Review: Sony Network Walkman NW-E405
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I’ve had one of these mp3 players for about two months now and overall, it’s the best one I’ve tried. Fantastic battery life, nice display, and easy charging with USB.
Pros:
- 50 hour battery life
- A 3-minute charge is supposed to last 3 hours. I haven’t tried charging for just 3 minutes, but it does charge pretty fast.
- Charges with a standard usb cable – same one used for most devices like cameras and usb hard drives and such.
- So small and light I have it with me all day without noticing it.
- I made my own screen savers for it’s sweet OLED display
- You can make groups of songs to play. I never used Genre on my last mp3 player, but groups is easy. I made groups for relaxing stuff, rock, and energy.
Cons:
- Display is almost impossible to see in direct sunlight. Still, better than a shuffle with no display. How often you’re outside with sunny weather would affect your chances of this happening. For me: probably about 4 times.
- Doesn’t play protected music purchased online. What was sony thinking?
- Mine is only 512mb, which means some repeating.
- Doesn’t charge and play at the same time
- In an effort to maintain an efficient database, Sony forces you to download songs using their software. You can still use the device for storing files, but music won’t be found unless it’s gone through SonicStage or Sony’s file manager.
Before this one, I had a Rio Nitrus, preceeded by a RioVolt, and a cheap one before that. Compared to the Nitrus (1.5gb micro hard drive) this is way better. Nitrus battery life is about 8 hours, compared to 50 for the Sony one, which makes a huge difference. On my last summer vacation I forgot the charger for my Nitrus. It was such an obscure plug that I gave up left it in the suitcase. With this new Sony one, any usb port can power it – including my car charger usb port. 
Tags: Gadgets
Gallery 2.0
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Better late than never, Gallery 2, which came out in september, has some great features. The last time I was looking at PHP photo gallery options, this was the one I liked the best. Version 2.0 adds things like groups, subalbums in the url, uploading any type of file, disk quotas, user albums, improved navigation, and more.
Tags: Photography, Web Apps 2.0
Ads of the World
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Some of these Ads of the World are pretty good.
Tags: GFX
Brilliant Button Maker
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Make your own tiny link buttons with the Brilliant Button Maker.
Tags: Pixel Gfx, Web Apps 2.0
Mobuzz TV
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MobuzzTV is one of several technology sites I visit almost daily. The main feature is daily shows on technology news that’s actually interesting. For example, the last episode went from a story about an 18-yo who started his own airline, to a story about ad-blocking glasses, then finally we find out about a new reality TV show documenting a sex change operation. See, not the dry stuff.
Hamachi VPN Software
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One of the few programs I never close from my tray is Hamachi. If you only have files on one computer, this may not be of much interest – otherwise you will want to at least try this free VPN software. It establishes tunnels between any computers that join the virtual network. One of it’s best features is the ability to get around almost any firewall and NAT. “eh?” I hear you saying. Here’s an example of how I use it:
- I have a desktop at home running Hamachi behind a typical Linksys router/firewall.
- I have a laptop running Hamachi which travels with me.
With the laptop, I can tunnel out through the firewalls at work, school, and anywhere else I’ve tried and access all the files on my home computer as if I was on the same network as the home computer. The speed does slow down depending on ISP limits, but having a printout waiting at home that you printed from school is kinda cool.
I should mention before everyone goes getting their hopes up, that this software is only for Windows 2000/XP & Linux. I’d use it with my parents Windows 98 machine if I could.
FlyakiteOSX
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Want to confuse a friend? Go to FlyakiteOSX and hit the F11 key on the keyboard to make it full screen. What used to be Windows becomes an Ajax Mac OS X – it even remembers the placement of desktop icons between visits.
Tags: Web Apps 2.0
Flock
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James’s Blog
Flock is an interesting application. It’s basically the Firefox browser with a community feel. All your bookmarks can be shared with the del.icio.us community and it has Flickr integration. Blogging is also built in, and it supports many different types. This program is still being developed so expect bugs, but it does have a promising future.
I tried to use this as my main browser but I need to be able to open a whole bookmark folder all at once from the bookmarks bar more than I need tags and sharing with everyone. If re-worked a little, I would like the bookmarks syncronization to keep them the same at work, home and on the laptop – but there would still be some links I wouldn’t want shared for security’s sake. No, not that type of links, I’m talking about links to control panels for websites.
Tags: Web
Wikipedia’s list of websites using Ajax
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I found this entry on wikipedia while looking for interesting AJAX applications. It’s got some good programs that could be really useful when out of betas.
Websites using Ajax – Wikipedia
Tags: Web Apps 2.0
Digital Media Minute
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Jim Rutherford showed us some things Web 2.0 can do in class last Wednesday. He’s posted some links he took us to in his blog: Digital Media Minute » Web 2.0 Link Dump. Jim’s blog is a good one for keeping up with the web and new technologies. I’d like this blog to be similar but covering everything I’m interested in, including graphics/photography, gadgets, handhelds, and probably some work-related tourism on top of the web technologies.
Tags: Web, Web Apps 2.0
