Sony BDPS300 Blu-Ray Player

High-definition video is truly awesome – it’s like seeing DVDs for the first time, all over again. There are, however, varying degrees of high definition. High definition cable and satellite, for example, are oftentimes disappointing – and expensive. Paying fifty dollars a month to watch upconverted DVD video can be little else.
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Sony Bravia KDL46W3000 LCD Monitor

While we bought the KDL46W3000 primarily for use as a large-screen computer monitor, we’ve connected a Blu-Ray player to it on several occasions as well. The results were breathtaking.

Shopping for a flat-panel monitor is brutal. There are oceans of them, and swimming shark-like within them, packs of consumer-electronics sales-trolls who all seem to be on commission. Some of the monitors we looked at were little better than digital sand-paintings.
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Stargate: The Ark of Truth

Short of actually having a working stargate in the back yard – for which we’d unquestionably never be able to get a building permit – Stargate: The Ark of Truth remains the most entertaining way to spend 97 minutes in living memory. With its series cancelled by SciFi channel, Stargate appears to have morphed into direct-to-DVD movies, a format that clearly agrees with it.

This is the first of at least two such movies.
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Kyocera FK-160 BK Ceramic Knife

Kitchen gadgets rarely rise to any detectable level of excitement, and getting hot and bothered about a knife is highly suspect. Thus it was with some degree of foreboding that I watched the unboxing of the Kyocera ceramic knife.

A truly remarkable feat of technology, this is the sort of knife that would make serious chefs rise from their stoves and burst into song, if people really did that sort of thing. It looks cool, it’s obscenely high-tech and it cuts food so precisely as to be able to measure the thickness of a slice of tomato to the nearest molecule.
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Wii Sports

One game console seems pretty much like another, and if the prospect of huddling in a darkened living room bludgeoning phosphor aliens all afternoon touches you with the sort of dread hitherto reserved for children’s birthday parties and small fuel-efficient cars, you’d probably resolve the issue by ignoring the lot of them.

The Wii game console, by Nintendo, is different… or at least, it can be. While it has access to a huge library of mindless violence, CGI monsters and bad driving, it comes with a DVD of games which is none of these things. Wii is intended to be played socially.
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Corel Draw X3 Suite

Dating back to just after the dawn of time, the Corel Draw suite of graphic applications is a rich, sophisticated drawing environment. The primary applications included with the X3 suite are Corel Draw and Corel Photopaint – a vector drawing package and a bitmapped paint package respectively – but the package includes a number of more specialized tools, a huge collection of fonts and a gallery of clip art.
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American Power Conversion ES-350 Uninterruptible Power Supply

Uninterruptible power supplies are almost as exciting as photocopiers, and the buying decisions surrounding them are usually predicated upon the nearest box with a plug at one end and a battery inside. It’s easier to develop a consuming interest in zucchini.

There are a lot of very inexpensive UPS devices – at least, there are a lot of them that cost less than the APC ES-350, which is relatively pricey as these things go. This having been said, none of them represents a really huge pile of cash, and the extra few dollars required to leave the shop with a state of the art, utterly reliable UPS is arguably worth it.
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Toyota Prius

Unlike the Ford Explorer reviewed in an earlier edition of Storm Gods, we didn’t actually buy a Prius. Not that we mightn’t have liked to – doing so will get you no end of cred with your greener acquaintances – but this one was a rental. Honesty bids me say it wasn’t even a rental by choice. On a recent sojourn to the old world, our flight to Manchester was unexpectedly diverted to Birmingham, and by the time I reached the car rental desk, the Prius was the last chicken in the shop.
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Jupiter diMedici 1321ES Alto Flute

An alto flute plays a fourth lower than a conventional C flute – it will play naturally in the key of G. It offers a useful lower range for flautists, or a handy way to play in a different range without a lot of transposition and uncomfortable head-scratching. Mostly, they just sound cool.
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Mr. Bean’s Holiday

The very definition of a strange little flick done perfectly, this latest glimpse into the life of Mr. Bean arguably deserves a place at Cannes, rather than merely being filmed there. Evolved from a UK television comedy, it follows the almost entirely non-vocal Mr. Bean through a tangle of misadventures as he attempts to weasel his way to a vacation in the south of France.

Make sure you have access to a Pause button – you’ll want an intermission to let your face stop hurting.
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Lost: Season 3

I can’t imagine trying to watch Lost one episode a week, stuffed in between the commercials of broadcast television. Experienced on DVD, its convoluted, quirky plots, maddening flashbacks and textured characters flow into a long, layered movie viewed over several nights. The third season is a treat, hinting at a resolution to the story but drawing no closer to it.

The extra features – a whole other DVD’s worth of deleted scenes, documentaries and out-takes – will prove a welcome nightcap for anyone who gets to the end and still wants another peek at the mystery before waiting for season four. It will come as no surprise that the bonus DVD is fairly thick with easter eggs.
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Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End

While it goes nowhere and takes a very long time – 169 minutes – not getting there, the last dubloon in the treasure chest of Pirates is fun to watch as it resolutely fails to arrive. A tangle of oblique references to nautical folklore, state of the art CGI and no detectable plot, At World’s End offers a final evening with Cap’n Jack Sparrow and a cast of rogues, villains and damned souls.

