KJH World » Gadgets

Covering CES 2009

kjh — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 14:55:25 +0000

Just a quick update. I’m in Las Vegas again covering the Consumer Electronic Show once more. How to follow: one or more of these:

Gizmos for Geeks’ RSS feed
Gizmos for Geeks’ Twitter feed
My FriendFeed

CES 2008 – Vegas Again!

kjh — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 08:55:33 +0000

You gotta love it – start a blog out of your bedroom, and qualify to attend the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) as a member of the press. Yup, I can actually say I did that with my buddy Doug. We’re attending CES again this year. Yes, it’s not just wandering around aimlessly trying to snag what you can for free, but even this kind of ‘work’ is a lot of fun for tech geeks like us.

We’ll be posting articles as we have time, and you can see them all on Gizmos for Geeks. Better yet, subscribe to our RSS feed so that you’ll get the articles the minute they are published. Don’t know how to do that? Hit this “How to Subscribe to an RSS Feed” mini tutorial I wrote.

Potential Buyers Holding out on Version 1 of iPhone

kjh — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 18:20:53 +0000

This is hardly the first article on the subject, but Reuters has a piece vaguely saying that some consumers are waiting on improvements or even a new version altogether before buying an iPhone. It would have been nice if they actually included some hard stats, instead of the opinions of just 3 people! Yes, yes, this is always true – there are always interested consumers who wait to see how others fare with a product before diving in themselves. But… based on my own (unscientific) experience, I actually believe the technology-buying public is becoming smarter – they’re not buying into new hype the second it comes out, because they’re learning that companies are more interested in getting the product out there quickly and fixing the smaller issues later on down the line.

Here’s hoping that Apple does in fact get it right with the iPhone to start with. However, considering how many iterations and firmware updates of the iPod there have been, I expect the same to be true of the iPhone. The thing that keeps Apple in the game and people flocking to their products is the design. So to Apple’s competitors – start hiring some more creative designers, so that we can get sexy gadgets that also function tremendously well starting with version 1.0.

PS> I think this is the first article from a major news outlet that I’ve seen where they used the word ‘wonky’!

GfG 2.0 Launches

kjh — Sun, 24 Jun 2007 01:03:31 +0000

To think that I started my blog with one of my (shameless) intentions being to plug the rest of my Internet biz, and yet I’ve failed to plug the new version of our flagship site, Gizmos for Geeks. It has been a whole week! Ok, so I’ve been a little busy…

Yup, so we moved platforms, and did a little redesigning. It’s definitely faster now, and there are more of the standard blogging type niceties that people have come to expect. Let us know what you think. Now we can consider it plugged.

While I’m at it, we also quietly launched some related gadget blogs in the way of Gizmos for Babies and Gizmos for Kids. Yup, I’m not kidding. There’s a lot of gadgets out there in just those categories. Even I’m amazed at how many things there are for babies.

If this whole ‘making money on the Web’ thing starts to take off, perhaps we’ll start a blog on how we’ve done it/are doing it… Stay tuned.

At Last – GPS Nav System with Voice Recognition

kjh — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 03:12:56 +0000

Particularly good for drivers, Magellan is due to release a new GPS navigation device that ‘understands’ some basic voice commands like “go home”, “nearest bank”, etc. It is about time, given how long voice activated devices have been around. Granted that its ‘vocabulary’ is limited, that’s ok; it’s for a focused activity device.

The Masetro 4050 should be available in May for about $700. A little pricey, but hey, you’ll get to order your electronics around for a change.

Storage: What Hardware to Get?

kjh — Sat, 07 Apr 2007 19:50:36 +0000

I was ~~prompted~~ finally pushed to write about this after running across a couple of articles on specific hardware that you could use as your main data storage. The question of how best to store data at home has become a growing one in the past few years as more people have broadband Net connections and have been filling their hard drives up with downloads (mainly videos and music). Having 500GB of capacity in a household is not a surprising thing any more. I’m already starting to think that the 1.5TB array that I chose in Dec for my new rig isn’t going to be enough.

Onto our products… Last year, one of my friends (who knew I was spec’ing out a new box) asked me if I knew any good external RAID enclosures, but I was lazy and didn’t go looking. Recently, Jeremy [LiveDigitally] blogged about his next choice of storage – a ReadyNas NV+ from Infrant. This is a device that you stick on your network (it’s not directly connected to a single computer), and while they have multiple models, this one holds 4 SATA drives and uses RAID to ensure data redundancy. Infrant even has something unique they call X-RAID that claims to let you dynamically add disks as you need them.

Next up is the Drobo [via Gizmodo] which is connected to a single machine via USB 2.0. Watch the demo video – it’s pretty impressive. It automatically handles data redundancy (they don’t say how), and you can hot swap in any sized disks into any of the 4 slots. Drobo also monitors your drives for issues and moves data around automatically. At $700, it’s a little more pricey than just a RAID enclosure, but could be well worth it for the convenience factor. I’ll be really interested when they produce a networked version of this box.

Gizmos for Geeks launches!

kjh — Tue, 06 Jul 2004 08:20:47 +0000

So what good is running a mailing list (or a blog) if I can’t plug my own stuff, eh?!

Doug (a friend I work with at ISX) and I recently built an info/review/community website that focuses on the latest gadgets, gizmos and toys.

We launched the site today and are now in a beta-testing phase. You special folks on my mailing list get to be part of the elite first-view audience. (Do you like how I’m laying on the compliments?!)

We would really appreciate it you can take a few minutes to register, log in, take a look around and give us some feedback. You can e-mail us at feedback@gizmosforgeeks.com.

And without further ado, here’s the site:

Gizmos for Geeks

The New Sony Playstation

kjh — Wed, 18 Aug 1999 17:51:03 +0000

Man, this sounds cool. The highlight of the article: this puppy can
render 75 million polygons per second, while current 3D graphic cards
can only pump out upto 5 million polygons per sec.

I still like my Atari 2600…

http://www.wired.com/news/news/technology/story/21301.html