bengston

gadget boys

yesterday I went to the digitec store here in Zurich for the first time. It's quite an interesting business model: They have a very fast and well built webshop and on top of that offer their customers to pick up the gadgets at the fairly centrally located shop/warehouse. When you enter you are required to get a ticket which you can print out using a kiosk system which includes a scanner for your printed order. Once you are called up they already have the order on the screen. Very efficient. The other observation I made was on their customer base: Purely male, gadet loving geeks of all sorts. So if you wonder where the boys are while girls are raiding department stores you know where to look!

iPod Battery replacement

Wow.. what can I say? ipodgarage.ch are superfast! I ordered the battery two days ago and today I received it. The change was a piece of cake: 5mins if you do it carefully and now it's back in the charger. Well then I guess that means my mini will last a bit longer. Not bad uh? Thanks strohsilo for the tip :)

bye bye iPod

After exactly two years, my iPod mini has let me down. The battery has reached a spectacular lifetime of let's say five minutes after an 8 hour charge. Well it was too small in capacity anyway but what am I supposed to do now? Anyone know where these units go after they're dead? I might return it and ask them to properly de-assemble it and recycle it. Damn.

remember the zip drive?

Yesterday I stumbled across a parallel port (!) zip drive and some 100MB disks in a drawer that I've long forgotten about. Me and two collegues bought this about 10 years ago in order to do backups of our data. we shared the drive which seemed to make sense. It used to be great to exchange data too before the CD Roms made it ubiquitous. Now I know there's some stuff on those drives but I can't even connect it anymore because my PC has no Parallel port...

Magic Block

Not sure if this has quite made the round but on Friday I was told I should do a search on "magic block". It's a new handheld device by IBM labs which works as a digital voice recorder - or better - diary. It records everything throughout the day and uses speech recognition to make spoken content searchable. Now it's about time we need Swiss German speech recognition... :)

iPod nano

now this looks too damn good to be true. iPod nano has just been announced! Any takers for my my iPod mini?