Gadgetoid

The SENA Dockable iPhone 3g Flip Case proved to be my favourite of the SENA batch and thus it is deserving of the first complete review.

I received a total of 5 iPhone 3g cases from SENA, representing a broad variety of their range. It was quite a mixed bunch and the Pebble-black Dockable case wasn’t immediately a clear winner because I found myself quite partial to the tough burgundy, crocodile skin effect Magnet Flipper. The only reason why the Dockable edged out the Magnet Flipper was, in fact, the semi-neutral pebble black style which I felt a little more comfortable carrying around.

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Outdoor security monitoring just got tougher, with Swann’s entry level, solid metal OutdoorCamT. With full colour day mode and black and white night mode you will be hard pushed to find a time or place that you can’t watch comfortably from the sofa in your gadget infused home.

11 infra-red LEDs provide the light necessary for night-time monitoring up to about 5 meters.

The metal casing and sun shield keep the camera secure against the elements but aren’t likely to stand up to an intentional attack, so you’re going to need barbed wire, trenches and attack dogs to back it up.

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Now we’re talking. The sound issues are sorted and we’re still capturing on “Better” mode to eliminate interlacing issues.

Here’s a quick video of some interesting moments in BioShock captured with the Pinnacle Video Transfer Unit and edited together with iMovie.

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Things are coming along reasonably smoothly. I’ve managed to successfully obtain a 60hz PAL, standard definition capture of some Halo 3 gravity hammer fun. The sound is a little sketchy but can be fixed. The capture was taken with the Pinnacle Video Transfer unit to a 16gb Lexar Memory Stick (a very good and stupidly easy to use setup as it happens) using the medium quality setting. I think the next task is to try high quality, full frame capture for the best final video results- we’ll see!

The capacity indicator on the 16gb Lexar Jump Drive Secure II Plus comes in very handy here, even when it’s unplugged it is possible to tell at a glance if it’s full or not. Also, 16GB is enough space to record, at “Better” quality, over 24 hours of video, or a solid day of gaming. Not bad!

Combined with the Pinnacle Video Transfer unit we can capture more video that we’ll ever need without even having to think about it and without needing the clutter and bulk of an external hard drive or whole computer hooked up.

Yes, I’m a little rusty at Halo 3. I was one of the first people in the UK to play with the gravity hammer at the Microsoft christmas event prior to Halo 3’s launch, and I owned with it… this is embarrassing.

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In keeping with my run-up-to-Christmas accessory coverage I have acquired a couple of notebook coolers from Antec to give the Gadgetoid once over.

As I don’t have my laptop handy in the office I have conceived a genius alternative use for one of these, the Antec Notebook Cooler 200.

Foot cooling.

No. I’m not kidding. Mr. Farley himself has been known to place a desk fan underneath his desk for the purpose of keeping his feet cool and comfortable in the fluctuating office climate. The Antec Notebook Cooler 200 does a fantastic job of this, and this alternative use could actually warrant the creation of another product- a fan assisted, USB powered, posture aiding foot rest… if such a thing does not already exist. Antec, if you’re listening then a tiny redesign could yield you a whole new product that employees would lobby their employers to purchase!

I’m really not kidding…

And yes, I do wear my socks inside-out… I find the seams irritating!

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I don’t make any attempt to hide the fact I believe that the SlingBox is the best thing since sliced bread. Although sliced bread still keeps the lead because, once toasted and covered in peanut butter, it’s very adept at taking out crappy 1980s VCRs and forcing people into the modern world.

I am, therefore, very humbled and pleased to publish Sling Media’s announcement that they’ve made the awesome SlingCatcher available to the United Kingdom so soon after the US launch

The Sling Catcher is now available (or at least should be, but they don’t appear to have got the memo yet) at Amazon and Micro Anvika for a bargain £199.99 which has immediately dispelled all fears that the $300 US price will be translated directly into pounds in the usual just-replace-the-currency-symbol manner.

In addition to being able to “catch” and play back SlingBox streams the Sling Catcher also offers a whole host of other media streaming and playback functionality making it the ultimate companion to a bedroom television.

It goes without saying that I am keeping my ear very close to the ground with respect to the Sling Catcher and will have one in my hands to produce a full review as soon as they’re available. SlingBox owners, start your drooling!

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I realize now that I must be reaching dangerous levels of geekiness; I find myself mentally adding the word “pwnage”, complete with the deliberate typographical error and associated change in enunciation, every time I see the brand name PURE. I really wish I was joking.

Now I have got that out into the open I would like to introduce the PURE i-10 iPod Dock which took me all of approximately half an hour to form a positive opinion of.

There are few products you can pick up and immediately form enough of an opinion of to warrant bashing out a review the same day. Keyboards are a good example, particularly because one can simultaneously use them and write about them. The PURE i-10 iPod Dock is another example. The moment I removed it from its packaging this very morning, witnessed its minimalist form with a gentle nod to the iPhone/ipod Touch design aesthetic and felt its quality reassuring weight I knew it was going to be a good, solid product and further testing proved that I was not far wrong.

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I’ve had an instruction manual free weekend with the TerraTec Cinergy PCI Satellite TV Tuners and, after some tinkering, have managed to receive several local satellite television channels.

Due to bad case design on Dells part I had to displace a PCI sound card to fit both the TerraTec Cinergy HD and SD tuners into my desktop, but once installed it was a fairly trivial matter of grabbing the correct drivers from the TerraTec website, installing them and then installing the TerraTec cinema software.

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The new Cinergy S PCI and Cinergy S2 PCI HD from TerraTec are a great match to the SelfSat HD-compatible antenna we saw in July.

Both devices are PCI so at the moment Laptops are out of the picture, but they are a perfect addition to your home theatre PC and, as its name suggests, the Cinergy S2 PCI HD (pictured) supports HD broadcasts making it the obvious choice.

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