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• Altec Lansing inMotion im7: thumb up! I got it from Amazon for $189. Big sound that fills a big room easily. The quality of sound is comparable to Bose sounddock but the price is a lot easier. Innovative tube design. Universal power adapter. Only issue – a bit too big.
• Altec Lansing inMotion im11: thumb down! $99 is reasonalbe, if it works. The sound is OK in the first half of volume range. It gets progressively more distortion moving up the range. The bigger problem: it shuts it self off randomly after a few minutes with the iPod still running! Returned!
• iHome IH5: big thumb up! Same $99 price, but much nicer than im11. The sound is very clear and fairly rich across almost the whole volume range – an 8 out of the 10 compare to Bose and im7. But the bonus is the multitude of functionalities – alarm clock, volume display, big volume nob, nice three-level LED brightness, nice and functional buttons in additional to remote, FM/AM radio, etc. Only issue here is the lack of universal power supply (110V only).

I’ve seen great reviews about Nikon SB800/SB600 speedlight. Finally bought SB600 – at about half the price of SB800, it is a great place for beginners to experience Nikon’s so-called “creative lighting system”. And what a great component to have!
I was only expecting a big external flashlight that can bounce lighting off the ceiling to create better portrait shots. So you can imagine the jaw-dropping when I see what the SB600 can do. It not only synchronizes with the D70 with laser precision at all angles vertically as well horizonal swivels, it zooms its own lens quietly in step with the focus of the camera, and it can adjust the amount of flash exposure needed – and these are just the basic operations. In more advanced mode, two or more flash units can be synchronized wirelessly to create more lighting situations.
The bottom line is, the SB600 costs only less than $200, shooting greatly improved indoor pictures is really priceless.

Apple is doing well these days. Seven months ago I bought the stock at 43.12, after some up and downs, it now stands at 57.75. It’s a good 30% profit with my modest 100 shares investment. I bought the shares for a different reason – betting that the company will broaden their software reach to Intel computers. That will still happen. But the stock price has been driven up by Apple’s success in launching the latest iPods – first Nano, but more importantly the Video.
Once again, a not so new idea has been excellently executed by Apple. The quality and coolness of the device, together with the great integration of buying experience on iTune made this iPod another success.

The new 2006 VW Passat looks very nice – bigger, faster and more upscale.
However, I only want to talk about color choice this time. Car colors are the most interesting marketing piece. Every company, every model has to come up delicious, distinctive color names. For example, my 1999 Passat is deep, brownish red – no no, it is called Colorado Red – sounds much better and conjures up the open road great outdoor image.
This new Passat has colors such as reflex white, candy white, granite green, blue graphite, mocha brown, arctic blue silver, and shadow blue. Well, no red this time. Why, red is not upscale enough. Have you seen a red Mercedes S500? or a Red BMW 750iL? Not even a red Audi A8. Now Passat has definitely gone upscale.
Honey, can I get the blue graphite? It matches my golf bag.

The new iPod device from Apple is again breath taking.
More importantly, however, it is the first time, solid-state storage has overtaken disk drive as mass storage in a major computing device.
The demise of magneto-mechanical disk drives was predicted many times in the last ten years. But every time, the hard drive industry – consists of only five companies — was able to fight back with yet another round of density doubling and price dropping. Hard drive technology even amazingly replaced some solid-state device as those compact flash compatible micro-drives.
Now this time it is real – the 4GB chip has successfully replaced the tiny 1.5 inch disk drives in the iPod Mini and becomes the iPod Nano – pencil thin, color screen, and weigh less than a few coins. What’s next? Laptop computers with 20GB non-spinning storage maybe – very light and shock resistant.

This world seems to have too many of certain things but too few of others. For example, there are dozens of different brands/models of cell phones, MP3 players and cameras – almost every consumer electronics company makes some. On the other hand, for a good conference phone, there’s only ONE.
I’m talking about full-duplex speaker phones that you see typically at conference rooms. Normal speaker phones are so called half-duplex, which means the up-link and down-link take turns to function, when you speak, you don’t hear. So if you make some noise when the other side speaks, it gets cut off. Conference phones are very useful in that it delivers the same high-quality as if everyone is holding the handset to their ear/mouth yet it requires none of this hand holding at all. You can even walk around and it still sounds crystal clear.
All conference phones are made by one company – polycom. So they can charge a premium. The most basic model retail for $499, the high-end model costs north of $1300. Thank goodness for ebay, I was able to buy one much cheaper at around $100. But I had to settle with the most basic version and get a used one.

I bought a Packet8 VOIP adapter a couple months ago. Just yesterday, Qing tried it in Hangzhou and it worked very well.
There are several independent Voip providers, they are usually much cheaper than the big telco or cable companies (Time Warner, for example, keeps asking me to sign up for the $40/month phone service). I chose Packet8 based on cost ($20/month) and friend’s recommendation. By making certain assumption of your typical home DHCP network, it makes the connection really pain-free.
The quality so far is pretty good, it is hard to tell whether the call is from a conventional circuit or not.

I finally got my Mac Mini, After weeks of agony!
G4 1.42 GHz CPU
1GB DDR SDRAM (I got it from a 3rd-party vendor and upgraded with a putty knife – saved $90!);
Combo drive (DVD writer is useless, just got a 250GB firewire drives);
Bluetooth + wireless keyboard and mouse;
80GB internal disk;
Total paid: under $800
Getting iPod connected to Mac Mini: priceless!

Thanks Hanbing for the encouragement and advice! I wouldn’t dare to pry open the spanking new Mac the first day I got it with the putty knife otherwise.

Just bought one as a gift to dad. It sounds great, especially consider the small profile – perfect to put on a small table or night-stand. The sound fills the room pretty well from almost all the ranges. Given its small size, it doesn’t have as good a separation of a large speaker system. But definitely better than any boombox. The remote control comes handy too.