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An impressive notebook from Apple. According to them, the PowerBook 17 is "The next big thing from Apple: The new 17-inch PowerBook G4. Featuring the largest, most spectacular display ever to grace a portable, miraculously engineered into a 1-inch-thin notebook that is ultra-light (just 6.8 pounds), ultra-desirable ...". Go to the Apple PowerBook 17 page for further details. You might also want to look at my Apple page.

The PowerBook G4 15 was Apple's Aluminum reincarnation of its successful Titanium PowerBook line. The release of this notebook completed Apple's all-new all-aluminum lineup of 17, 15, and 12 inch PowerBooks. The PB15 gives all the features of the 17, while being less unwieldy and a whole 1.3 pounds lighter. The only "inferior" aspects of the PB15 I use (as compared to the 17) are: a slightly slower processor (1.25 GHz vs. 1.33 GHz), a slightly lower resolution (1280x854 vs. 1440x900), less battery life (45 minutes to an hour less than the 17). Go to the Apple PowerBook 15 page for further details.

The 12.1" iBook I have has an 800MHz PowerPC G3 processor, 512K L2 cache, 640 MB RAM, 40 GB Ultra ATA drive, ATI Radeon 7500 with 32MB dedicated video memory, Combo Drive (DVD/CD-RW-16X), Built-in 56K v.92 modem, AirPort and up to 5 hours of battery life. The rugged machine also has USB, FireWire and TV-out and with all of this, it weighs 4.9 lbs. In conjunction with the above mentioned PowerBook and a few external drives, the iBook contributes to a nice two-machine kernel debugging environment.

According to Apple, "The new super-slim iPod once again redefines what a digital music player should be. It's lighter than 2 CDs, can hold up to 7500 songs, and downloads music at blazing speeds. Now you can take your entire music collection with you wherever you go." I got a 15GB iPod the day they were announced, and there is not much to say that would make this gadget any more worthwhile than it already is. A comparison of the "older" iPod with the newest one is something that you might be interested in.

Apple released this camera at the WWDC 2003 in San Francisco. According to Apple: "iSight is a state-of-the-art video camera that's the easiest way to video conference with your colleagues, friends and family over broadband. Featuring an autofocusing autoexposure F/2.8 lens which captures high-quality pictures even in low lighting, iSight also includes a dual-element microphone in its stylish compact aluminum body." iSight has a 1/4 inch CCD (640x480 VGA), and uses a FireWire connection for audio, video and power. The two elements of the microphone do noise suppression. Here are some notes on using Apple's iSight camera, including solutions for mounting the iSight.

Like most people I know, I appreciate being wire-free. When I acquired a Bluetooth enabled notebook (the PowerBook 17), I tried the Microsoft Bluetooth mouse, but I found it to be much jerkier than a wired mouse. Apple later released their own Bluetooth mouse and keyboard, and I gave them a shot too. I was pleased with the way these peripherals work (almost like their wired counterparts, which is what I desired). Note that this could be due to the fact that I am using these with Panther while I tested the Microsoft mouse with Jaguar. In other words, the Microsoft mouse might work just as well with Panther.

The ProGear WebPad was introduced by Frontpath, a subsidiary of S3 in 2000. It was based on S3's prototype dubbed the "Day Tripper". The press release hailed it as "one of the first ever wireless, truly portable, untethered, broadband-based products capable of enabling vertical partners to fully customize content." The WebPad had a really decent configuration and specs. Consider the one I got my hands on: Transmeta 400 MHz Crusoe Processor; 10.4" 1024x768 XGA TFT flat panel display with touch screen; 128 MB system memory; 5 GB 2.5" disk drive; 802.11b Wireless in CardBus/PCMCIA Type 2 slot; One USB port; One InfraRed port; Sound card, microphone, speaker, earphone jack; Scrolling device with center select; Up to 6 hours of battery life; 9"x11"x1", 3.2 pounds; Phoenix BIOS, Linux 2.4.x kernel, Slackware, Netscape 4.7x, Real Player, Adobe Acrobat, Macromedia Flash, Java, Javascript, XFree86 with screen rotation, Motorola handwriting recognition, virtual keyboard and so on ...

As many Unix aficionados might agree, it is particularly satisfying to own a SPARC based Sun system, and to be able to run a "true" Solaris on it. Although my Ultra 10's UltraSPARC IIi processor only runs at a measly 333 MHz, its RISC-ness along with the 2MB processor cache, 512 MB system RAM and the general goodness of Solaris 9 make it a worthwhile machine for experimentation and research. Before I rebooted this machine in order to install Solaris 9 on it, it had an uptime of over 540 days, while it served as a file/web server and development machine. I briefly looked into expanding the system memory to the maximum possible 1 GB, but was amazed (dismayed, rather) by the inordinately high prices of memory for this particular system.

