Tuesday 5 July, 2005 at 8:56PM (Nereus)  ::  permalink  ::  comments (0)

Got a couple of new items recently. First up was a good set of speakers for the computer. The stock ones that came with this computer were tinny little things that sounded so bad that having no speakers at all was preferable. Those were replaced with IceQueen's speakers from a computer that was retired years ago, which sounded a little better. Unfortunately the connections were phut, which meant I had to physically push down on one of the connections and hold it there to use them. With a bit of volume they lost the plot too (slightly blown I think) so really not that useful, although still preferable to the tinny little stock speakers. IceQueen has a decent setup on her computer including a good bass box, but it was a pain having to transfer files and use her computer if I wanted to hear music while on my computer, so I checked things out and found what has turned out to be a great set of speakers. The image here is the Creative Inspire T3000 set which is running on my computer now. They sound great, and what really blew me away was the price - they were under US$50. Amazingly good value, and they have a really good range too. The system power is 60W which is plenty for our apartment - the heavy bass box makes them feel a whole lot more powerful than that in fact. If you're looking for some speakers for your computer that sound great and are good value for money, these are the ones.

The other recent purchase was a personal digital mp3 player. This is very kewl. After finding that IceQueen's very old RCA Lyra digital player had finally died, it was time to get something new. The Lyra was probably one of the earliest personal digital players commercially released, and had a capacity of a whopping 48MB via a flash card. That 48MB is only a few songs worth even in MP3 format, and that also included some of the MP3 encoding software - kinda pointless unless you wanted to hear the same couple of songs over and over. Of course I looked at iPods since they are so popular, and was left wondering one thing.. why? The iPod is restrictive in that it doesn't play well with others at all, and iTunes.. well, don't get me started on that. What we got is an awesome little iRiver player (pictured).

This little machine holds 1GB of music, although there are bigger capacity ones, but 1GB is actually a couple of hundred MP3 format songs si no worries there. It features an FM radio tuner and also a voice recorder, and what's more, it can record music from almost any device - for example, a friend's player where you'd normally plug in the headphones, you just plug in a lead that runs to this little iRiver player and that's it, hit record and you've got their music - anytime, anywhere. It runs up to 40hours on one AA battery, and it's incredibly compact - the length is just over the length of an AA battery, so the entire player can fit in the palm of your hand and you can close your hand and have it almost completely concealed in your fist, it's that small. The sound is great, and because it's a flash disc, there is no skipping no matter how much you shake or bump or drop it - great for joggers (not that I run). IceQueen and I spent Independence Day weekend up in Catskill (more about that later) and it was great having this to listen to on the 2 hour train ride up - Ice loves it. I have some New Zealand music on there already - some classic Dave Dobbyn (from the Loyal album) and of course some Shihad too, among others. If you're in the market for a digital player, get one of these - the iPod is all hype and relatively overpriced.

As I mentioned, we spent the Independence Day weekend at a resort up in the Catskills - it's so good to get out of NYC for a few days (we left early Friday morning and got back late Monday night). The place we stayed was great - so much to do there - we even went on a riverboat cruise on the Hudson. This entry is getting pretty long so I'll write more about it later.