I’m kind of picky about my headphones. The Sennheiser HD 202 sound decent and are a bargain at $22.
I have two or three pairs kicking around the house. Whenever I recommend them to a friend they are impressed. It’s true what some of the reviews say, they can be a bit tight on the noggin but they will loosen up a bit with time. I have no problem wearing them for a few hours.

I was in the market for a second GPS unit. I was going to buy the same Navman usin that I already have. Howver I am enperienced GPS user now and I know what feature were lacking in my old unit. A couple of features I was looking for include

text to speech
Ability to avoid highways
Ability to enter my own route if I know a certain road has a ton of lights or contruction
Live traffic
A detour feature

Based on the recommendations of some friends I was looking at the Garmin 750 & 760 gps units, After a bit of research I discovered that somting about the Nuvi line. The Avoidances menu can be used as a round-about way of forcing the nuvi 760 to exclude highways. Unfortunately there’s no way to avoid, or exclude, specific roads or highways – a feature sorely missing from Garmin’s entire nuvi product line.

I then turned my eye to the Magellan 4250 which I saw at buy.com for $119 refurbished. The live traffic feature has a free trial for 3 month ans then is $60/year. That’s not too bad.

Most GPS system make you choose avoidance options (avoid highways, avoid tolls etc..) as part of the main menu system and it applies to all routes you enter. The 4250 et’s you choose a route method while entering an address. After you can further tweak the chosen path by browsing the maneuver list and excluding any roads you want to specifically avoid. You can also use the methos for detours bu there is also a dedicated detour option.

It looks easy to enter multiple stops (way points) if you want to plan a trip to different points on the same trip.

This is a lot of GPS for only $119.

This is Amanda Bynes and her Blackberry taken 1/29/09.

Ashley Tisdale is running a few errands in LA and chatting on her iphone.

If you look at this picture long enough will notice after a while that Kristin Cavallari is holding a Blackberry. I think it looks like the Blackberry Storm.

Blackberry Storm

When the new broke that Barack Obama may have to relenquish his Blackberry I was a little curious as to what model he had. After a bit of investigating I learned he uses the Blackberry 8700. One site I cam across mentiones it was the 8700c.

Walmart appears to be jump starting the holiday season with a pretty good deal on a Compaq CQ50-139WM laptop for only $298. As is typical with Walmart this seems to be configured specifically for Walmart. The laptop has a w/ Intel Celeron Processor 575, 160G drive, 2G of ram and Vista Home Basic.

I was looking for a portable field recorder and decided to give the Zoom H2 a try. I payed $169 for this unit. There are competitive units out there but they really do not match the value that the Zoom offers for anywhere near this price point.

Some of the features I like are:

• records onto cheap SD memory cards
• records in WAV or MP3 format
• is very portable
• can record up to 4 hours on 2 AA batteries
• can be mounted on a tripod
• has 4 microphones which allows for flexible recording options
• You can monitor recording through headphones

The Zoom H2 come with everything you need except batteries. The unit includes headphones, a case, wind screen, a neat little tripod for table top usage and more!

I removed the unit from the packaging and was able to figure out this unit without the manual. My type of gear! Zoom does include a quick start guide and a full fledged, very complete owners manual.

The included 512MB card can record well over 3 hours of 320Kbps MP3 audio. You can also use up to a 16GB for insane recording times.

Zoom H2 Sound Samples
Hear are untouced sound samples from The Zoom H2. Notice the nice stereo image. You can also hear crickets in the background of the recordings.
Zoom H2 Sound Samples – Dog Barking
Zoom H2 Sound Samples – Cars on the road

Overall I’m impressed. The Zoom H2 makes is a great choice as a recorder for students, videographers and musicians

I was strolling through Best Buy today and noticed the Asus – Eee PC. This wasn’t the first time I heard of them but I never saw one in person. The model was the EEE PC 900 and was $449. This model has windows XP loaded on it. The keyboard was a nice size and the thing was light as hell. The 8.9″ screen seemed a little washed out. Maybe it could be corrected with some adjustments.

I imagine most people are buying these as a second computer and basically want an internet appliance. For about $50 less you can get the linux version which is fine for surfing the net.

My Ipod Nano got the ole broken screen defect. Being the handy man I am I decided to order a kit from ebay and replace the screen myself. I have more degrees in electrical/electronic engineering than I can shake a stick at and I consider myself somewhat talented at fixing things.

Everything was going beautifully until I tried to attach the ribbon cable to the main board. I broke the little connector on the main board. I got frustrated at this point and gave up.

My advice. If your Ipod breaks send it in for a repair.