I had been reading some of my favorite blogs and saw that the second generation Jawbone Bluetooth headset had been released.  I haven’t really been a fan of handsfree headsets.  Using Skype more and more on my computers, it has quickly become only second to my iPhone.  I’ve just been using the built-in mic and speaker on my computer, but I figured I should get a headset for better call quality.  I had read a lot of good reviews of the original Jawbone and since they claimed the new one is better than the original, I figure I’d give it a shot.

I decided it was time to upgrade my Sony home theater in a box.  They were a decent set for the price, but I was looking for something better so I picked up a Harman Kardon AVR-247 and a set of Aperion Audio 7.1 4 Series speakers.  I had read some really good reviews from CNET about Aperion Audio, even though I had previously never heard of the company.  They are a small company based in Portland, OR.  I gave them a call about what I should select and I was able to talk to a real person, not some computerized recording.  I don’t mind automated systems, but a lot of the time the computer tries to figure out what you want and fails.  In some systems it doesn’t let you call the operator and you are just stuck.  With Aperion Audio being a small company,  I was able to get to a representative right away and they were very kind and helpful.

When I’m out traveling for an extended period of time, I need a bag that will hold all the gear I use to create my office away from the office.  I’ve used Booq’s products for a number of my machines now and I’ve been really happy with every purchase I’ve made with them.  They’re always made very well in my opinion and each bag seemed to be well thought out.  Booq bags are slightly pricer than some of the competitors, but I think the quality justifies this difference.

When Leopard was released, I wanted to transition from my current backup solution which was SuperDuper to a network based external hard drive to Apple’s Time Machine.  Before switching completely to Macs I had always put together my own hardware from buying parts and putting a PC together to buying external hard drive enclosures and sticking my own hard drives in them.  This isn’t a bad way to do things.  You definitely get more for you money.  The main reason for my transition is I wanted support.  If something failed I wanted to just send the entire thing in and not have to worry about it.  So this is one example of that.  I went with Western Digital drives because they were relatively inexpensive and they look nice next to my Macs.

I’ve been using the Macbook Air for a couple of months now.  I decided to convert my Macbook Pro into a Windows Vista machine.  I’ve been having wireless problems in Mac OS X, but for some reason I don’t have the same problems when running Vista on that machine.  I use that machine for testing websites and running Windows only applications.  For the most part the Macbook Air is plenty of machine for what I need to do and I figure in times where it can’t I can pack the Macbook Pro and the Macbook Air into my bag when I travel and still keep my bag under 10 pounds.

For some reason, when I purchased my Macbook Pro with 802.11n enabled, my Belkin N-1 basestation had poor wireless connectivity with the machine. I couldn’t really figure it out. I changed some settings, but nothing seemed to be acceptable. It was unusual because I had an AppleTV connected via 802.11n as well and it seems to work just fine. I decided that I would try another basestation and see if my luck would change. Since I’m a big Apple fan, I decided I would give it a try. I was looking for something that had decent features, was easy to configure, and I was interested in the AirDisk and print sharing capabilities.

So I wanted to wait about a week to get a good idea of my initial impressions before I wrote a review on the Apple iPhone here. To make a long story short, I’m happy with my purchase. It’s the best phone I’ve ever had. There are some things that I really like about the phone, and other things that I think could be improved. Last Friday I stood in line with all the other Apple fans. Everyone seemed to be pretty excited for the product. With all the hype surrounding the product and a six month wait I can’t really blame them. I was actually going to pass on the first generation and wait for the second so I had bought a Blackberry Pearl a little over a month before. I was telling myself I’ll just wait, but as the June 29 date approached I realized I was going to get an iPhone. I showed up at my local Apple Store at around 6:30 PM. I figured I wasn’t going to camp and if I didn’t get one that day I could just wait. After waiting about half an hour I got through the store with an 8GB iPhone in hand.

I was fed up with my Palm Treo 650. Fed up enough to break contract and go with something else no matter what it cost me. I had Earthlink Wireless and my coverage was poor almost everywhere. The Treo 650 stopped retrieving emails after a while and I’m not sure if that was the fault of the unit or the service, but in any case I wasn’t getting email. On top of that, the Treo 650 would restart at random. It would restart in the middle of the night, in the middle of calls, and just about any other unexpected time. Some may say it was third party software causing it to crash, but I didn’t have any at all. I just did a hard reset to factory defaults and experienced the same issues. I figured this was unacceptable and it was time for a change. Cingular (now AT&T) and Verizon offer excellent coverage in my area and areas I travel to frequently. I know going with either of them work work much better than Earthlink. The next item in hand was to pick a handset that would suit my needs. I wanted email and internet capability as well as contact management, calendars, and the usual phone ability. I decided a smart phone would be the best fit and I decided to go with the Blackberry Pearl.

I preordered an Apple TV back in February and it finally arrived last Thursday. I had previously had a Mac Mini in my home theater system to handle Home Theater PC (HTPC) functionality. I realized that surfing the Internet on the big screen wasn’t too practical and I found it much easier to just go over to my laptop and use the Internet there. That only left me with using Front Row on the machine and I thought it seemed a little bit of a waste of machine. The Apple TV had been released and I figured I would be able to free up a machine for other uses and still get all the functionality I needed for streaming movies and music.

I picked up one of the Apple Airport Express units when I purchased the Logitech Audiostation Express. I wanted to stream music from my laptop to the speaker wirelessly and I knew this would do the job. Its been out for a while, and with Apple updating its Airport Extreme basestation to 802.11n technology, it’s only a matter of time until this product is replaced.