I always wanted a wirelesskeyboard for the loungeroom and finally got around to buying the Shintaro Wireless Keyboard.

The reason I went for this keyboard over all others is that it has a built in trackball, I didn’t want to have an external mouse as that wouldn’t really work for me.

The keyboard is really great and even has a scroll wheel located on the bottom left hand side and a left mouse button on the bottom right (this makes sense when you use it).

This means you can hold the keyboard in your hands easily use the mouse to click, scroll and do a variety of tasks.

Overall: Great product am very happy with it.

So after 4 months of rumours, the 3G iPhone has been announced.

Whats new (not much really):

• Now with 3G data transfer speeds.
• Built in GPS.
• Better battery life.
• Slightly slimmer.
• 1/2 the price of the old one ($200 US for the 8Gb vs $400 US for the old model)
• No Dock included, it is now seperate.

Unfortunately none of the new features are pain points for me in the current model, so I am on the fence about upgrading, for new users this is a slam dunk, Apple must really want the mobile phone market.

I finally broke down and bought an iPhone.

What can I said that hasn’t already been said? Nothing, the thing is fun to use, I now don’t have to carry a seperate iPod and phone and the potential of the device is amazing.

There are a lot of community made programs out there that run on the device and its a lot of fun playing with the thing and trying out all the programs.

I have broken it a few times and just had to do a restore and rebuild and back up and running, though this is pretty easy and it hasn’t stopped me from enjoying it.

It isn’t quite ready to replace my Palm T3 yet, though when third party apps get the full go ahead in July it just might.

With the digital age and the ever expanding storage space available, it is easy to never clean house and hold onto files forever.

Doing this on an iPod can backfire, because before you know it you have too many songs that you don’t listen to and there is too much to go through it all and clean it up.

I decided to clean up my music collection because I have too many albums that I just keep around for nostalgia reasons and some music that was never a good idea.

What I did to help get me started:

• Thought about: How do I use my iPod? What kind of music do I want when I use it?
• In iTunes Reset all play and skip counts.
• Setup a playlist that excludes songs I have played or skipped in the last 60 days or has 1 star.
• Started listening to each song to see if it fit how I used my iPod.
• Listen and decide: 1 star to delete, skip or listen to the full song to remove it from the playlist and keep it in the collection.

It’s funny how some music that you thought you wanted/liked, you don’t. Also good to go through and hear the great songs that brings a smile to your face.

I found that I had a lot of stuff piggyback onto my iPod when I ripped my CD collection, cleaning this up gave me a lot of free space.

Going through the most of the music allowed me to dump about half of what I had. So it was definitely worth it.

Thinking about a bluetooth headset? Then you should look at the Jawbone headset.

It features military grade noise reduction, check out this Jawbone demo video for a rundown of how it works.

Here is a Jawbone Review without marketing hype, its still awesome.

They also made some really funny commercials the you probably won’t see on TV:

• Commercial 1
• Commercial 2
• Commercial 3
• Commercial 4

Overall I have to say that this is the kind of headset that does the job really well.

Turns out that Monster Cables are as good as Coat hangers.

Monster cables have always been over-hyped and over-priced, perhaps one day people won’t fall for it anymore.

I was looking for a decent set of headphones that could handle the audio quality of YouTube and various other internet media.

After a bit of reasearch I decided on the Sennheiser PX100 headphones.

The Good:

• Nice and small, can easily pop them on and off.
• They are actually collapasable and come with a hard case to carry them in.
• After they were worn in, the sound is very good for what they are.

The Bad:

• Definitely not the best in terms of sound reproduciton, though you get what you pay for.

Overall:

Very happy with the purchase. Considering the source material they are perfect for the job.

Pioneer have a 9mm thin concept plasma. Something to tide you over while you wait for OLED.

So I just watched the MacWorld Keynote for 2008.

Best highlight - New Apple TV update that doesn’t need a PC to work, you can rent movies from itunes, all via your TV with no PC required.

I have been talking about this for years, finally great to see it turn up. Now they just have to make my vision complete and add every show ever made to it.

MacBook Air looks pretty sweet as well. Amazing how they made it so thin with 5 hours of battery life. Fullsize backlight keyboard and 13.3″ screen.

So my Linksys WAG54G ADSL2+ wireless modem router is now broken. It keeps dropping the LAN connection, apparently it is due to a faulty capacitor and this happens lots of people. I have had a few problems with the Linksys since I got it, such as constant reboots (fixed by firmware update) and this was the final straw.

I decided to purchase a Netgear DG834G Netgear ADSL2+ Wireless Modem Router and boy am I glad I did.

• My ADSL connection is now faster 16mb up from 14mb.
• The configuration was a breeze, just start the setup wizard, wait 30 seconds and then enter my ISP username/password.
• Every single page has a help column that tells you what each value does and when you might need to use it. This feature alone highlights how much Netgear make it easy to use.
• Their website has easy to find product support details with the latest firmware, the linksys was a nightmare for this.
• The only drawback so far is the lack of wall mounting holes.

For now I am very happy with my purchase.