Gadgets and tech talk
In case anyone was thinking of buying a new iPod in the next couple weeks, might want to hold off a little longer: Think Secret says new iPods will be announced around the end of the month. (Of course, this may instead make you want to buy one of the older models before they disappear.)
Last night I discovered that I blinked just a few months too soon in my digital-camera purchase: the Canon Powershot S400 (the next-generation model of the Canon "Digital Elph" series) is now out, and it's just what I wanted when I bought the S230 five months ago: it takes 4 megapixel images (as opposed to the S230's 3.3MP), and does up to 3x optical zoom (the S230 does 2x), in a package exactly the same size as the S230 (the previous high-end model, which did 3x optical zoom, was still small but was noticeably bigger than the S230). Ah, well. I suppose it was worth it to have had a digital camera these past five months; I've certainly gotten a fair tad bit of use out of it. And by the time I get a new one (which won't be for at least a couple years), there'll presumably be something even better.
Last night I almost bought another ultra-cool gadget: the SmartDisk FireLite FireWire portable hard drive. A 60GB drive that fits in the palm of your hand (it's about the size of a PDA) and plugs directly into a computer via a FireWire cable; cooler and cheaper than the 20GB Iomega Peerless drives I bought a while back, which were mighty cool except that they required a base station to connect them to a computer, and the ejection from the base station makes about the loudest and most unpleasant noise I've ever heard a peripheral make. Also, not long after Iomega started selling the Peerless drive with much fanfare, they suddenly switched to selling a higher-capacity drive called HDD, which appears to be basically the same thing as the Peerless except that they won't show you a picture of the base station. (The Peerless drive continued to be for sale on their site for some time, and there's still no indication anywhere on their site that the HDD is actually a replacement product (or information about what makes it better/different), but when I emailed them to complain about this, their support/customer-service people informed me: "Firstly I would like to let you know that Iomega has declared Peerless Drive as End of life product and no more manufacturing it. However if you are getting these Drives available anywhere for sale then it must be of older dates.") Anyway, so I was looking longingly at the FireLite drive, and was just about to buy one when it occurred to me that I don't actually need any more portable drives. All I need an external drive for is to back up my disk, and for that a desktop drive would be just as useful as a portable. And SmartDisk sells 120GB desktop drives for 2/3 the price of their 60GB portable drives. The desktop drive doesn't have nearly as much Cool Factor, but is better in every other respect (faster, cheaper, larger capacity), so I ended up getting it.
Unfortunately I was foiled in my first attempt to back up my disk this evening. 30GB takes a long time to back up, and after it had backed up 25GB of that 30 (which took several hours), it informed me that my disk was full—it had been saving the backup file to my internal drive instead of to the external one. It's partly my fault for apparently completely missing the dialog box that asks where you want to save it, and partly Retrospect's fault for not being better designed. But at this point, rather than have it run all night and potentially keep me awake, I'm just gonna run the backup tomorrow.
