Helium Digital Leatherback Flip iPhone / iPod Touch Case

An iPod Touch – or an iPhone, if you really felt you needed a phone that was smarter than most of your friends – will start looking a lot less leading edge after it’s been used for a while. Scratches, dents, a damaged screen and a few unidentifiable stains can serve to make these icons of technology and general coolness resemble leftovers from an upmarket garage sale.

This is, of course, why there are cases available for these devices. In fact, there are a bewildering number of cases available for them, ranging from really cheesy and objectionable ones, right on up to rhodium-plated micro-sarcophagi hand-tooled with Edwardian hunting scenes. Most of these suffer from the same palette of shortcomings, too – they’re either too ugly to look at without suffering permanent retinal damage; they’re too awkward to use, causing them to be hurled across the room in time; or they offer no detectable protection for that which they encase.

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Blue Snowball USB Microphone

Just this side of too cool to be real, the Blue Snowball is neither blue nor made of snow. It is, however, one of the slickest devices in the known universe to plug into a USB port.

In ages past, getting sound into a PC was a bit of a labor. The options for doing so included plugging a conventional microphone into the audio input of your sound card – which worked flawlessly, but typically sounded like a long-distance call to Mars – or springing for an expensive and mind-numbingly complex external analog to digital converter, and then hiring a team of research alchemists to consult on how to install the beast.

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Rogers W35 Rocket Mobile Hub

This review arguably won’t be of much interest should you happen to reside outside Canada – Canada being Mr. Rogers’ neighborhood. For the passing interest of those fortunate enough to enjoy a more robust national telecommunications industry, Rogers is one of the three primary telecommunications companies in Canada.

Can you say “oligarchy?” I knew you could.

It’s a source of pride and gratification to the people who write speeches for Canadian politicians that the populace of Canada is among the world’s most connected. Something like 85 percent of Canadians access the Internet. This statistic is a bit misleading, however, in that a fair number of them still access it though dial-up modems, just as their forefathers did in the preceding century.

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Dell Inspiron 15 Laptop

In my darkest imaginings, I want one of those road-warrior laptops with a machined aluminum case about as thick as an in-flight magazine; a high-resolution display panel suitable for performing remote-control brain surgery; flawless surround sound through speakers slightly smaller than a quarter and fewer ports and interface devices than a toaster.

Admittedly, such laptops have several drawbacks. They’re largely unusable – there’s not a lot you can do with no mouse, no CD-ROM drive and twenty minutes of battery life. They’re also preposterously expensive.

The Inspiron 15 is something of a digital Volkswagen, and it’s a great computer to consider once you get your brain past the whole up-market credit-card bruising section of the computer isle at Best Buy. Attractive, not unduly weighty, nicely thought out and affordable, it’s a laptop that’s comfortable on jeans, rather than Armani trousers.

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Bushwacker Street Flares

Pickup trucks are like sports cars without a cloth top – really, really big sports cars. Unless you actually bought a truck to get some work done, you’ll probably want to indulge the inner sports car in yours. Some tasteful customization will be called for.

This having been said, there’s an ill-defined boundary between a few artful touches of plastic and steel, and what looks like the aftermath of an all-you-can-eat buffet at a local accessory shop.

Never attach anything to your truck bearing the chromed silhouette of a reclining woman.

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Red Dwarf Back to Earth

Red Dwarf has arguably been an acquired taste since it first appeared in 1988. A strange, twisted science-fiction comedy, it was everything North American science fiction television wasn’t. Its plots were preposterous, its special effects all appeared to involve flashlights, its sets moved when someone bumped into them and its characters were all clinically insane.

It was born to have a cult following.

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Sanctuary Season One

Some of the best science fiction to show up in a box in a long time, Sanctuary is edgy, unpredictable and periodically very, very strange.

Doctor Helen Magnus is 157 years old, although as a result of some stealthy Victorian medical experimentation, she hides her age quite well. She runs a sanctuary for mutants, genetic anomalies and other beings of latex and CGI. She and her entourage of fearless monster hunters sneak around tracking down new mutants.

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Ridgid 2 ½-inch Straight Finishing Nailer model R250SFA

Nailing trim by hand was originally devised as method of punishing unrepentant criminals who stubbornly refused to recycle their plastic bottles. Outlawed in several European countries as barbaric, cruel and inhumane, the practice remains legal in most jurisdictions in North America. Despite the outrage expressed by human rights agencies around the world, the carnage prevails to this day.

While it seems like a trivial matter, driving hundreds of finishing nails into wooden baseboards and moldings without splitting the wood or mashing your fingers is about as easily accomplished as getting a believable answer out of a Canadian cabinet minister.

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Wii Sports Resort

I’ve never killed an alien with our Wii console. None of the games we own involve first persons shooting anything. In fact, I’m pretty sure none of the characters therein are capable of dying.

Unlike more heavily-marketed game consoles, Wii is pastoral, social and very nearly uplifting. If you’re not careful, you might switch it off and find yourself still humming the background music that accompanies its games.

You can buy vicious, blood-soaked carnage-fest games for Wii, of course… you just aren’t required to.

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Melnor 3015 Electronic AquaTimer

An electronic watering timer is about as essential to personal agriculture as shovels, agro-chemicals and seeds. We use them to water our greenhouse, wherein one or two forgetful days can turn rows of potted vegetables into all the sun-dried tomatoes you can stand.

