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 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.

I had been interested in the El Gato EyeTV Hybrid for a long time. I like that it had tuners for digital and analog. No one up to this point had a single solution for the Mac OS X platform and on top of that it comes as a relatively small USB dongle that can be used with a laptop when on the go. The El Gato EyeTV Hybrid has the ability to watch analog and digital television programming, record that programming, and later edit the video. The unit also has the ability to rewind, fast forward and pause live TV. Getting two tuners in one for about $150 to me is a bargain.

Apple started shipping the second generation iPod Shuffles. I already had the first generation, and the only real difference is the size of the unit. Most the features are basically the same. I figured size and the aluminum enclosure was a good enough reason to get the new one. Besides it gives me an excuse to write another post for this site. The new iPod Shuffle comes in only one size, 1GB, which Apple says is about 240 songs. I was able to put 263 songs in my real world use. At $79, I found that the iPod Shuffle was very reasonable in price.

I had converted my 12-inch Powerbook into a desktop machine but keeping it on my desk and adding the 20-inch Viewsonic VX2025 monitor, iPod docks, Logitech Z-2300 speakers, IOGear GUH284R USB hub, and the Logitech LX501 wireless desktop. For what it was worth, the machine still has a lot of life and for the work that I do it still functions pretty well. However, since I got the MacBook, it seemed so much more sluggish which is expected. When the 24-inch iMac was released I decided it was time to upgrade to a true desktop.