magazines vs newspapers.