Welcome to UnprotectedTechs. I’ve been living a life of high risk behaviour in the world of gadgets. Get the real world low-down from here so you don’t catch a bad case of buyer’s remorse. They don’t make any good creams for it.
The Force Is Not With Him: Anakin Skywalker 10 Years Later
Man, this makes me truly sad. I’m not sure i would have hated him any less than the rest of the world did but the mantle this guy has to carry has to be so much worse than the lament of the “star wars kid”. who had to move and change schools. I’m surprised little anakin made it out uninjured.
poor kid.
Microsoft patent makes smartphones more like PCs – Network World
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2009/013009-microsoft-patent-makes-smartphones-more.html
M$ seems to be wanting to patent the singularity, tomorrow the Wheel.
10 Things Every Digital Nomad Needs… and 15 They Might Want
http://www.forevergeek.com/gadgets/10_things_every_digital_nomad_needs_and_15_they_might_want.php
Not a bad article. The only thing that i felt was left out was that once you truly go nomad weight and battery life become much more of an issue.Netbooks and pocketPC are reaching a convergence thankfully… hopefully soon. The Raon Everun has been the closest convergent product to date for many reasons. IMHO of course. Back to point, you’ll find yourself looking to trade processing power for longer battery life. At which point you will realize how much of a resource hog most high quality applications are and look for lighterweight alternatives. Also as you migrate from yesterday’s best device for you to tomorrow’s best device you will get sick of reinstalling and keeping serial numbers and CD keys around. There are a great deal of USB key portable applications that can live on a netbook, run on netbook cpu’s without gobbling power and be very easily migrated to another machine. You can still find a few people developing programs in Assembly which will smoke any win32 native apps for speed and footprint. Gathering up a collection of these apps has become a bit of an underground. Anyone interested in going nomad should definitely start developing a cache of these applications.
www.portablefreeware.com
www.portableapps.com
The 2 best sites IMHO for portable resources.
Balloon Animal Style. Not exactly safe for work.
I’m going to try and get Durex to sponsor the site.
Celestron USB microscope
Okay, this thing is kinda fun.
Well built.
High intensity LEDs surround the lens clearly illuminating the subject.
Clear base makes it easy to center on target.
Focus/magnification wheel is stiff, difficult to turn but once you get used to it is not a big deal at 20x resolution becomes pretty encumbering at 400x.
Smaller than a soda can, about the size of 2 D batteries stacked on each other.
Very minimalist software, feels like raw OS level windows drivers.
Great picture and resolution.
Mine has a few specs on the sensor somewhere. Can’t be reached so far.
USB powered!!
Navigon 7200t GPS
Day 1.
I like it. Seems to work as described.
- Nice interface.
- Touch screen is responsive.
- comes with a screen guard.
- smaller than it looks in pictures. Cell phone sized.
Look for updates on:
- traffic updates
- signal acquisition time
- mp3 playing
———————————————————-
took my first real trip with the navigon last weekend.
Real time traffic: a little bit of a let down. Gets data from an alert service. This service is like a National Weather Service system. Pretty generic, only reports something if there’s a public incident. So you only get notified if there’s an accident on your route not traffic congestion. It does not seem like it’s going to replace google maps +traffic on my blackberry which shows congestion for the major highways which helps me choose my commute path home each day.
Signal acquisition is pretty fast. 15 seconds average.
Battery life has been pretty disappointing. ~2 hours and it wastes a decent amount of battery in it’s standby mode. Expect to leave it plugged in.
The included cigarette lighter adapter is ungainly. The connector is straight and sticks out from the bottom edge of the device. Means you have to give it another 2inches from the bottom of the device for mounting considerations. Some other usb chargers send power over the data lines which will put the device into PC connected mode and turn off navigation. Big design oversight if you ask me.
Other than those concerns really like this GPS. The cpu is fast, it updates the screen quickly and voice instructions come fast and before NOT AFTER you need to hear them.
The lane assistant is surprisingly helpful. It basically gives you a picture of the roadsigns and lanes in front of you and helps orient you to show you where you need to be.
Guiding Principles
Well, this is where i will start to outline what type of tech user I am so that you will know where i’m coming from as I rate things. This will be almost as important as the reviews themselves. You need to check how my lifestyle meshes with yours to see if my opinion should mean something to you.
POWER: Having a gizmo that doesn’t work is worse than not having one at all.
- 5hours+ runtime on a rechargeable minimum to carry a proprietary charger.
- AA / AAA batteries. Preferable.
- USB charging rechargeables. Acceptable.
I carry serveral external laptop batteries for each computer I travel with. I need 4 hours use any real instance.
For major outings i use my solar powered xantrex mobile power supply.
For Minor outings, My APC universal laptop battery +usb ports.
For day to day i keep Duracell rechargeables, the pre-charged varieties, They hold their charge for MUCH longer than the other types of rechargeables. Similar to the Eneloops.
There’s nothing worse than a device you can’t use when you want it.
