Wishlist

If you’re looking for my Amazon.co.uk wishlist, it’s here.

This is a short list of the things I find interesting enough to contemplate buying (I’ve outgrown the “gadget freak” stage some years back, but it’s always nice to contemplate my options).

Rather than the old, verbose format I had for this page, I decided to be a bit more systematic and use this URL as a scorecard for gadgets and software I’m likely to lust after every now and then, and why I won’t buy some of them anytime soon. Score reflects likelihood of acquisition and not product value.

Last Update	Item	Cost	Pros	Cons	Score
2010
Jan 27	Apple iPad	TBD	It’s perfect for most of what I want to do at home.	Glass looks fragile considering I have two young kids in the house, am unsure if I need 3G built-in.
2009
Dec 17	Panasonic Lumix GF1	US$1400	After reading this essay and this review, I couldn’t help but wonder if I shouldn’t get one and enjoy it.	Expensive as heck, including the extra pancake lens.
Nov 30	Canon S90	$400?	I’ve been meaning to get something between my 350D and Lumix DMC FX-33, and either of these two seems like a good mid-point – the S90 fits my spartan “less is more” attitude (more info here), and the TZ7 would be a nice step up from the 33 and has a decent zoom.	I can’t really justify spending money on either given the time I have for photography these days.
	Lumix DMC TZ7	€399
Nov 5	LaCie Network Space 2	TBD	Storage appliance with smarts, of which I’ve heard nothing but good things (reg. older model)	I don’t really need it and have been trying to wean myself off the “home server” notion
Nov 17 Oct 28	New mini	€ 549	Need a single box to store all my music and photos, can be plugged in to my TV, left idle/sleeping and woken up by the iPod remote via WoL	Need to buy Bluetooth keyboard and mouse. Would remain idle 99.9% of the time, so it’s hard to justify both expense and energy-wise. Went ahead and bought it anyway as a birthday present for myself, Magic Mouse and all. I need something with oomph sitting on my office desktop for handling photos and managing music on the limited free time I have, and this is pretty good bang for the buck.
Nov 17 Oct 25	27” iMac	€ 1799	Sheer lust, can be used as an external display	Don’t use desktop machines anymore, can’t justify it for home use Just got the new mini instead. Also, many folk have been having hardware issues.
Oct 25 Oct 14’08 Jan 19’08	Cinema 23” Display	€ 899	(poof)	The 27” iMac makes it look like a bad deal, so it’s out of my list now.
Aug 1	LG BE06-LU10 Blu-Ray burner	€ 300	Nearly cheap enough, even though DVD media is still cheaper	Recording backups I can only read on a single device until Apple makes up their mind about including internal Blu-Ray is a risk.
Aug 1 Feb 17’08	PX-B920SA Blu-Ray burner	TBD	Would likely solve all my backup problems. Plextor hardware tends to last ages.	There are now cheaper and better alternatives What I really want is an external USB or Firewire drive that I can hook up to any Mac or PC.
2008
Oct 21 Jun 29 Jan 19	MacBook Air	$1799	A great travel laptop for running Citrix and Office 2008 in a sane environment.	No wide-area connectivity built-in, and using a Huawei E172 would take up the single USB slot. The new consumer MacBooks make it look dated and flimsy, and there are now a gazillion ways to get OSX running on cheap netbooks if I really want the portability.
Nov 21	Kodak Zi6	US$180	Cheap, apparently records as straight H.264	Not available here yet
Sep 3	Sanyo Xacti 1010	US$800	Finally, an HD camera I find interesting	I’m more of a photo guy, even considering my pocket camera does video too
Jun 29 Jan 19	OmniGraffle Pro	$149.95	The best diagramming application on the planet, period. Visio replacement.	No real need for it at home (can’t really justify the expense), Powerpoint does pretty good diagramming these days.
May 22	HP C7280	Eur. 329	I’m told that it works properly with a Mac even for scanning via Wi-Fi, which would be a welcome change from my PSC 950.	I’m not sure if I want to buy another HP printer, though, especially considering this uses four separate ink heads.
Feb 17	Apple TV	$329	Smaller than my PS3, better UI.	No content for Portugal (or most of Europe), no DivX support, no DLNA support.
Jan 19	Time Capsule	Eur 499	Might be a sensible way to centralize storage and backup for my machines	Hideously overpriced. Useless to backup my wife’s Windows machine. Does not work with FileVault on my laptop, plenty of sad tales on the web
Jan 19	Blu-ray writer	~$400	Blank disks are now around Eur 20, and provide 25GB of capacity for off-site backups.	1TB hard disks are 60% cheaper than current writers, lack of support from Apple.