About MY Gear

HP2140- My First Hack

One of the things that has been most significant since I made the move to using Apple’s products almost exclusively, is the fact that I have become very spoiled. I now want and expect electronics that not only work well, but also have a high degree of polished aesthetics, so that when I use the devices, they not only function well; but they also look and feel great while I use them. This is certainly the case with my iPhone and iPod Touch which continually amaze me; to a slightly lesser, but no less profound degree, this is also the…


HP 2140 In The House

Chris and I have been having quite a good time tweaking our MSI Wind netbooks. Both of us have run Mac OSX and Chris, who’s been a bit more aggressive in his hacking, now has his device booting with three different operating systems. Why then, you might ask, is my MSI Wind now in the Philippines with one of my writers from What’s On iPhone? It’s a long story that reflects my technology — fickleness.


HTC Shift – Shifting OS from Vista to XP

While several members of the Gear Diary team have been loading up their netbooks with Mac OS X (and why wouldn’t you, it’s great!), I recently changed OSes on a device that highlighted the shortcomings of Windows Vista: the HTC Shift. I reviewed the Shift last year, and found it disappointing. With its low res screen, pokey keyboard and poor battery life, it was hard to recommend at its staggeringly high price tag. The worst thing though was the performance of Windows Vista. With its paltry 800Mhz processor, it just crawled along trying to run Microsoft’s bloated OS. It’s unfortunate…


Blowing in the Breeze Part 2 – OSX 10.5.6 & the MSI Wind

Before I get started, I wanted to say special thanks go out to Dan Cohen, who stayed up with me until 3am Eastern/2am Central working on the Flash drive needed to get this all done. So… OSX 10.5.6 and the MSI Wind… Yah ok… maybe not so much. Quick update – I’ve got OSX installed on my Wind (calling it miniMBP); and I’ve learned some interesting things as of this morning. 1. I can still survive and be human on as little as 2.5 hours of sleep as long as there’s good, strong coffee around…somewhere. 2. You have to find…


Tricking Out The MSI WindOSX – Adding an SSD

A little over a week ago I installed Mac OS Leopard on the MSI Wind I had picked up at Best Buy. I’m pleased to report that after a week of use, it is still going strong. I’m amazed at how well the Mac OS runs on the device; I am grateful to everyone who figured out how to get Mac OS X running perfectly on a Wind and were then kind enough to share their work. Well, I couldn’t leave well enough alone, and so I decided that I need to trick out the diminutive Mac just a bit….


The Creation of a Hackintosh

(Note- This post is done in order to share my experience creating a Hackintosh. It is not intended to recommend or encourage similar hacks. Gear Diary neither recommends, nor takes any liability, if you choose to do the same.) I’ve been through the whole UMPC thing from the start. I had a TabletKiosk UMPC the day they were shipped. I had a Samsung Q1P, Q1Ultra, Q1Ultra Premium and a Sony UX 280P in rapid succession. I loved the whole UMPC concept but none of the machines ever fit the bill quite well enough for me. Each was either returned or,…


Nikon to Nokia – a photographer’s journey

Despite an occasional straying here and there, I have been shooting with Nikon camera gear just about my entire career as a photojournalist. In this millennium many of my duties have been restructured, with tasks added as well as getting a new title – editor. But all along I have been shooting Nikon. Until this week. My first digital Nikon camera was the Coolpix 950, then on to the D1 digital SLR (which I hear is being called the “classic”). A host of other D-SLRs have come and gone and with this most recent Christmas, the Nikon D300 (which I…


Goodbye Blackberry, It’s Not Me – It’s You – Here Are 10 Reasons I Left

On Friday I transferred my Blackberry phone number from T-Mobile over to my Apple iPhone, effectively terminating my contract with T-Mobile and ending a 15+ year practice of taking a Blackberry with me everywhere I went. In January I’d purchased an iPhone (“just to try it out”). Like many iPhone owners, I’d been hauling two phones with me. The Blackberry was my main email phone. The iPhone the web browser, Twitter client, music/video player, and picture taker phone. During the past week I was out at the Sage Software Insights Reseller Conference where they’d asked me to speak about Social…


The Last Day of Mobius Seattle 2008: AKA the Spectacular MacBook Pro Meltdown

When I arrived at the conference area to grab breakfast before entering, Tim McAfee was there to greet us, handing out my Flickr t-shirts. I was hoping for a medium, but some of the other guys had already beat me to them; he made it up to me by giving me two larges. Ha! After getting set up and then eating my food, I settled in with the others to listen to the first presentation on the Microsoft Zune. Creative Strategies Presentation Ben from Creative Strategies started a two hour discussion with the question “How is technology going to better…


BlackJack II SGH-i617 – First Impressions

The Easter holiday delayed the delivery by a few days, but never mind, my new unlocked BlackJack II is here! I’ve had it for less than 12hrs but I wanted to post my first impressions of the device. •    Looks great. The glossy black body is more stylish and “hip” than the original BlackJack. The new design is less functional, loosing out to the original’s superior grip and ruggedness, but with competitors like the iPhone and Nokia N95 8GB around it was a necessary change. •    Build quality is top notch. No flexing , creaking or general crapness to be…


