Monday, June 9, 2008

New Toys

I feel almost guilty for posting this, because it seems so decadent. But since I have a feeling that I won't be able to help talking about them anyway...

I got two new toys this long weekend. The first is a GPS logger:

I have wanted something like this forever, since I do love traveling and taking photos, and my photos have kind of gotten out of control. The idea of being able to geotag them has tempted me for a long while, and when a colleague of mine told me about the Holux M-241 GPS logger, it seemed that it would fit my needs. Basically, I didn't need something with a fancy map display, but I needed coordinate logging plus something that would show the current GPS coordinates on the fly (i.e. it needs an LCD display).

The minus side is that it's got HORRIBLE Mac support, and the only way to get the GPS tracks onto the Mac is through using a piece of freeware that's got (and I quote) "an exceptionally ugly interface". Yeowch. Oh well, but it works for me.

The second toy is a cappuccino machine! I have owned several of these when I was living in the US, but then, being a poor graduate student, I could only afford the semi-auto ones that I gave up on using after a couple of tries :-(. When I was visiting Ivy about a month back, I got introduced to her coffee maker, and decided that I needed my own :-). I wasn't too convinced by the Nespresso system, though, and after much research, decided to get the Saeco Giro Talea, which is fully-automatic, does a fair bit of self-cleaning, and brews an amazing cup of coffee to boot.

I think I can say goodbye to Starbucks now.