I acquired this machine as part of my Hewlett-Packard Award. The 9100C Digital Sender is a compact desktop sending device for black-and-white or color office documents. It enables users to digitally send paper documents easily to any Internet e-mail address, fax number, JetSend technology-enabled device, network printer or personal computer - all from one networked device and is an efficient and cost-effective alternative to such typical paper distribution systems as fax and courier.

I was very excited when I got the Empeg, as indicated by my thoughts at that time: "There is not much to say about this incredible gadget. Not because there is nothing much to say, but because words will not do justice to the cool-ness of this geek's dream come true". This compact in-dash MP3 unit is actually an ARM-based computer running Linux, with up to two laptop hard disks inside it. I do think that it's rather bad looking, so I didn't and wouldn't actually install it in my car. The MKIIa models (one of which I have) come equipped with a serial port, a USB port and a 10 Mbps Ethernet port. See my Empeg page for further details.

The SONY CyberShot® DSC-F707 Digital Still Camera is a 5.2 Megapixel (5.0 Megapixel effective) camera. It has a Carl Zeiss™ Vario Sonnar 5X Optical Zoom Lens, and has features too numerous to list here (for example, it can take shots in complete darkness using what Sony calls Night Shot™ infra-red illumination system. One of the most welcome features of this camera is its amazingly long battery life, and yet another is the reflective coating on the LCD screen, which makes it very easy to look at the LCD (and make things out) even in bright light. See the Digital Photography Review web site for a detailed review of the DSC-F707. I am very satisfied with this camera!

Video games enchanted me fairly early in my life cycle. That is why I was introduced to glasses actually (and not because I was a bookworm, although I was one). I have owned a number of consoles in the past (and played a larger number). One of the TV game systems I have is the Sega Dreamcast. The Dreamcast doubles up rather well as a programming platform, since there is a lot of information available on its innards now. Useful pointers include the Dreamcast Programming page, the Dreamcast Emulation page and Dan's DCDev page.

The Gameboy™ Advance is a marvelous little toy from Nintendo, housing a 32-bit RISC CPU and an 8-bit CISC CPU. It is fairly easy to set up a cross development environment for the Gameboy™ Advance on Linux. Some links with useful programming information on the platform include the Gameboy Developers page, the Gameboy Advance Development web site, www.reinerziegler.de and Lik-Sang International.

The Flash Advance Linker is a mass produced development and backup device for the Gameboy™ Advance. The GBA Flash Advance Linker is plugged in to the printer port of your PC. Once connected, it can simply send and receive game ROM data from or to the plugged in game or Flash Cartridge. It can be used to read out game ROM data (dumping) or to send ROM files to an empty cartridge.

It might be construed as blasphemy by some (to call these things "toys")! My friends gave me a Honda S2000 for my birthday. It was a 1/10th scale R/C car from Tamiya: a two-wheel drive car with front and rear double wishbone suspension and coil spring damper system (not oil filled). The motor is 540 electric, mid-mounted. I spent the night assembling it (a sucker for ego I was surely), and managed to do so. I needed my friend Boris to drive me to Albertsons for batteries at 4:00 am, and Chris to provide me moral support! It has been ravaged and ravished into obliteration since by everybody who drove it around. R/C Aircrafts and Helicopters are very interesting too (although expensive). www.drones.com has a R/C Flying FAQ. Google (and other search engines, surely) have R/C flying resources listed. Check this out, for example. Tower Hobbies is an excellent place to buy all such stuff from.

This neat gadget from SONY™ has a slide-in disc loading mechanism, and exceptionally long battery life and a host of features, including 64-track RMS programming and CD-Text capability. What's more, there is even optical output for high quality recording (to SONY's excellent line of MD players, for example). For details, look at Sony Consumer Electronics Guide. I got this Discman in the year 2000, and it has held its "coolness" rather well, although admittedly newer generations of Discmans almost certainly beat this one in slimness and weight. However, I am not aware of any other Discman at the time of this writing that has a slot loading mechanism.

Currently I have a multitude of these things, but I made some interesting notes, particularly on getting it to work on Linux, when I encountered an IDE-to-FireWire drive enclosure (the "Pyro", made by ADS Technologies) for the first time. Look here for details. The ADS Pyro is one of the biggest enclosures you can get, complete with a fan, which would make sense if you intended to use it with full-sized CD/DVD drives. If an enclosure is needed exclusively for hard drive use, much better options are available. Update: please take into account that the above notes were made in 2001 - external drive enclosures have improved greatly since then.