Yesterday, I found out about the Beatmix Bumblebee while browsing Amazon.com. The bot was shown under the “New For You” section on the main page. Since I love robots and Transformers, I clicked on the picture to find out more.

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The great folks over at CleverMedia have produced some very good games for iPhone owners to play. Gary Rosenzweig made the games and Eve Park (Geek Girl) made the pretty icons.

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Recently, Judie did a post about the FunSlides Carpet Skates. Because of a technical glitch with our email server, I never got the team email about reviewing them. It was after Judie did her write up on the skates that I thought to myself, these may be just the thing to solve the problem my Robosapien robots have with walking on carpet. I mentioned this to Judie, and she thought it would be a great idea to let the bots volunteer.

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As many of you know, Michael Hess of Skooba Design, is one of Gear Diary’s sponsors. We recently were given the chance to return the favor when we helped sponsor him and his team in the Hospice Regatta.

As Michael told me in his initial email, “I am a crew member on a racing sailboat (“Blue Knight,”) and each year we participate in the Hospice Regatta—a series of races held to raise money for end-of-life and palliative care centers. Anyone who has had a friend or family member cared for by Hospice knows what an amazing service it provides in the most difficult circumstances imaginable. These serious, big-boat racing events, held in communities across the country, are one of the most significant—if not the leading—sources of funding for Hospice.”

For those of you that aren’t familiar with Hospice, I’ll borrow some of the excellent information available on the American Cancer Society site:

Hospice, in the earliest days, was a concept rooted in the centuries-old idea of offering a place of shelter and rest, or “hospitality” to weary and sick travelers on a long journey. Dame Cicely Saunders at St. Christopher’s Hospice in London first applied the term “hospice” to specialized care for dying patients in 1967. Today, hospice care provides humane and compassionate care for people in the last phases of incurable disease so that they may live as fully and comfortably as possible.

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[Note: This is a joint review between Clinton Fitch (Dot) Com! and Gear Diary, and it is being simultaneously posted on both sites. Clinton's comments appear in black; Judie's comments appear in italics.]

I love card games.  From the first time my mother taught me how to play Spades to my addition on Free Cell on Windows 95, card games have always been at the top of my list of things to keep myself entertained (Nintendo Wii aside of course).

I was more of an Uno kid while growing up, but once I discovered Solitaire, Pyramid, and Poker, I was hooked. Being able to play these games on a computer was the ultimate in convenience - no shuffling, I could play these games by myself, and learning intricate card layouts was not required…yay! The first card game I remember playing on a PDA was Pyramid, on my Casio Zoomer in 1993ish, I scratched that screen terribly!

While there have been a slew of card games made available for the Windows Mobile platform, few have had a comprehensive list of different types of card games you can play or, even worse, did not perform as well as they should have or were expected too.

That has changed with the release of Astraware Solitaire from the UK-based developer Astraware.  This collection of no less than 12 individual card games has a great range of difficulty levels, “luck” levels and packs hours of fun for players.  Top off the smooth game play, the variety of games and options and a Trophy Room to help celebrate your victories with great graphics and you end up with what has easily become the best card game application I have ever reviewed for Windows Mobile - hands down!

I would have to agree! Normally I don’t like to start a review by lauding the praises of the product, but from the moment I loaded an early release, I knew that Astraware Solitaire was going to be installed on all of my PDAs - present and future.

Astraware Solitaire is installed on your Windows Mobile Professional device via ActiveSync or Windows Mobile Device Center and requires approximately 4.7MB of storage space on your device.  You can installed the application on a storage card or in main memory, and your device must be running PocketPC 2002, 2003, 2003SE, Windows Mobile 5 or 6. Astraware Solitaire supports both QVGA and VGA and square screen devices, it is also available for Windows Mobile Standard devices.

Well, while we are listing the OSs that it plays nicely with, we should also mention Palm. As usual, Astraware has all of the popular formats covered.

When you start Astraware Solitaire for the first time, you are prompted to enter your name or alias. By doing this, all of your achievements will be tracked by the game which is important for the Trophy Room and your statistics.  With your name entered you are sent to the main screen of Astraware Solitaire which is where you can choose your game, see the luck, skill and difficulty of each game as well as the time required to play that game.  The range of games offered is impressive, ranging from the almost universally known Klondike to the lesser known and more difficult Calculation.

The graphics used on the main menu were my first hint this this game was going to be something special - they are engaging and humorous.

To change the game you wish to play, tap the up or down arrow on the main display to rotate to the games available or use the up and down functions of the D-Pad on your device and the Action button to select the game.  When you change games, the information related to that game changes as well.

The right side of the screen features two arrows that when pressed create a dynamic scroll, through which the twelve games will rotate. Specialized circular icons for each game are displayed, with the featured game’s icon magnified in the center.

