« Home
Gadgetize: January 2006Not announcements - real, available gadgets and gizmos. If you read about it here, you can buy it. Probably. |
Compare Prices on Gadgets at Spot Cost |
Site SearchPrevious Posts
» A Day With Kindle and a Free Kindle Book
| |
Thursday, January 12, 2006
Find the Culprit, Kill-a-Watt $34 ShippedThis seems like it'd be pretty fun, and maybe, just maybe, a little useful. Just put it between your appliance and the outlet, and it keeps track of your power usage.I have some 220 that it won't help with, but still, I'm curious if the refrigerator uses as much as I read they do. You can get the Kill-a-Watt for $34 delivered from Amazon. | ||
Wednesday, January 11, 2006
The Sonic Impact T-Amp: $30 Giant Killer?This is one I missed altogether, and I really used to love audio equipment. Nevertheless, the somewhat belated buzz on the Sonic Impact T-Amp is that it is as good or better than amplifiers 100x the price? Unbelievable? Read the reviews, from everywhere. There are a couple linked from the product detail page.I have already ordered one, looking forward to the sonic majesty. | ||
Tuesday, January 03, 2006
My Experience with VongoI went ahead and tried out Vongo today, a $9.95/month service for legally downloading and watching movies. You can watch as many movies as you like each month from their main selections, or download pay-per-view titles for 3.99. It also includes a live feed of the Starz! channel.The software installation was simple, and as far as I can tell, the Vongo player and interface use Flash for pretty much everything. It worked smoothly, registration was trouble-free, but I decided to pass on the monthly until I could watch something. I would recommend Vongo make some kind of demo video available to test quality and convince people to sign up. The selection of movies was a little slim, but I'd expect fast improvement here, so I wasn't too upset. There were 3 or 4 movies I definitely wanted to see right away. However, I was a little hesitant to sign up for the monthly service, thought I'd be watching 3 Ninjas before too long. I went with a pay-per-view so I could find out, and I watched Infernal Affairs. Not bad except I hate dubbed movies. The download process took less than 20 minutes on my cable modem, which was surprisingly good I thought. The player worked nicely, the quality of static screens was excellent, and looked great full screen on my projector. So far, so good. But the movie I watched had a lot of horizontal panning. Either the codec itself, or the quality of the encoding led to a fairly jittery sideways pan. My computer was far beyond the minimum requirements, so I don't believe the problem was on my end. To me it was extremely distracting, enough so that unless something changes, I wouldn't watch again. I did finish the movie, but I was aware of the problem all the way through. Again, it could have been that specific movie, but without some demonstration video to show off the codec without paying, I am left with the impression that the service is a very slick one, with a very attractive price level, but also with a slight quality problem that makes it unacceptable for me. On the positive side, if there were a few more movies and the quality improved a little, I would subscribe without hesitation. | ||
© Gadgetize.com All Rights Reserved. Besides, there's nada to copy. | ||
Gadget Saving
» Froogle - Shopping Search
|
Tags / Labels |