Author: Dave

So, I’m starting to wonder if there’s some collusion between the Christmas gift guide writers. It seems that some of the things consistently show up on all lists, between WIRED, Men’s Health, and other magazines. For instance, a rather obscure item (which is, incidentally, one of the only things I’m marginally interested in from these lists) has shown up on at least four lists. This item is the SD USB card from SanDisk. Although a great invention, it’s not particularly earth-shattering (it ain’t no iPod).

Well, I’m trying to decide whether I want an XBOX360 or can settle for the D-LINK DSM 520. I do torrent quite a few shows (mostly paid for on regular satellite), so I want to be able to stream them from my PC (out in the office, a separate building) to the big TV in the living room. I can’t seem to wait in line outside Walmart or Target to actually get one of the XBOX360s, so I’m thinking I may wait until Halo 3 comes out (simultaneous with the release of the PS3 from SONY), and then get one, in the meantime get one of those D-Link boxes.

There’s really only one format used on torrents: .AVI with MPEG4 encoding, which both *should* be abled to read over the Windows Media Connect interface. Advice? Let me know.

For reference, the XBOX360 is about $500 for the one I would buy, and the D-Link box is about $220. Currently, eBay prices for an XBOX360 hover over the $700 mark.

Kind of cool sounding, this GP2X handheld uses LINUX and comes bundled with a MAME machine, but not quite as cool as the Nokia 770.

http://www.gizmoproject.com

Looks like I found a good competitor to Skype (and vonage). Gizmo is a SIP client for PC, Mac and LINUX that seems to be very interoperable, and doesn’t have the nasty EULAs that Skype has. Moreover, with SIP support (standard), it can be used with a variety of SIP hardware to provide non-computer access.