A few new toys.

One of my favorite new toys of the year isn't really a toy. It's a HTC One V that I got from Radioshack for $50 early in the year. I originally got the One V due to the price to try out Android as well as try out Virgin Mobile. Unfortunately, while VM had a pretty decent deal on paper, their data reliability was crappy and often I got very slow and unreliable speeds. So instead of using the One V as my replacement phone, I'm planning to replace my iPod Touch 4 with this as my stand-alone mobile device. The biggest feature of Android for me is the speech to text ability that you access wherever you can pull up the software keyboard at. This feature is important as often I want a way to jot down notes and ideas without having to type it while driving. For this reason, I'll likely eventually replace my Lumia with an Android phone since that feature relies on a data connection.

On a different tangent, I got quite a few Lego sets last year due to clearances at Walmart and other places. I especially got a number of the smaller sets like the ones pictured below. My favorite of the bagged sets has to be the mini bulldozer by far. Am I a kid or what? ;)

Xmas Eve...

I deleted the ecchi blog. I felt there's no point having a separate ecchi blog. I don't write enough as it is.

Lately, I've noticed I've been using my Nokia N95 to take pictures more than my real camera, a Lumix DMC-LZ3. The main problem stems from the battery usage. I'm not sure if it's particular to the camera series or just to the one I have but if the batteries aren't fresh off the charger, the Lumix will refuse to use it on account of "battery too low" which is fresh full of BS. I'm definitely out to get a new camera but not sure what to get. While I do take pictures once in a while, it's not like I take a lot or even frequently so I'm worried about the battery life and hope I don't have a repeat of my current Lumix.

Logitech V550

I've been searching for a wireless mouse for the past week and bought and returned 3 mouses before setting on a Logitech V550. I've found that for me, someone with really big hands, a small mouse is no good as well as a mouse with a thumb grip on both sides (a dedicated right-hand mouse would be fine, OTOH). I went with this mouse becasue it was somewhat normal shaped and it happened to be on sale at Fry's for $30. I kinda wanted a mouse with extra buttons but I think the hyper scroll wheel was a decent tradeoff. It's also nice that it has a micro-sized receiver which can be stored inside the mouse, a super-long battery life, an optional docking clip to hook the mouse onto, and an actual on/off button. I had to download the drivers to get it working with my PC but this seems to be unique to my PC as all the wireless mouse I've tried needed the dedicated driver software to work on it. OTOH, my netbook seems to be able to use them straight out of the box which is apparently how they're supposed to work. Hopefully the mouse will work out for me.