Author: jane

I’ve noticed that in the blogger.com Blogs of Note section recently there have been a couple of travel blogs. These are people who are using blogger to update their web sites during their travels. This is a great idea, and blogger provides a really good interface for this.

Some travel blogs I’ve looked at:

• The Strange California Journey
• Greg’s Appalachian Hike
• Tina’s Travel’s through New Zealand, Australia, China and Southeast Asia

Well, Big Brother started again in the UK on Friday, and I’m kind of hooked again. Not sufficiently hooked so that I watch it on E4 for 20 hours a day or whatever, but enough to check the site out from time to time. I only got interested in the first Big Brother at the time when Nasty Nick got kicked out, and I think I was a bit spoilt as that was way more interesting than the current programmes are. However, it is early days yet. It is very obvious (well to me anyway) that Channel 4 are definitely trying to spice things up a bit with this series, building a “den”, putting in a “table dancer” etc and I guess only time will tell whether anything happens or not.

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Earlier this year, we bought a copy of Jungle Book Groove Party for the Playstation. This is a fantastic game, you have to dance around on the dance mat in time with the music following the arrows on the screen. Some friends came around for dinner a few months ago, and immediately went out and bought the game themselves.

Yesterday, we had the “Dance Mat Challenge”. The game comes with a few 2 player options, and so we tried them out at their house. One of the options is the head to head match, no big surprises here, both players get to choose a character and then they dance against each other. There was one surprise though, at the point where in the normal game you get a rest, here you get a “Dance Sprint” where you make as many contacts with the mat as you can to score more points. The other game we played was the team game, which was really hard. If one player missed a contact, then the arrow moves over to the other players stack. This was really funny to watch, as the more contacts were missed, the more the boys laughed, and the more they missed.

An excellent game and pretty good exercise too

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A new magazine was launched in the UK a couple of
months ago. No big deal, new magazines are launched all the time. What’s different about it is it’s size. Instead of the usual size it’s about A5 – only slightly wider than a book. This is a fantastic idea in my opinion. It makes them even more transportable on tubes, trains, planes etc. I read the April edition (I think) and I have to admit that it was “just another women’s magazine” but, if I was looking for something to read on my way to work or similar it would probably be one of my first choices.

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New toy for Jane

It was my birthday a couple of weeks ago, and I had a nice long think about what I wanted. I decided that, with the hopeful move to Brighton, a portable MP3 player would be a really cool gift. So, we started researching them, and there are SO many to choose from. All with different features, some have radio, some have 64MB, some have 96MB, one has 128MB. I decided that I didn’t want one of the “burn MP3s to CD” versions, as they are quite large (a good idea for the car, but not for lugging around). Some of the other cool ones, mainly due to their size, were the Panasonic e-wear models and the Sony ones. Both of these, however, record the mp3s into their own format. So, despite them coming with a usb connector, it could still take 20 minutes to copy the songs across. I didn’t like the idea of storing songs in yet another format, and so looked around a bit more.

We ended up decided on a SoundsGood springboard module that fits into the handspring visor. The module itself it small, and fits snugly into the visor springboard port. It has 64MB onboard, uses a USB connector (just the standard cradle) and comes with a desktop application for putting music onto it. It seems to take about 5 minutes to transfer the 64MB across, which I think is pretty reasonable. It also comes with a registered version of musicmatch. We also got the EnergyClip battery pack. This is the bit that swung it for me really. This takes one AA battery and the module just slips into it. So, you can carry your music around without the visor. You don’t get an LCD display or anything particularly pretty but it’s functional and means that you don’t have to carry the visor with you to listen to music.

Because it only has 64MB, I’m busy converting some of my favourite tracks to a lower bps rate (96) working on the theory that whilst sitting on a tube or train, the loss of sound quality isn’t going to worry me so much. However, I’m looking for a better way to convert them as doing it one album at a time is going to get pretty boring.

A review will appear on the gadgets review page when I get around to it

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Update: 20 May 2001 The 2 reviews are now available – Sounds Good MP3 player and Energy Clip