The new Qi Hardware palmtop, the Ben Nanonote, looks really interesting but doesn’t have wifi. However, there is a solution now and more features coming in the Ya and Mu Nanonotes. Is this a future direction for the notebook market?
Archives for New Toys!
Ben Nanonote with WiFi
Searching for a decent set of cans…
The old and fairly reliable Sennheiser RS40′s I was using up until a few weeks ago finally gave up the ghost in the run-up to Mobile World Congress this year – or to be more accurate, the battery packs finally gave up. Despite overnight charging, I was getting only about three hours of operating time; and since the charger in the headphones themselves wasn’t working, I only had the charged battery in the base unit, so I was getting maybe four hours a day from them.
The RS40s were (and are) really lovely headphones, with the great feature that if you stood up to walk to the printer and forgot you were wearing them, you didn’t treat the rest of the lab to the cartoon Yoink! Thud! sound effects as you nearly strangled yourself with the headset cord. Shame they were let down by the powerpacks…
You can’t even find the BA151′s easily anymore 
So the hunt was on for a better set of ‘phones for the lab…
Logitech Professional Presenter R800 Review
I went a little mad for an hour there after being assigned my first course to teach, and afterwards found I’d ordered the R800, Logitech’s top-of-the-line presentation remote/laser pointer. Here’s what I think of it so far.
New CS7004 hardware arrives…
So for CS7004′s labs, I wanted to have one large-ish, deep-ish, multi-step, interesting project. And I’ve thought of one and I’ll write it up as we go through it (no fair readers here learning before the students!).
But here’s a sneak peek at the hardware they’ll be using 
(Assuming, of course, that I can get the sodding thing to do what it needs to do!)
Nespresso and Nexpods
So I turned 33 the other day and for a birthday gift, my parents bought me one of these:
A DeLonghi Lattissima 660 Nespresso coffee machine.
For those who are not coffee purists, these are usually catalogued under “Evil” or “Wrong” 
….but when you’re bleary-eyed in the morning….kindof convienent….
In fact, they’re pretty much designed for use by the bleary-eyed early in the morning. Take a coffee pod, lift the machine’s lever, drop in the pod, close the lever, push the button, get coffee. Want Cappachino or Latte? Stick on the foamer attachement, filled with milk, and press a different button. All automatic. And while it’s not as good as the hand-made stuff in a decent coffee shop, it’s not horrible, and it’s better than you’d get in a bad coffee shop. And early in the morning, you don’t care so much
However, there’s a major, major drawback. Specifically, it’s a Nestle product. Now their (rather heinous) ethical record aside, they’re fairly much dead set against the idea that they’d sell you the machine and then you’d buy the coffee elsewhere; so if you want pods for this thing, you can only buy them via Nespresso. This isn’t a major hassle if you find you adore the taste of one of the nespresso coffee blends, but to be honest, I don’t particularly find any of them incredibly good (“pretty okay” seems to be as far as the tastemeter goes with them) — and more, I don’t like the idea that if they decide the pods aren’t profitable anymore, I get stuck with a machine I can’t use.
So I was rather happy when I noticed a post in the Boards.ie coffee forum describing the NexPod, which is a third party pod for the Nespresso machines:
for those who like their
