Today’s Gear Deal brings us the brand new 15.6″ Dell XPS 15z Ultra-slim Laptop. It is available now starting at $999.99. The new laptop weighs 5.54lbs, is less than an inch thick and sports an anodized aluminum case. It has a backlit chiclet keyboard and a Magnesium alloy palmrest. The XPS 15z is powered by the 2nd Generation Intel Core i5/ i7 “Sandy Bridge” processor, has up to 8GB RAM,has a 750GB 7200RPM Hard Drive and 2GB NVIDIA GeForce GT 525M of discrete graphics with Optimus. The laptop features HDMI 1.4, a miniDisplayPort, a 1.3-Megapixel Webcam, is Intel Wireless Display ready, has Bluetooth 3.0, 802.11n WiFi, two USB 3.0 ports, 9-in-1… Continue reading on Gear Diary …

Recently I completely re-did my older Macbook Pro and reinstalled all of my music and apps to use it as my primary iPod/iPad sync source. While doing this I discovered I have over 1000 apps! While that might sound like a lot, in the context of the total App Store it is a drop in the bucket. Apple recently passed 500,000 approved apps in the App Store, and to mark this event Mashable put together an infographic showing how things have grown and changed since the summer of 2008 when the App Store was introduced. Being a numbers person I find it fascinating to look back at all of the milestones … Continue reading on Gear Diary …

Apparently Amazon was NOT going to let the day go without some sort of ebook reader announcement. Not surprising, since both Kobo and B&N unleashed big hardware updates that made the Kindle 3 look, well, kind of boring. Since even Amazon can’t release a hardware refresh on a 6 hour turnaround, they’ve done the next best thing: sliced the price of the Kindle 3G! Yes, on the heels of the popularity of the Kindle Wifi with special offers comes a Kindle 3G with special offers! This one drops the price $25 from $189 to $164, with the same ad offers, etc. Amazon was very quick to point out this is the cheapest 3G ebook reader available, and while… Continue reading on Gear Diary …

We constantly get emails with all sorts of proposals – most come from great people with great products worthy of coverage. Sometimes we get very questionable products and refuse to simply parrot the hype. Then there is this … I just wanted to copy a bit of an email Judie shared with us today … wait, before I do that, here is the title of the email: SX-CALLCeptor – the new version ……when you need to know EVERYTHING about a person of your interest OK, so my first thought is ‘STALKER ALERT!’ But then I wonder what it is all about (morbid curiosity) so I read on: SX-CALLCeptor – the ultimate Continue reading on Gear Diary …

Well, after a quiet winter with no big hardware news for ereaders, we’re drowning in new releases, with the crown jewel being today’s B&N NOOK announcement. It was pretty much common knowledge that a new NOOK was coming, but they blew expectations out of the water with their new touch-screen eInk device! What’s so exciting about this release? For starters, it’s a huge upgrade from the original NOOK. B&N ditched the color strip navigation, upgraded the screen to the sharper “Pearl” eInk, and apparently sped up the refresh rate significantly on page turns. Plus the whole package is TINY, and B&N was quite proud to show how small it is compared to an Amazon Kindle. Most importantly… Continue reading on Gear Diary …

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Have you ever just had a song come on and you and your spouse/boyfriend/girlfriend/significant other just start dancing? Last night the song Skywriting by a never popular British group ‘The Bible’ came on my wife’s iPod, and we had a nice little dance … to the amusement and embarrassment of our kids. I makes me think back to one of my favorite moments from The Cosby Show – at the end of an episode, Cliff drops a record on the turntable (look it up, kiddies), and on comes a gorgeous song and then he and Claire begin playful snuggling and snacking as the music plays in the background. That song is… Continue reading on Gear Diary …

Let me begin by making it clear that I have no formal association to Nuance, the leader in voice recognition technology and innovation. I do not work for them, they do not directly advertise on Gear Diary, and I have personally paid for all of the Nuance software I have or currently use. I have, however, beta tested upcoming products for them, and I hope to continue to do so. Nuance “does” voice recognition, text-to-speech software, and much more. I have been using their products for years and, since encountering wrist issues associated to rheumatoid arthritis, have come to rely upon their technology. Dragon for Mac is an oft used Mac OS X program… Continue reading on Gear Diary …

