Monday, December 26, 2005

Better than a lump of coal Well, you asked. . . What did 'ya get?. Go ahead and make us drool. Tell us all about the Mac goodies you got for Christmas. Was it an iPod video, an iBook, speakers for your iPod, or a new case to carry it all around in? How much do you love it? Is it what you wanted or were you disappointed? [The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)] I got a Griffin Technology SmartDeck, in hopes of replacing my Griffin iTrip. The iTrip's fine, but most of my distance driving involves moving from one set of FM stations to another (Santa Cruz to San Jose), so an open station on one side of the hill gets too much interference on the other side. I thought the SmartDeck, which plays my iPod through the cassette deck, would solve the problem. But. . . it doesn't work in my 2000 VW Passat's factory-installed deck. Phooey. Worse even is the fact that I pre-ordered the SmartDeck just as soon as it was announced, then Griffin took forever to actually release the device. At least they had to decency to inquire via email if I still wanted it! Now, if you take a look at the Griffin site, they've changed the connection to a dock connector instead of the earbud connector on top. No telling if that might  make a difference. Other new tool: I got myself an iSight when it was on sale back at Thanksgiving. But the first glitch that I encountered was that my silly IOGear combination USB/Firewire hub (IOGear GUH420) does not provide power to the Firewire ports. Now that's bloody stupid. As a result (apparently this is fairly well-known), the iSight, which is a bit of a power and bandwidth hog, doesn't work unless I unplug the hub and restart the iMac with only the iSight plugged in. Fortunately, it does now work with the iPod also plugged in to the second Firewire outlet on the iMac. And I've ordered up a powered Firewire hub (Belkin). And: one of the justifications for the iSight was to use it with Delicious Monster's nifty Delicious Library cataloger. I started off with the trial download last night, and was sold within minutes. The prospect of having a catalog of all these books (and maybe even the CDs) that surround me without typing anything is just too good to pass up! Delicious Libary uses the iSight as a bar-code reader, identifying each piece of media by its UPC and then linking to the Amazon.com description, including cover photo. This is gonna be a life-saver. And that's it for the Mac-related goodies. . . 10:31:24 AM    Questions? Comments? Flames? []

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