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Last year I bought a Sony Ericsson M600i for several reasons. First off it was very small, fit easily in a pocket without bulging, and felt great in the hand. It also had both a thumboard and UMTS, both features I wanted. The hardware aspect of it was fantastic, and I loved it, but it was disastrous on the software side. It would crash repeatedly, the web browser would often require 4-5 attempts before it would open, and I would regularly pull it out of my pocket to find it sitting on a wonderfully helpful screen saying it had restarted itself for performance, waiting for me to click continue before it would boot (hence sending all calls to voicemail and no SMS/email notifications until I noticed).

Needless to say it wasn’t good. I returned the phone, and the service person was not surprised to see it come back. She said they had received almost every one of them they had sold back. It was withdrawn for sale for a while before being re-released, presumably with a production-grade ROM installed.

I was disappointed to return it, because as I said I loved the hardware and when the software worked, it wasn’t too bad either. Reading about the M600i’s successor, the P1i, I was eager to try it out and see if the flaws in the original had been ironed out. Sony Ericsson were happy to send me a loaner for review, and I have been using for the past week as my primary phone/PDA.

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Today is a very special day, Mitchell Oke turns 18! Yeah…let that sink in, will you? I’m going to get a little bit sentimental for a moment, so just bear with me. I’ll also try not to embarrass him too badly. ;-)

I don’t even know where to start when telling you all about how much I appreciate having Mitchell on board here at Gear Diary; we have so many wonderful writers, but Mitchell will always hold a very special place in my heart.

We first started corresponding in 2000, or maybe 2001, which would mean he was about 11 or 12 at the time. Sure, I remember realizing that he was young when we first started talking, but not exactly how young; he’s only a few months older than my daughter Sarah!

Mitchell’s maturity, knowledge of computers and gadgets, as well as his general can-do spirit have always impressed me. When I started Gear Diary, he was one of the first people I thought of when considering potential contributors; thankfully, he was eager to help.

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Of all the movies that have come out of Hollywood, you can always count on Disney to put out quality entertainment for the whole family. National Treasure, which was released back in 2004, was the best Disney movie ever. I love this movie as it has everything that I like in it. There is action, adventure, an awesome heist, and there is an incredible story about hidden treasure. The film is also shot on location, so there are lots of scenes with historical importance as backgrounds.

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I really don’t remember how I came across the art of Nate Hill, but his work really caught my attention. You see, his art supplies are very unique in that they are not the typical canvas, paint, clay or anything that you would think of being used for art. He uses animal parts that he finds in the garbage of New York City’s Manhattan Chinatown. Those with a queasy stomach or sensitivity to seeing weird works of taxidermy may not want to read on or click on the links provided; you have been warned. For those with a sense of adventure, click the link below to continue.

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Rear speakers have been pretty much the bane of my existence for most of my married life. OK, let me back up for a minute. I love stereo equipment. To me, it ranks right up there with my mobile devices. I have been an aficionado of multi-channel sound since it was first introduced back in the early 1990’s. While 5.1 surround sound (and now 7.1) is a phenomenal way to add an extra dimension to your television and movie watching experience, it does come with one major drawback. The rear speakers, which must be on the opposite side of the room, must somehow attach to the stereo. Typically, this has meant running speaker wire across the room.

When I was in college, and even law school, there was no problem with running speaker wire straight down the middle of the floor. Frankly, it was quickly lost in the mass of dirty underwear, clean underwear, old food, and empty beer bottles. When I got married, we rented an apartment and I somehow convinced my new wife that it would be a good idea to string the speaker wire across the ceiling. I don’t think I have a picture of this, but needless to say, it was not pretty. I cannot draw a straight line with a ruler on a piece of paper, let alone string wire upside down from the ceiling.

When we bought our first house, my wife wised up and said that any wires had to be hidden. There, and in our next house, I was able to run the wires along the baseboard without any problem, and this provided an adequate solution. In our current home, however, there is a beautiful open floorplan. I absolutely love this design, except when it comes to rear speakers. Now we have a problem because there is nowhere to hide the wires.

For a long time after we moved here, we had no rear speakers at all. I just could not find a way to make it work without stringing wires through the middle of the room. And my wife learned her lesson on that one. So, for much of the first year we lived here, we suffered through stone age sound coming through the front channels only. Then, I found a set of speakers that transmitted sound over the electrical lines. I rushed out to buy them…they were expensive and heavy. They were also terrible. They frequently had no signal and when they did pick up the signal, the sound was often distorted. So, I was back where I started with no rear speakers. We lived like that, seemingly in the audio stone ages for some time before I got a recent email from Judie. It seemed she had been given the Rocketfish speaker kit by accident and asked would anyone be interested in reviewing it. Well, I know a good opportunity when I see one, and I jumped at the chance, in the hopes that I had finally found the answer to my years long speaker dilemma. Read on to find out whether this truly was the answer I sought.

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