Gadgets I have bought recently

I have bought a few gadgets recently. Some that I really need, and some... um... it's good to have them.

1. Apple Mighty Mouse $438

I bought the mighty mouse when there was a sale in the online Apple Store last month. It is a Bluetooth mouse with laser as tracking device. Noticeably it has a scroll ball on the top so you can do 360 degrees scrolling. I have to admit it is a bit too expensive but I have to say it would work with my future Mac laptop like a charm. Besides the side button that I could hardly squeeze to activate, it's rather good. Photos

2. Logitech UltraX Keyboard $180

Also a slightly expensive keyboard compared to other non-cordless keyboards. It is a laptop thin keyboard and the touch on it has been excellent. There are no cheap plastic that act as spring to the keys. I don't know how the mechanism is because I don'r dare to remove one of the key caps and take a look - I can only peek at them, otherwise fearing the key caps can not be replaced. The only drawbacks is it works on the legacy PS2 adapter. It has standard 104-key and some multimedia keys at the far right corner that I can ignore.

3. Kingston 1G Memory ~$550

This is for my Mac Mini. My Mac used to have 512M memory and it was running rather slowly and (beware: technical-speak) need to swap data from hard drive to memory and vice versa frequently. It has been running extremely smoothly ever since I upgraded the memory (or it is running in a speed I can bare with). Now the urge of buying a new laptop has go away, but you know, it's always good to have a new computer :)

4. Stardom RAID External Backup $3200

To some, it is too much. For me, the risk of losing data is just too high (or I considered it to be too high). It is a 2x320G hard drive arranged in a mirroring mode - that is there is only 320G of hard disk space. Once I copied files into it, I can forget about backing up to secondary media without so much fear of losing the data. I still plan to back up files annually to DVDs, or at a later time I might bought one more hard drive for off-site backup.

5. Flickr $200/year

This is not gadgets actually. It is a service that I subscribed to host photos. I dropped the idea of hosting my own photos because it just take too much of my time and there is just no good photos organising software that is comparable to Flickr. You should take a look at my photostream and I plan to update it rather frequently (to supplement my lack of update in this blog :). I am also planning to tag and upload photos I took before, esp. the photos I took when I was travelling in Europe / California. By the way, some photos can only be viewed by my friends, so log in Flickr with your Yahoo! account and tell me, I'll do the rest.