I'm having massive gadget lust in the exhibit hall at Macworld and figured I'd drop by the "blogger lounge" ... the microsnarft guy at the booth entrance condescendingly explained to me (very ahem-ily in a tone of voice to warn me off) that it was "for bloggers only" and then what a blog was. thanx dude! anyway the free soda and couches are nice. Now a dude in an EFF hat... named ... Mike? is telling me that "we need more women bloggers" and complains that there are no women bloggers in NYC and they don't come to the meetups. Waaaah! And they don't come to Gnomedex! And despite Dave Winer's best efforts the women don't come! I am baiting him shamefully, switching back and forth between extolling the virtues of SXSWi's diversity efforts and then explaining to him that all women bloggers are having secret lesbian sex orgies and not letting him in and that's why they're not at Gnomedex. BWAHAHAHAHA.
People want to photograph me a lot at this conference, do you think it's the hair? 8-)
Here's my product picks for amazing coolness! Stuff I want! I'll add the links later. Best first.
- Circus Ponies Notebook. This is the thing I will very likely buy here, probably tomorrow after I download it and try it. For one, OMG Ponies!!!!111!!! For two, I need something beyond mindmap software, and a step before ecto, for taking notes as I websurf, think, and grab stuff for blogging and that sort of thing. Notebook looks extremely nifty! For fuck's sake, though, where are the cool stickers? They are missing the cool sticker potential. (The price is so much better than mindmap software.)
- Handle for macbook that screws into the case screws! 50 bucks, 20% off. Leather handle on top of lightweight metal that folds down to be a sort of stand, if you like.
- The incredible planetary flythrough/ astronomy planet flight simulator thingie. I have to go back to it and get their name and flyer and url. (Update: It's called Seeker, and is by the same company, Bisque, that makes an astronomy program, TheSkyX. Seeker is around 100 bucks. Planetariums use it.... You can script your flythroughs on other planets, moons, asteroids, dock with space stations, and save the results as quicktime movies and stick them on your blog! Yeah! It only needs an open source api so that we can build games on it and make things explode!
- Radtech backpack with solar panel array, charge up battery beltpack for phone, ipod, etc. Within 6-8 months there will be a 3x more expensive backpack with solar chargeable laptop battery!
- Voyager 4 astronomical software. Fly around the solar system while everything is orbiting. Neat! Not quite as neat as the other astronomy thing, but still very cool; it did different things, and was great for grokking orbital motion and looking at the whole solar system working together. I think this is the one for serious astronomy geeks who want 1 million years of accurate simulation of the night sky and the precession of the Earth's axis.
- ScanSnap, document scanner thing, small enough to be portable, not too expensive, has a bag for easy transport, sucks in something like 20 pages a minute and pdf-s them. Yowza. Still can't scan a book in a library, the holy grail of scanners for me. Yet... with this, I could do the xeroxing I already do, then feed it into the scanner later at home and get rid of the huge amounts of paper I accumulate. (Mostly poetry in Spanish, so who knows if the OCR would work well with it; I'd like to test some day.
- laptop cases with amazing stuff, designs, patterns, laser-etched dragons, etc! THey had a peacock diamond one.
- Gelaskins doohickeys for ipods, neat looking; comix on your ipod skin.
- All the mind map software. Novamind, Mindmanager 6, Omnigraffle. I want them all! Or ... just one! No, all of them. All too expensive for a person like me.
- Mariner software products looked good!
- Lightscribe cd/dvd etching thing. Wowie... and it is only 99 bucks. Okay this is damn cool. I want it just to play with, but it would also be useful for my small press poetry stuff. Their samples were amazing - You can design pretty much anything and it will etch it onto the surface of your cd. Complicated scrolly vines and flowers and engravings with very fine detail. It looked GREAT.
- Pen-it note taker drawing thing. Really a digital pen. So, no tablet necessary, you just draw on paper with a working pen and it has a usb thingie. I wished I could get this for my sister.
- I was excited about Readiris but it didn't turn out to be quite what I would wish. only 1 step up from a cuecat as far as my purposes go. Not useful for scanning a book in a library
- iCliplite looked neat. I should try it along with the omg ponies Notebook.
- Intelliscanner. WTF gadget thing for obsessive compulsive people who scan in their groceries. Seriously, cans of food...!? along with your comic books and wine collection. People make fun of me for being obsessed with LibraryThing, but, CANNED FOOD? haha! This seemed to have a nifty design and nice software and I have to admire it. Anything that nerdy and that obsessive, just wow. Sparks many thoughts of how as a culture we are obsessed with our Stuff.
- Etch-a-mac SF place that will etch cool designs into your laptop case.
- Extremely cool laptop bags and cases. Sumo, Crumpler, bbp. Scosche; backpack with built in speakers. Lexie Barnes designer laptop bags, super cool and amazing. Flowery. Girly. Yay!
- Microreplay - sell your used computer through/to them
- Good info from Disc Makers with a booklet that, while it's a big magazine-sized ad for them, is also super informative & useful. They will make 1000 DVDs in cases for $1.79 each, which sounds like a good deal. I assume CDs are cheaper to make. You know, I burned 200 CDs one by one for the anthology of bay area poets that I edited! And swore if I did that again I would do a run of 1000. Even my tiny zines are selling out of 500 copies in a couple of years. And the book was way more popular than I had thought - I moved almost 200 copies of it in no time flat - and my co-editors sold the other 200.
- Techshell laptop case things - very strong, different colors, see-through.
- Lineform - a drawing program that I also wished I could get for my sister. From Freeverse.com.
- Optix - a document management thing that looked interesting and slick.
- I would like to give something called "imeem" a mention as an example of marketing that radiated maximum lameness. Lame myspace clone trying to sound hip but completely failing; schizophrenic "check it out" "can you dig it" "celebrities & hipsters & models" language mixed with buzzword speak... "combines the best of instant messaging and social networking." complete with re-invention of the word "group" with their own company name. Here at Blurgh! we're so cool, like models, that we are going to send each other "emails" but we call them "Blurghs!" because that's what cool people do!
I want to try Mariner's screenwriting app. It looks to be lightyears ahead of MovieMagic.
Celestia is another 'space browser' and it's open source.
Check out BareBone's Yojimbo for filing bookmarks, pdfs, and notes.
I'm a fan of Tinderbox as a note taking tool.
Posted by: whump | January 10, 2007 at 12:11 AM