Hardware

I like looking at pictures of other people’s office set-ups. With most people working from home at the moment you see more and more nice workspaces especially tuned for video conferencing. I was lucky enough to have a space and a reasonable set-up already. By chance I also had ordered bits and pieces before everything was sold out on Amazon. There are a few things I still want to improve. The light is not ideal for video conferencing and I am also going to try a separate microphone for better sound. ...

In September I published a review of the Bloomsky Weather Station, which I summarized with “a nice toy with brilliant hardware and rubbish software.”. My main complaint was that it was impossible to share an URL of the station and to get to the data, photos and images in any way. Today all of this has changed. Now there is a map with all the stations, and each station has it’s own URL like mine for example. It includes the current data and webcam image and last timelapse. ...

UPDATE: I posted a followup to this, with information about the new software and API and now highly recommend the Bloomsky Station The Bloomsky “Weather Camera” is a weather station with built-in camera. I first saw it on a Kickstarter Campaign, which was pretty successful. I snapped one of the early birds deals and later added a solar panel. Expected delivery was December 2014 (ha!), it turned up in August 2015. But this is already better than some other campaigns. They had some problems to get the CE approval for Europe, so that explained some of the delay. ...

Another brand new toy. After my last trip to the UK for bikesoup I decided that it was about time to get a proper laptop. So far I only have a netbook, which is very convenient when size and weight matter. But for getting work done it is just to small, the main problem is the screen size and resolution. I had a look around for good full sized laptops and the only brands producing something with the quality I had in mind were Apple and Lenovo. The advantages of the Apple over Lenovo are better built quality, battery life and easy to buy locally. I choose the Lenovo, because you can order it with more gadgets, swappable batteries and mostly because it isn’t an Apple as I despise where the company is going and I already had bad experiences with Linux and iPods. This is the configuration I finally got. ...

I was planning to buy an ebook reader for a while. I mean it is 2010 and if we don’t have flying cars at least everyone should have a robot and not read from dead trees. It took me a while because I wasn’t able to decide on a brand and when I decided on Amazon I couldn’t decide on which Kindle to get. My girlfriend took the decision off me by giving me a Kindle 3G+Wifi for my birthday. So here is a quick review. ...