In reviewing this horn, I sincerely regret that we didn’t build a graphic with six stars when the Storm Gods page was designed. Immensely cool to look at and inspiring to play, the Shadow is a bit like buying talent.
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We have a fair number of digital cameras in house – you’d probably expect that. None the less, the Rebel XTi remains a house favorite. Cool, flexible and capable of using our disturbingly large collection of Canon EF lenses – some of which date back twenty years or more – this is a camera to engender considerable squabbling over.
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Typewriters are quaint, irritating anachronisms of another age that should have been recycled a long time ago. We only have the one, and for the most part, it’s used to address envelopes. This is, to be sure, mildly preposterous – having word-processed letters and outputted them with a high-speed laser printer, their authors have to walk down the hall to where the typewriter lives amidst its dust and ignominy, and peck out an address.
There are a number of ways to work around the issue of typewriters in this capacity – window envelopes, laser printer compatible envelopes and so on – but few of them actually turn out to be practical. We’ve tried them all, and the typewriter remains.
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The technology of coffee is second only to that of manned space flight – considering that it’s just water poured through ground-up beans, it’s remarkable how complex the process of brewing the stuff can get.
Tassimo is the third pod coffee maker we’ve bought. Its predecessors were cast into the back of a cupboard for the lack of a reliable pod supply in the case of the Black and Decker system, and due to profound and apparently unstoppable water leaks for the Melitta machine. Thus far, Tassimo seems to be made of sterner stuff.
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I’m old enough to remember when phones just rang and talked to you – and fortunately, not quite old enough to have experienced the ones with cranks on the side. Such a phone would be regarded as the drooling, imbecile cousin of telecommunications technology today, suitable only for use as a decorative plant stand.
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I love iPods, but not their headphones. Sticking bits of plastic into my head just seems wrong. Perhaps more to the point, putting speakers that close to the inner workings of your ears – even every small speakers – carries with it the very real risk of doing serious damage to your hearing.
This, and walking around with wires dangling from your face looks silly.
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The problem with most electronic drums is that they sound like electronic drums. Not having to give up a huge volume of space to a traditional drum kit is an attractive prospect, but perhaps not as attractive as it might seem if the resulting percussion smells strongly of transistors.
The Roland SPD-20 drum pad does acoustic drums so convincingly that you’ll swear you can hear them falling over and crushing someone’s toes at the end of a session. Based on several decades of earlier electronic percussion devices, it offers hundreds of drum sounds, each of them indistinguishable from real percussion toys. It’s also programmable, should you find that hundreds just isn’t enough.
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Something of a one-trick pony, the Safety Siren Radon Detector’s trick’s a decidedly important one. Radon is a colorless, odorless gas that’s created when trace amounts of uranium in the rocks and soil around buildings decays. Radon is itself radioactive – breathing significant quantities of radon can increase your risk of lung cancer. The EPA in the United States estimates that 12,000 to 15,000 cases of lung cancer per year result from radon exposure.
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Sadly, after a long and distinguished history as the preeminent Windows anti-virus product, we were compelled to consider VirusScan 11 as one of the lemons that snuck in. Unfriendly, unworkable and apparently unfixable, this is a security application that does its job entirely too well. Users of VirusScan 11 might come to suspect that it’s been designed to defend them against themselves.
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You’re unlikely to need one of these, and even more unlikely to need one for the reason for which we bought a bunch of them, but this box was such a perfect solution to a seemingly insurmountable problem that we felt it deserved a mention.
The Targus Mobile Docking Station is intended to connect to the USB port of a laptop and provide it with a host of other ports it might not have started life with. Powered up and plugged, in, it will provide its host computer with a parallel printer port, an RS-232 serial port, two additional USB ports, an Ethernet port – that actually works really well, much to everyone’s surprise – and conventional PS/2 mouse and keyboard ports.
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If you’re considering any other flat panel monitor, you’re about to make a horrible mistake. Nothing beats the Multisync 90GX2.
A slightly unconventional monitor, the 90GX2 has a glossy screen rather than a matt-surfaced one, something its manufacturer refers to as “Opticlear.” While slightly prone to glare under harsh lighting, this texture-less surface allows the screen of the 90GX2 to display precise, flawless pixels. Everything on it looks like a huge, laser-sharp photograph.
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While SUVs are decidedly unfashionable in some quarters, when it’s twenty below in the middle of January, you don’t want to be caught outside in northern Ontario driving a SmartCar. The Explorer Sport-Trac, despite its slightly upmarket name, is a serious little truck that can do battle with all four seasons.
It’s also just about the coolest thing with headlights.
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