Status-Q

I've just bought a new battery charger, which recharges standard AAs or AAAs in 15 minutes. You may be able to see the grill behind the batteries - for ventilation. Yes, this is a charger with a 60W power supply and a built-in fan, which cools the batteries as they charge.

It certainly seems to work as advertised, but does anyone know if there are implications, good or bad, for the life of your batteries if you charge them this way?

I bought it here, by the way.

Neil Davidson from Red Gate software was visiting the other day, and since he'd seen my interest in the Iliad, he brought his along:

My brief experiments left me quite impressed. It's beautifully manufactured and has the best e-ink-type screen I've seen yet. It has wifi, too, and I gather from friends that it's rather more 'hackable' than some of the competition. And unusually, you can also write on it with a stylus:

Nice for notes & sketching, but you can also annotate PDFs.

Of course, there are downsides. Joe Newman tells me that it's slow to boot, and the battery life is around 5 hours of reading... both of which are markedly different from my Sony. I guess you have to keep more bits powered up on the Iliad, to detect stylus contact etc, whereas the Sony uses almost no power at all until you turn a page. I felt it really needed a processor with double the speed, which no doubt would swallow a battery even faster. And, of course, the biggest problem is the price: at £400, it costs more than two Kindles.

Nonetheless, I think this, and not the Kindle, is really the shape of things to come.

I must be just the sort of customer Apple love, I think. Having had fun playing with iMovie, I long ago upgraded to Final Cut Express, and I'm a big fan of Aperture, their offering for those who need more than iPhoto.

This week I decided to splash out on Logic Studio, which is a substantial upgrade from GarageBand, and I'm looking forward to getting to grips with it. A key part of the decision was that it includes Soundtrack Pro which is an exceedingly powerful audio editor/mixer and has good facilities for creating video soundtracks. The package isn't cheap, but some of the individual components used to cost substantially more on their own in the not-too-distant past. And hey, who knows when I might have to mix a 5.1-surround soundtrack to my home movies! One thing was clear, though, I really needed to replace my miscellaneous cheap mic pre-amps, phantom power units etc with a better audio interface if I were to make the most of Logic.

The default manufacturer of such kit for amateurs like me is usually M-Audio - I have some other bits from them, and their Fasttrack Pro USB interface was recommended on Gear Media Tech.

But USB is almost always an inferior technology to Firewire, especially if you're concerned about latencies or the number of channels. It's something PC owners often have to live with, but Macs all have Firewire, so I thought about the M-Audio Firewire 410, which you can buy from the Apple Store or, at nearly half the price, from StudioSpares. However, as I read up on this, people seemed divided on whether M-Audio are good value for money, or just cheap, and in addition, they had taken a very long time coming up with Leopard drivers for the 410.

So in the end, I went for the Edirol FA-66, also available from Studiospares. (It doesn't need any drivers for Mac OS X.)

On my first quick experiments, I'm very pleased. It does everything I wanted and more. All I need now is some talent to go with it!

Most people know about the Kindle and the Sony eReader, but what about the iRex Iliad? No, I hadn't come across it either, but it has a few interesting features:

• A great name
• An even higher price tag than the others

but most importantly, and this could be especially interesting in certain professions:

• You can annotate documents, as well as read them.

I'd like to try one out... Thanks to Steve de Gabrielle for the link

For anyone looking for a backup medium, rewritable Blu-ray drives are starting to become quite interesting. Dabs have an LG one for £160 now, and that includes VAT!

The disks are 25GB or 50GB and come in write-once or rewritable form, but since even the cheapest ones seem to start around £6, you wouldn't want to have too many write-failures!

Watch those prices drop, though... it won't be long.

The latest product to use the DisplayLink technology is Samsung's 2263DX, which is, I suppose, a monitor and a half.

I haven't seen one in the flesh yet, but it looks cute. Ideal for buddy lists, twitter status, today's calendar...

Here's a fun way to increase your visibility when cycling at night:

It's called Monkeylectric, and a search will find various other videos and photos.

Michael and Laura today gave me a fabulous present. It's a Gorillapod, a beautifully-designed device which lets you put cameras - or other things with similar mounts - almost anywhere.

Here it is on my bike handlebars:

We had fun today thinking of other things to do with it.

And I mounted my little Ixus on it and recorded video in unusual places. (Such as the view from the top of my head while walking home from lunch - I got to see what the world would look like if I were several inches taller)

If you need to find a present for someone with any interest in photography or video, I'd strongly recommend one of these. It's fantastic. It's also very tactile - a great stress-relieving executive toy...

UK readers can get them from Amazon.

I think my iPod has ideas above its station.

I got a new car today. It's rather nice. And it has an iPod adaptor cable.

When I plugged the iPod into this gleaming tonne-and-a-half of throbbing sports-tuned German engineering, it said, "Accessory attached".

The ASUS EeePC has been a great success. Next week, HP will start shipping a similar machine and, yes, the lowest-cost models are also Linux-based.