A watering timer will automatically open a valve to water whatever it’s connected to several times a day, for as many minutes as your plants need or your well can manage, as the case may be.

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Tascam DR-100 Digital Audio Recorder

Easily among the coolest, most worthwhile boxes of technology we’ve seen all year, the only unfortunate aspect of the Tascam DR-100 is that it’s somewhat specialized, and as such only a relatively small cadre of users will have the opportunity to experience its coolness. Unless you like buying technology as desk ornaments, you’d actually need to have an application for one of these things to be able to justify owning it.

The DR-100 is a professional portable audio recorder. It’s comparable to the portable digital audio tape recorders of a decade ago, although it’s considerably smaller, lighter, cheaper, more rugged and easier to use. About the size of a fat book, it can record CD-quality sound on SD memory cards. Actually, it can do better than CD-quality sound, if you have a use for it.

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Apple iPod Touch

I own a really excellent cell phone – it’s not “smart” in the accepted sense of the word for mobile devices; it doesn’t have a keyboard; it won’t run applications; and turning it on its side just makes its display more difficult to read. In its defense, however, it will fit in my pocket, it has superb reception and it doesn’t present me with a monthly bill that looks like a senior civil servant’s expense account.

This being the case, the aspect of the Apple iPhone I really can’t get along with is its phone.

The iPod Touch is for the most part an iPhone with no phone. It offers the same intuitive user interface, it runs the same applications and it looks every bit as cool. However, having bought one, you won’t have to keep re-paying for it every month.

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Sennheiser LX 70 Sport Headphones

There’s a remarkable wealth of technology available to avoid using headphones with a portable music player – the house favorite is a tiny transmitter, such as the Griffin iTrip, to play them through a nearby FM radio. Clearly, this isn’t always appropriate behavior. Turning someone’s radio into in impromptu jazz station is likely to be grounds for fisticuffs or pistols at twenty paces.

The alternative – stuffing plastic discs into your ears – just isn’t natural. The ear buds that come with most music players appear to have been designed for the ears of creatures other than human beings. Uncomfortable and prone to dislodging themselves during any movements more vigorous than REM sleep, they’re a poor substitute for a decent audio reproduction device.

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Belkin N+ Wireless Router

High-speed wireless Internet routers are about as rare as governments spending money they don’t have, and most of them are almost as easy to understand. Presumably difficult to design, their creators clearly feel that they should be difficult to use as well.

The Belkin N+ router is a cheerful exception to this observation – oozing with features, impeccably built and not unbearably ugly if you catch sight of it, it will likely distinguish itself as the easiest router you’ve ever installed. It certainly did so for us.

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Koutech HU1300 13-Port USB Hub

There’s nothing remarkable about this device, save that it exists and that it actually works. As a rule, USB hubs come with four ports, and they typically arrive in packaging that suggests you should be grateful for that many.

While you can use multiple hubs, or hubs plugged into other hubs, the result is usually both messy and potentially troublesome. Each hub will add some propagation delay, or “latency,” to your network of USB devices, and this can degrade their operation.

By comparison, the HU1300 hub will let you plug up to thirteen USB 2.0 devices into it, and in so far as we’ve been able to tell, it doesn’t even break a sweat if you max it out.

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Nikon Monarch 12X56 Binoculars

It’s surprising how few people have ever looked through a really good pair of binoculars. Squinting through cheap optics from Walmart isn’t the same thing at all.

As glass goes, Nikon’s Monarch binoculars are truly amazing. Plant your eyes behind them, focus them and you’ll find yourself reaching out to try to touch something that’s two hundred feet away. Their flawless lenses and prisms lack even a suggestion of the optical aberrations that are all over the view of low-cost binoculars. Rather than peering through a tube, these things are like watching high-definition television.

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Sirius Satellite Radio

Satellite radio certainly seemed like a cool idea, and we dithered for ages over subscribing to it. Being able to fire up a radio and have it play actual music, rather than a few tunes hammered into the dead air between commercials and babbling announcers, would arguably be worth paying for.

When the competing Sirius and XM satellite networks merged in 2007, satellite radio seemed even cooler.
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Profile PT-2700 Tuner

Tuning guitars and other stringed instruments is a lot less fun than playing them. Perhaps more to the point, it’s a bit subjective. Accurate tuning is essential if you’re playing with other musicians, or recording.

Electronic tuners have existed for decades – some of the early ones were pretty wild. Our digs are littered with Korg chromatic tuners, matchbox-size devices which will listen to whatever’s being tuned and indicate the note it’s playing with a line on an LCD panel.

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Epiphone Les Paul Prophesy Custom GX Guitar

The Gibson Les Paul I’ve played since just after the dawn of time is a much-beloved instrument, but nothing lasts forever. New frets, new pickups and new wiring would have cost more than a new axe.

New Gibsons are seriously expensive, and to some extent, the financial carnage attending one sticks to the name on its neck as much as to the fire in its strings.

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Western Digital My Book Essential Edition USB Hard Drive

While external USB hard drives have been extant for several years, most of them have been funky, nasty or possessed of installation procedures with levels of complexity that rivaled a liberal politician caught with an open microphone.

The Western Digital My Book external hard drive is none of these things. Nicely engineered by a manufacturer that has been making hard drives since the late middle ages, it has proven to be utterly reliable in the time we’ve used one. It also has an installation procedure so simple as to defy the need for documentation. Plug in its power adapter. Plug in its USB connector. Pat yourself roundly on the back.

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