Now that the Christmas dust has settled, the turkey has been eaten and, at least in Canada, the Boxing Day/Week sales are winding down, what did you get? Any cool gadgets?
My wife and I don’t exchange gifts during the holidays, we simply spoil our nieces and nephew and then get what we wanted after Christmas at a bargain. It’s a pretty good arrangement that we’ve had for years. We get the holiday experience via family and we both get what we want at a more reasonable price…just time shifted a day or two.
That said, this year, I had scanned all the deals and decided the main thing I wanted this year was a new point and shoot camera. I’d had the same one for over 3 years and have been shopping around for an upgrade for those times when I don’t want to lug around my DSLR.
I settled on the Nikon Coolpix P6000
- built in GPS – this is a relatively new feature to any camera and I think the P6000 is the only point and shoot with it.
- it has many of the features of my DSLR camera in a much smaller form factor. I can dial in the various modes and settings and still set it to AUTO when I need to let someone else use it
- Price. The Boxing Week sale price was $100 less than anywhere else.
I’m still exploring all it’s features and options. The manual alone is the same size as the one that came with my DSLR. It has a few features that I probably won’t use, like the ethernet port on the bottom which only allows you to connect to the internet to upload to Nikon’s My Picturetown photo site. If I could post to Flickr it would be a no brainer but at the moment, it’s not an option. Plus I’d rather it was a wifi connection and not a wired ethernet option. Still, the other features of the camera still seem to outweigh the downsides. I’ll do a more in depth review once I’ve had it awhile.
The other thing I got, the Korg Kaossilator, started after some ‘look what I got’ tweets started showing up on Twitter (like this one).
I seem to recall hearing about this little device and immediately started looking into it more after seeing CK’s tweet and subsequent blog post. I’ll embed the same video he embeded (from Korg’s site – also check out the intro movie on the Kaossilator site linked above) because it’s a great example of what this little gadget can do:
It’s basically a laptop touchpad and a synthesizer in a box a little bigger than an old school iPod. Instead of keys, you use the touchpad for input into the device and the samples, loops and patterns built in (including some awesome 8-bit videogame sounds too!) can be controlled with your fingers. This makes for a lot of fun simply zipping your finger around the touchpad and affecting the sound. This could so easily be an iPhone app if something similar isn’t one already. You can also loop segments and overlay them with others. I’ve dabbled in all kinds of music applications over the years. I’ve had no musical training of any kind and just like to mess around with this stuff making noise that drives my wife nuts but amuses the hell out of me. If I manage to record anything interesting, I’ll post it here.
So what did you get?
Update: So here’s a mediocre first attempt at making something that hopefully doesn’t melt your ears with the Kaossilator: Ka0s1 [MP3]. Kinda turned out like the credit sequence from a cheesy sci-fi movie but I like it. It was made simply by looping a drum beat and messing around with the S.60 sample on the touchpad with the arpeggiator turned on.