My Car PC

When I bought my new car in September 2007 I knew I would be keeping it for a few years, so I decided that I was going to take the plunge, and build a Car PC like those that I had read about on the MP3Car.com forums. The computer would replace the standard audio system, and add MP3 playback, video, GPS, GPS tracking and internet access to my car After months of dreaming about such a setup my Car PC is finally installed. I’ve had the computer on my desk for over 3 mths now but time and money kinda…


Setting Up and Using the Roomba 560

Today I unboxed and set up my recently received iRobot Roomba 560 evaluation unit. I figured it might be fun for those of you who are curious to see what’s involved…and then we could send it on a test run together. Consider this part one of its review, because I will be posting initial impressions tonight and final impressions after having used it for a good bit longer. I like the promise written on the box, “cleans routinely so you don’t have to.” Yes, please! This model is supposed to be able to clean four complete rooms, it can be…


How I turned the HTC Advantage into a laptop replacement

I’ve been quite the busy little Windows Mobile bee over the last couple of days. Inspired by Aura Mae’s comment that she used the HTC Advantage as something of a computer replacement, I set out to see whether I could achieve the same. Any boy, was I blown away by the results! The Advantage’s 5inch screen (which is the same size as some UMPCs) and VGA resolution means you can cram more into the screen – especially when you use the RealVGA utility to run it as its native 640 x 480 resolution. This, combined with a big helping of…


My First Nokia, the Nokia N95

My name is Judie, and I have never owned a Nokia mobile phone; I’m not exactly sure why I haven’t, it just never happened. It’s not that I haven’t been curious, especially with the release of some of Nokia’s newer models – such as the N81, the N92, N93, and yes – the N95, but I just never took the plunge. Why is it that I feel like I should be admitting this glaring error of my gadget repertoire in the confines of a 12-step program meeting? Probably because until today I was one of, oh…maybe fifteen people in the…


The HTC Advantage X7500 So Far…(a serial review)

I’ve been using the HTC Advantage for five days, which is definitely not long enough time to pass true judgement on the device, but it is enough time?to talk about some of my likes and dislikes. Ready? The screen is glorious…absolutely fabulous. 5″ of diagonal goodness that is clearer, and easier to read from, than any other available Windows Mobile Device. If a lot of screen isn’t important to you because you aren’t reading eBooks, editing documents or entering data in a spreadsheet, then you will most likely be turned off by the overall size of the device. With the…


My First “Pocket” PC – A Tribute to Clinton Sr.

[Judie’s note: This article is also currently running on Clinton Fitch (Dot) Com!, and it can be viewed in the original format (with even larger pictures) there. If you haven’t already checked out the many Windows Mobile software reviews on Clinton’s site, then be sure to visit soon.] If you read my biographical information on the Clinton Fitch (Dot) Com! Staff page, then you will see that I’ve been writing reviews of some type since the late 1990s. Likewise, if you read my blog entry over at Smartphone & Pocket PC magazine last month, then you read about how I…


The Treo 750 vs. HTC Hermes

[tps_start_button label=”Start slideshow” style=”” class=””] Recently my dad’s company bought several of their employees Dopod 838 Pro mobile phones (based on Judie?s review actually :-D). His device arrived at the office a few days ago, but he is in Vietnam for work, so one of his colleagues dropped it off. For the last 3 days I have been using it instead of my Treo, to see if I made the right choice months ago. I have come to a somewhat mixed decision based on several things that I?d like to describe below. My basis for these ?ratings? is that I…


eBooks and eReaders–a Short Overview

Soon I will be lucky enough to review Sony’s Reader, an eBook reader by Sony. But before I do and give y’all a review, I thought it might be nice to give folks a brief overview of eBooks, both on devoted devices and PDAs. I’ve been in the online documentation game for a long time.? A long time.? I was writing online doc back in 1991, before the Web even got going, back when Acrobat wasn’t even a twinkle in Adobe’s eye.? So I have some pretty (ahem) strong views on online doc, eBooks, eBook readers, and what makes for…


The Fujitsu T4215 Tablet PC Overview

My purpose here is not so much a review, but some thoughts and observations on what I really like about my new 4215 and what I don’t like. These are the things that as a new Tablet PC owner jumped out at me right away. I would like to begin by explaining how I came to purchase the Fujitsu 4215 in the first place. After years of owning (I still do, of course) Pocket PC devices I came to very much enjoy writing on my screen. It was and is however, a tiny screen. Much as I love handheld devices…


Hello World…

I have had a fascination with all types of gadgets and gizmos since I was a child. One of my earliest gadget memories was a Christmas when I was given yet another doll, and my brother got the coolest toy robot in the world. It didn’t take me too long to convince him that he wanted to trade…really!

And thus, the monster was born.

I never expected to become a prolific writer, it just kind of happened. I got my start in late 1999 after answering a software reviewer request at the now defunct smaller.com. By mid 2000 I knew that I wanted my reviews to focus not only on software, but also on the PDA hardware which I found so fascinating.

I soon