iPod Nano

OK if you haven't seen one of these things in person yet you simply can't understand how truly small it is. I've heard the description that it's the size of 7 credit cards stacked up and that's a very fair description. I held it up to my wallet thing that I use (which is basically a money clip with a credit card pouch) and it really is that small. I was telling my friend that had it that it's only a matter of time before somebody comes up with a men's and women's wallet for it.



I personally have the 40Gb iPod and never thought I'd fill it. I'm actually about 55% of capacity and I still have probably 50 cds that I need to eventually load on it. But I've got to admit that 4Gb is an awful lot of music and I probably listen to less than that amount on my iPod as it is. This amount is perfect for a work out, or a long road trip, or even a weeks vacation. The fact that it's a flash memory unit means less stuff to go wrong and it probably doesn't have any issues with bouncing or such associated with running. (Not that I've ever had any problems with my iPod skipping nor that I would ever actually run for any reason short of someone chasing me.)

We'll see how Apple keeps doing with these things, but right now they seem to be rolling right along.....

-Kent

External Hard Drive

I've been in the hunt for a good, low cost, external hard drive for a little while. I've been doing the usual debate of exactly what I should get and was looking at everything from tiny cheap units, to larger networked items. I finally decided on getting a Maxtor 200Gb unit.

So far it's worked very well. Setup was a breeze and the speed is pretty good. I can honestly use it for more then just backing up data. I've been putting the files that I transfer from TiVo (see my review) there and it works great transfering the files for viewing back. No delays are seen and it still leaves my main hard drive running pretty light so I can be doing other things with that.

I did a full backup from my desktop to it the other night and it did take a while, but we're talking about copying an awful lot of data so I didn't really mind. I'll probably change the settings in the near future so that it only backs up my relevant data and not the entire program files of things that I could just reinstall if I ever needed too. (No sense in backing up hundreds of megabits of graphics from MS Flight Simulator and such.)

So overall a decent product. If anyone has suggestions on similar products let me know. I'll probably be getting another one in the near future if I keep finding stuff that I just can't live without in the digital world!!!

-Kent

Google Reader

Over the last week I've been playing with the latest Google product: Google Reader. Basically this is an RSS Aggregator that pulls feeds from blogs that you subscribe too so that you can read new postings without having to go and manually visit all those blog sights.

I've been reading some blogs for quite a while. Lately I've been following some of them more and more as I get a little more personally into this whole idea. The concept of anyone being able to publish thoughts to the entire planet is really pretty amazing. I actually get a lot of my information now from the web, and a lot of that is from RSS feeds that show up on my homepage of either My Yahoo or now Google Homepage.

Google Reader is apparently built on the new software called AJAX. I won't get into a great deal about what this involves here but it appears to be a new way of programming web sites for the future. It allows a great deal of flexibility for the programmer and the user alike.

The reader itself took me a few minutes to get use to using. Since it's still a Beta release from Google Labs there isn't a great deal of help information for it. But after a few minutes of experimenting I was able to figure it out and so far it's been working great. I'm assuming that when it's fully released it will be cleaned up a bit more to make the initial user experience a bit easier. Most likely anyone using an aggregator is a bit higher up on the computer savy end and will be able to figure it out like I did.

With the reader you are able to "star" entries like you can with Gmail so that you can go back and look at them again later. I would LOVE to see something like the "label" feature from Gmail so that I could save items related to different things. I'm assuming that the "filter" item is designed to help with that, but I honestly haven't tried using that too much yet.

Another cool feature is the easy ability to email an entry out via Gmail or to blog about an entry right from the entry itself. So far this has worked pretty well in my basic experiments. Perhaps you'll see some more entries now from me on small stuff I find on the web.

So all in all I would recommend this product. Yet again Google seems to be on the edge of the curve for leading the web.

-Kent

TiVo Update

Well it's been a sort of crazy week or so and I haven't been able to update my thoughts on using TiVo. So finally I'm going to sit down and post my thoughts.

I'm still disappointed with the fact that TiVo doesn't have a two tuner input so that you can record one show and watch another. There is apparently a bypass feed so that you can use your TV as the second tuner and that's not so bad, but you lose the funcationality of being able to pause the show you are watching, but not recording. Whatever did I do before I could do that?

Overall it's been a very good experience. I wish the $150 rebate was easier to get, but I suppose part of the reason companies give rebates is that they know a lot of people will be too lazy to fill out all the stupid forms required to actually get the money in 6-8 weeks and so they'll never have to give it back. (I think they learned this from Health Insurance companies.)

So far the only thing I am honestly disappointed with is the TiVo Desktop software. One of the big reasons I got this was to be able to easily transfer shows to my computer and then eventually be able to burn them to DVDs. I haven't tried the DVD feature yet, but I have transfered a number of shows. The first problem is the speed of the transfer. It takes over 45 minutes to transfer a 30 minute show if recorded at high quality. I suppose I could record at lower quality, but why would I want to? (Honestly though the quality doesn't drop that huge if you do.) The transfer speed is livable though. I usually pick what shows I want to transfer and then just let it go while I'm eating dinner, or while I'm sleeping.

The biggest problem is just the reliability and speed of the software itself. For some reason it has a really hard time loading. I will get a warning message atleast once that says Tivo Desktop is taking an unusually long time to load and offers to let me retry or cancel. From a quick search around the TiVo forums this is not uncommon. Usually if I just hit retry it will eventually load. I don't think it's an issue with my computer, but could be. Haven't taken the time to really dig into it that far as I can eventually get it loaded and do what I need to do.

Watching programming on the computer isn't too bad. It can use Microsoft Windows Media Player for the viewing so that's not too bad. If I ever get around to saving up to get a larger monitor I will probably use this feature more as I'll have more room to put windows side by side so that I can keep working while watching sitcoms on the side. Yes I'm a TV junkie.

Well I think that's enough about TiVo for now. I'm sure I'll post more thoughts on this in the future as I play with more of the in depth features.

-Kent