IGU.fi » gadgets

Taking it a step too far

IGU — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 18:24:33 +0000

Rant time.

Enthusiast websites and forums can be a gold mine for information but getting unbiased information is almost impossible. You also encounter individuals that seem to have taken their devotion just a bit too far. And this seem to happen in almost any topic. Let me give you a couple of examples:

Shaving. Sounds simple enough, eh? Wet/lubricate your facial hair and either manually move a blade around your face or have a machine vibrate a set of blades for you. But then you find a forum like badgerandblade.com that does give a newbie like me a lot of good advice on traditional wet shaving with a double edged blade – but at the same time it also suggests that having a “shaving den” is a perfectly normal thing to have.

What else .. oh yes, music and hi-fi as a hobby is common enough and those cool basements that are turned into a home theater rooms seem a bit excessive but still completely understandable. Also the debates that you see on hi-fi forums on which cables and “audio stones” give more sonic satisfaction without any scientific evidence seem silly but fairly harmless placebo-effect-at-work. However, when you decide to turn a big hall into a 6 million dollar “home” theater which is just one big mess of cables and equipment racks, it just doesn’t make any sense to me. The justification for that enterprise was that it’s a “demo system” and it’s used to get people to buy more similar systems from him.

I don’t care how rich you are but I’m pretty sure that anyone with an option to drop 6.000.000 $ to the table for a home theater system, will demand a lot more than stacks of really expensive equipment in warehouse in exchange for their hard-earned money.

There are a number of other examples but at least in some cases, the very best are still “reasonably” attainable, though the bang-for-the-buck ratio can be seriously questioned.

For example: a nice bespoken suit can go past 5000£ at Savile Row but at least you’re getting a huge number of man hours put into each of the suits and they are all hand made from scratch to perfection every time. And, as a final example, my quest for the perfect espresso-machine showed me that the top end for home market stops at around 6000€, which I would never spend for a coffee maker but it’s still a reasonable price for a long term hobby.

(this post was moved from my old blog to igu.fi)

Robots are dog’s best friends

IGU — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 13:44:13 +0000

Here’s a wiener dog enjoying some catch with his new best friend.

Using your Nokia device as a WLAN access point

IGU — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 08:50:57 +0000

It’s a feature that’s been requested time and time again and finally someone got it done.

“JoikuSpot is a free mobile software solution that turns Nokia Smartphones to WLAN HotSpots.

JoikuSpot software is installed directly to the phone. When switched on, laptops and ipods can establish instant and fast wireless internet connection via smartphone’s JoikuSpot access point using phone’s own 3G internet connection.

Multiple devices can connect to JoikuSpot in parallel and seamlessly share the same 3G internet connection. JoikuSpot acts thus as an internet gateway to external WLAN devices.”

You can download or order the sw to be sent to your phone directly via joiku.com

Turn your iPhone/Touch into a über remote

IGU — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 10:52:05 +0000

More details here.

Tiny projector from 3M

IGU — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 09:18:10 +0000

It can only do VGA resolution but it fits to almost any kind of gadget. It’s not a laser projector though and uses LEDs but still.. Press release.

Highend pocket recorder from Olympus

IGU — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 10:10:33 +0000

Besides their legitimate uses the Olympus LS-10 recorder could take bootleg recordings to a whole new level.

Embended tiny projectors coming in 2008?

IGU — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 06:22:21 +0000

Tiny projector from Microvision is shown at the CES 2008:

Dubbed SHOW, the lensless PicoP projector is designed for home and business use, and uses tiny lasers to shoot a WVGA (848 by 480, roughly DVD resolution) image on virtually any surface that isn’t a dark color or textured. It can even project onto curved and uneven surfaces. From a distance of two feet, it could project a two-foot diagonal, full-color image on a white T-shirt. From five feet away, it could show a five-foot image on, say, a white wall or ceiling.

More at pcmag website, including a image gallery.