At least, it purports to be a final evening. The closing scenes hint at yet another sequel, and rumors have it that some of the actors in this film, including Cap’n Jack his’self, have signed on for another voyage.
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Motorola motoKRZR K1 Cell Phone

This is easily the coolest cell phone on earth – albeit, with one of the highest price tags on earth. Ignore this… the phone will be cool long after you’ve paid off the plastic you dented to buy it.

Cell phones that do a lot of stuff are pretty common – if you have half an hour to kill in a mall one afternoon, try finding one that doesn’t have a camera and an MP3 player. This having been said, cell phones that do a lot of stuff really well are pretty scarce, and it’s hard not to wonder if all the bad ones are part of a conspiracy to soften you up for a phone that costs a week’s pay.
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Canon EF 28-135mm f/3.5-5.6 IS USM Lens

Those little digital cameras that look like they arrived as prizes in a box of Cap’n Crunch are wonderful for capturing slightly blurry images of next door’s drooling children attempting to bath a cat, but serious photography demands something with a lens having a diameter in excess of that of a pencil eraser. Photographers carry huge, bulky cameras around with them for a reason – the reason having nothing to do with the usefulness of a large brass object on a long strap for defense against bears.
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Mio Technologies C520 Digital Navigation System

People who buy satellite navigation systems to drive around the suburbs might be deluding themselves. Out in the frozen wastes of rural Ontario, a good GPS receiver is almost as important as a good coat.

A good GPS receiver that can tell you where the nearest gas station is defies description.
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Generac 05251 7 Kilowatt Standby Generator

PREFACE: About a year after the following review was written, our three-and-a-half-year-old backup generator refused to start. Upon summoning one of Generac’s service technicians, it was discovered to have almost no engine compression, indicating that it had burned its valves or its piston rings. The quote we had for repairing it – which entailed trucking it away, replacing its engine, returning it and setting it up again – was within a few hundred dollars of replacing the whole machine, and would have left us without a backup generator for at least a month. In that the generator’s two-year warrantee had expired, the manufacturer wasn’t interested in assisting us. While we remain convinced that a backup generator is about as optional as indoor plumbing out here, we’d look to another manufacturer if we had to install one of these things from scratch.

Life’s possible without electricity, but it’s not a lot of fun. The sudden failure of the power grid can turn your refrigerator into the domain of squishy purple mutants; your business into a nuclear winter; and your days into an endless wait for a utility that only cares about you at the end of a billing cycle. Especially in rural areas, where the electric infrastructure is often increasingly aged and under-maintained, power failures are becoming common, protracted and more than merely annoying.
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Vantec EZ-Swap MRK-102FD / MRK-200ST Removable Hard Drive Rack

The hard drive in your computer is arguably its most valuable component. While remarkably affordable, installing Windows and the other applications and data you use is typically a time-consuming undertaking. We usually allow several days to get a new computer up and running.
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Dyson Root 6 Hand Vacuum

One of the drawbacks to living somewhere quiet and rural is that dust, not confined by asphalt and poor urban planning, is everywhere. It gets everywhere, too. Dust measurably shortens the life of technology, and we have a lot of technology.

One of the drawbacks to living somewhere quiet and rural with a hundred and fifty pound Newfoundland dog is that huge tumbleweeds of shedded black dog hair make the issue of dust immaterial by comparison.
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Stargate SG-1: Season 10

The final episodes of the known universe’s longest-running science fiction series are thoroughly enjoyable, perhaps all the more so in the knowledge that Stargate appears to have resurrected itself as a number of DVD movies. Its cancellation by SciFi channel marks its second termination – it was originally a production of the Showtime network – but it clearly intends to live on.

Arguably having blown through pretty well all the obvious science fiction devices and concepts that lend themselves to tales suitable for telling in forty minutes, the tenth season of Stargate SG-1 entangles itself in a sprawling story arc in which the galaxy is poised for invasion by a race of fundy religious extremists. You can decide which fundy extreme religion they’re ostensibly based on. You just couldn’t ask for a better collection of villains – they have no redeeming qualities at all, they’re easy to loath and they always look surprised when they get zapped.
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Monk: Season 5

Airing on the USA Network, Monk is a somewhat esoteric detective series presided over by a somewhat esoteric detective. Adrian Monk is beset by obsessive compulsive disorder to a degree that would cripple lesser men. Somehow, he continues to function despite a morbid fear of germs, needles, milk, death, snakes, mushrooms, heights, crowds, elevators, disorder, dark, enclosed spaces, dirt, spiders, driving, bullies, fire, puppets, tap water, noises, touching, feet, flying, beautiful women, imperfection, dogs, cats, rabbits, monkeys, bridges, public speaking, flies, slime, tetracycline, rivers, tunnels, caves and dentists.

Yes, I did have to look those up.
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