You know what I do whenever I have gadget envy? I give an existing gadget that’s close enough to the one I’m lusting over a nice little makeover, and then I try and convince myself that what I have is good enough - if not better - than what I was originally making eyes at. It works for the most part… until I drunkenly smash the thing. But that’s only happened to me a couple of times in my entire gadget history, so I’m not going to beat myself up about it

Right now my gadget envy is focussed on the iPod touch. All the journos I know that have one are thinking about buying one. I suspect that the courier tried to deliver my iPod touch review unit on Friday, but given that I wasn’t home, I was unable to take receipt of this wondrous new toy.

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Well, turns out my adventures with the JASJAR were embarrassingly short-lived. I’ll spare you the gory details, suffice to say that drinking on an empty stomach and being literally blind drunk does not go well with fumbling with an oversized phone and trying to call various people to come and rescue you from wherever you’ve drunkenly stumbled to.

The damage (busted hinge):

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When you see all the new DirectX10 titles coming out for PC it becomes very easy to overlook the newer DirectX9 titles. Battlefield 2142 is one of these titles, and it most definitely shows itself as proof that DX9 is not dead yet!

Now, don’t get me wrong, I am fully aware that Battlefield 2142 came out almost a year ago now, so it’s not anything new. However, it is new to me! Now, without further ado I will now begin…

I got my hands on a copy of the game Saturday, and I figured it would be a nice change for me since I have never actually played the official Battlefield.

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[THIS is a monster post with lots of photos - so give your browser some spinning wheel time!]

GearDiary was invited to join traditional media and automobile journalists to experience the launch of the redesigned Ford Focus and Ford Sync™. Hosted in Seattle, Washington by Ford Motor Company and Microsoft, the program included significant drive time with the Focus vehicle, demonstration of the Sync technology and a visit to the Microsoft campus to view the House of the Future. Geekness and coolness personified .

Sync is the newest mobile technology to emerge from the Ford-Microsoft relationship. Debuting in the 2008 Ford Focus automobile, Ford Sync is a fully integrated, flash memory-based system that allows the driver to use their Bluetooth phones hands-free. Additionally, music players such as the Zune or iPod can be controlled via voice commands and buttons mounted on the steering wheel.

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Observing ants in your home used to mean obtaining the typical ant farm which used sand as the medium for the ants to live in. A modern development and improvement on the old sand ant farms are the AntWorks ant habitats. This habitat uses a special gel instead of sand. The gel setup was originally developed for an NASA experiment, in which ants were sent into space on board the space shuttle to study insect life in near weightlessness. Traditional soil-based ant farm tunnels would collapse from the intense vibrations during a take off. To solve the problem, NASA scientists created the special gel that would serve as home, food and water source for the ants. Fascinations adapted the gel setup for the product AntWorks.

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Obviously I spent a good portion of tonight loading and configuring my nano, and one of the things I did in the process was re-discover the iTunes TV Shows section. While poking around, I noticed and downloaded the free pilot episode of The Big Bang Theory, a new CBS sitcom with Johnny Galecki (remember him from Roseanne?) playing one of a cast of girl-clueless geeks.

If you decide to watch, just bear in mind it’s a pilot and so it has to set every character up in its short 23 minute run. But I still I thought it was surprisingly good, and I found myself laughing out loud several times.

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f you’ve got a Windows Mobile 6 device and haven’t yet tried the voice clip feature, do it - it’s amazing! Instead of struggling with the touchscreen or keypad input, you just activate the voiceclip function, speak into the device’s microphone, and the other party gets an embedded voice clip within the chat window.Mitchell and I have been using the voice clip function with each other this morning - he on the HTC P3600i, and me on the i-mate JASJAR. Sound quality is excellent - sounds even better than speakerphone IMO, which is not surprising as it’s completely digital. Also, I was using it over my wireless network while Mitchell was doing it over 3G, and it works across different devices - I was also getting the voice clips using Windows Live on my MacBook.

The experience was very similar to using a walkie talkie - he’d record a voice clip and send it, I’d listen, record a voice clip in response, and send it back. Sounds complicated, but it really isn’t - Microsoft has done a great job at simplifying the experience. And it works like speakerphone, so you don’t need to have the handset to your face to use it. If you miss what the other person said, simply hit the Play button to repeat it. You can even save clips to your device.

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This is off-topic, but I thought I’d share with you a little nugget of wisdom I found today. I’m one those habitual procrastinators that will always find a way to put something off until I absolutely have to do it - and if I don’t have to do it, then there’s a good chance it’ll never get done!

It’s not like I haven’t read all of the productivity and time management books, but nothing ever seems to stick, you know? But after reading ‘Thirteen Tricks to Motivate Yourself‘ on Lifehack.org, I found one tip that really stood out:

Go for Five - Start working for five minutes. Often that little push will be enough to get you going.

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Dear Artie

You and I got off to a great start. We had some wonderful times, sitting in the sun together, my hand gently stroking your chassis. Granted, you were a bit slow at first, but as I got to know you, I realised that you were just waiting for that special someone to come along and unlock your potential. So I put in the hard yards and made a lot of compromises. I did all I could to make our relationship work.

And we were almost there, when you dropped the bombshell. You had a faulty touchscreen. Not a hardware issue per se - more like a driver problem in Vista. Worse, I did a Google search, and to my horror I discovered that other people had posted about your “little problem” and were awaiting a solution.

Artie, I hope you realise that, if not resolved, this touchscreen problem will amount to an irreconcilable difference, and I will have no choice but to part ways with you. I refuse to let my emotions cloud my judgment. This has got to be fixed, or I’m leaving. I’m only being this frank with you because I truly care about you and want you to change for the better.

Yours sincerely

Jenneth

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One of my favourite gadget blogs is jkOnTheRun, and in James’ latest post, he discusses one of the quandaries of being a gadget reviewer: which one(s) do I take with me today?

Once I decided to bring a full-sized Tablet PC with me I had to decide between the Fujitsu P1610, the Lenovo x61 and the HP 2710p. The P1610 was my first choice being smaller and lighter than the other two but since my work was going to be writing I felt the smaller keyboard of the P1610 might not be the best choice. I can touch type fine on the Fuji but for extended touch typing sessions the small keyboard can get a little uncomfortable so I decided a bigger device would better serve me this time. I thought about bringing the Lenovo with me because it’s such a sweet, fast device but it’s also the biggest of all these devices and I’d have to bring a bigger gear bag than I wanted. That would entail having to transfer anything in my smaller gear bag to the larger one and that’s a hassle for a simple trip to the coffee shop. The HP 2710p is a fast and smaller Tablet so I decided to take that one for this trip.

My dilemma’s actually a different one - not so much which device I bring (as I tend to standardise on one particular device of each type for weeks - even months - at a time), but how many. If I could get away with it, I’d bring them all with me, in which case I’d need a small shopping trolley to carry them all! My iPod and/or Zune for listening to music, Artie for writing, surfing the Net and playing Scrabulous, my Nokia N95, my Canon EOS 40D for taking photos, my Panasonic HDC-SD1 for shooting video, my Canon M80 for backing up my camera’s memory card, my Nintendo DS Lite for playing games and - of course - my Battery Geek Portable Power Station to keep everything charged.

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