OK, so my family has been on a Dark Angel kick lately, plowing through the entire series on DVD (which I grabbed on Goozex). One of the best things is the endless stream of quips from ‘Original Cindy’ (OC). She always seems to have a comment to match the situation, such as when Normal gets involved with a transgender woman who discovers she is a lesbian … “Original Cindy is just too straight to hook up with a science-fiction girlfriend.” Anyway, this weekend we watched some of the Billboard ‘Awards’ show, which largely tossed out popularity prizes and reminded us why sometimes it IS better when these performers lip-sync! During the show… Continue reading on Gear Diary …

I consider my family fortunate – I grew up watching Sesame Street when it was brand new, and my kids got to experience it as well during a time when both classic and new material was presented side-by-side, and there were plenty of videos, computer games, and music CD’s to enjoy! Last week my wife was shuffling on her iPod and ‘What do I do when I’m alone’ came on, a hold-over favorite from when the kids were little (I still have Rainbow Connection on my iPod!). Then this weekend a post at Buzzfeed looked at a bunch of classic clips from Sesame Street. Here are a few: C is Continue reading on Gear Diary …

My pile of field production equipment is ever-growing. I am a “one-man-band” of sorts so I am constantly looking for gear and “doo-dads” to make production work easier. Recently I picked up a great set of headphones (which I will feature in a separate post), and I learned the Swann RC helicopter won’t lift my HDHero POV camera — so no aerial shots for right now. When I first began updating all of my camera gear, I remember receiving a note from USBFever.com announcing some HDMI to mini HDMI adapters and cables. I also remember saying to myself “What the heck would I do with that stuff?” Continue reading on Gear Diary …

Poor Sony. Yet again they’re ahead of the ebook reader curve, and left with nothing…they were putting touch based eInk screens on their devices over a year ago, but now that the Sony Reader line is outpriced and outmatched, everyone else is jumping on the touch bandwagon! The latest entrant is Kobo, with their “eReader Touch Edition”, and it looks like a great device at an amazing price! The eReader Touch looks like it takes with it the best part of Kobo’s other devices, the soft, quilted style back, plus the touchscreen lets them include a keyboard! My big gripe with the Kobo WiFi edition was how difficult the d-pad/keyboard combo felt, so this is a big improvement!… Continue reading on Gear Diary …

The trend toward strangely-capitalized programs is really annoying. The mediaplayer aTunes is trying to follow the iTunes naming model somewhat slavishly, so we’re stuck with that I suppose. Of course, that means sentences starting with the name of the program are either capitalized wrong or the word is capitalized wrong. Such choices! Installation was smooth and trouble-free, with a language selection dialog less impressive than Songbird, but sure to cover most use cases (darn, no Korean!). It also allows you to optionally install the source code for this GPL-licensed open source program, the only one in the set to do so. The encoders for FLAC and MP3 are another optional part of… Continue reading on Gear Diary …

‘What Would You Do’ is one of those ‘if we happen upon it’ shows my family will watch occasionally on Friday. The show sets up actors playing roles on hidden cameras in public places. Some of the ones we have seen are different teens (boy/girl, black/white) attempting to take a bike chained to a pole, hateful speech lobbed at an overweight girl, a spouse (again, male & female) trying to instigate a tryst in a bar on their anniversary while the other spouse is in the restroom. The goal is to see how normal bystanders will behave when confronted with an intentionally difficult and controversial situation. The results are intriguing – many… Continue reading on Gear Diary …

So you say you managed to get over the fact that it has a long, unpronounceable, and nearly impossible to remember name, and you went ahead and got yourself a brand new Samsung Galaxy S II GT-i9100, right?  What’s the very first thing you wondered as you were unboxing your new toy?  No, no, not that!  The other first thing! That’s right; what to cover it up and protect it with!  And as per usual, PDAir has a plethora of choices for you, all available at their web site for around 28 bucks.  So don’t sit here reading my drivel; get up off your virtual duff and head on over to their site and start a-buyin’!… Continue reading on Gear Diary …