JoeN's Blog : Gadgets

Please turn off all electronics, Nike+ shoes and...

JoeN — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 06:54:53 GMT

I gave into temptation the other day and bought some Nike+ runners and the iPod extension thing so I could run and get feedback.

I've turned into a bit of a shoe freak, so I actually ordered one of the Nike ID shoes where I could customize everything on them (this included getting my GamerTag ("Feral Joe") printed on them).

I actually read the manual for the shoe insert that wirelessly transmits to the iPod receiver and came across this delicious warning:

"Important: Put the sensor to sleep before taking it [iPod sensor] on an aircraft, to comply with applicable government regulations"

I laughed when I read this. Can you imagine the looks you would get if you were in the waiting area for a flight and pulled off your shoe, removed the insert, grabbed a small high tech looking device from the shoe and used a paperclip to press a button on the sensor. If you were lucky you might be able explain, otherwise you might be in for a nice chat with a TSA employee.

And don't even think about doing that on the plane itself!

Dell XPS 1210

JoeN — Wed, 22 Nov 2006 04:00:42 GMT

I recently had to upgrade my laptop and after a little bit of hunting around I picked up a Dell XPS 1210.

My major requirements for the laptop was that it is able to run Vista, runs Visual Studio really well, can be used for presentations and it runs WoW really well:-).

I decked the machine out and got:

2GHz Core Duo
2Gb RAM
100Gb Harddisk (7200RPM)
256Mb NVidia GeForce 7400 video card

It's a great machine, the screen is really nice and the overall speed of the machine is fantastic. The harddisk speed really helps overall performance.

When I ordered the laptop I was really excited because it came with a free laptop "skin". Unfortunately I wasn't eligible for one (not available for corporate customers) but the Dell support people pointed me to Skinit.com. I ordered one of the skins for my laptop and it looks really cool. Now that several people on the team have the same laptop it's really easy to recognize mine.

The laptop met all of my expectations. Vista and VS runs really well and WoW has a very smooth frame rate! I highly recommend it.