More on Gadgets

On Friday, I had my first stint watching videos on the Creative Zen V Plus. I wasn’t completely sold, but I have to sat it was quite an agreeable experience. When I synced it up, I let it move and transcode every video I had downloaded on the XP box, so there are about 25 of them. Because they get bigger with the uncompressed AVI format, that almost completely filled up the 4 GB device. I watched 5 or 6 of them during lunchtime Friday and thought it was quite pleasant. Even though the screen is small, it was perfectly watchable. I’m looking forward to making this a normal part of my podcast workflow and being able to watch vlogs on the go.

The downside: the revived Win XP box which worked for a day and a half seems convinced to take a dump and now won’t even restart. I’m going to try to find the install disks from somewhere and just start this box over again. If nothing else, my brother-in-law has them and I can get them from him the next time I see him.

Also, we went ahead and got upgraded cell phones last week. We had served out our 2 year contract and were eligible for new ones, so I got the Nokia 6126. It seems nice enough. It takes fairly lousy video, better photos and generally seems like a decent device. I haven’t made a lot of phone calls yet to judge quality of the telephony. Nowadays it seems like call quality is at best a tangential issue in picking a model, since it is all the gee-whiz features that one uses to make a decision.

One nice thing is that I was able to transfer the numbers from my old phone to my new SIM card. I had always thought they were automatically there but that’s not the case apparently. I had to do delete a few to make my address book small enough to fit on it, but that saves me a huge amount of rekeying of data. I think I’ll miss the automatic syncing of the old cellphone with my iBook. I don’t think the new one will do it, at least with my un-upgraded 10.3.9 box.

So, for a guy who wants to stay off the eternal nerd treadmill of reaching for the newest and shiniest thing, I seem to have a lot of new stuff. Of course, none of it is that new and all of it was pretty cheap (or free.)

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dave

Dave Slusher is a blogger, podcaster, computer programmer, author, science fiction fan and father. Member of the Podcast Hall of Fame class of 2022.