"Oregon Scientific WMR-100 Professional Weather Station"

The "Oregon Scientific WMR-100 Professional Weather Station" is available from Amazon for £169.67.

This was the weather station that the Gadget Show liked.

To read more and order it if you want to click on the link below.



Please note that the information above is correct at the time of writing but that both
price and availability may change at Amazon.

Liked The Airzooka best

...on this weeks Gadget Show. Here's a fairly comprehensive list of what else they had on - where there is a link - it is a link to the item at Amazon.

The two phones were the Nokia - N82 and the LG KU990 Viewty Sim Free Mobile Phone - Black.
The three televisions were the Samsung PS5OQ97HDX and the Philips 47PFL5522D - 47" Widescreen HD Ready LCD TV - With Freeview
(the price for this telly at Amazon is way higher than the price shown on the Gadget show - not sure why. The prices in Amazon New and Used section were lower but still over £1000).
The third telly was the LT-47DV8BJ.
The night vision goggles were the Cobra Optics Storm Pro and the The Yukon Tracker NVG 1X24
The top 5 office toys were the Airzooka Air Gun, the Fireball Gun, Thumbs Up Fake Brick, the Firebrand Elasticband Gun and Toy Crossbow.
The sat navs. were the TomTom ONE v3 Great Britain and the Magellan RoadMate 1200 Great Britain & Ireland

Finally there was the Dirtsurfer Flexi-deck 20 Inch Pro.

Hope that was of some help.

The Irish Independent reviews the Sony Walkman NWZ-A816

..and they liked it - you can read the review here.

There are also a lot of positive reviews of the Sony Walkman NWZ-A816 at the link below (and at the time of writing it is on sale)




I'm going to stick with my Ipod though - I have had a few difficulties with it - but I probably now love it more than I love some members of my own family.

I do, however, really like the Sony Walk man ad.

The Celestron Nexstar 6 SE. A Recommendation.

Today's Sunday Times' In Gear Section reviews telescopes and the one they gave a 5 star (top) rating to is the CELESTRON NEXSTAR 6 SE and you can read more about it here:



The Times' article was entitled "Reach For The Stars From Your Backyard", which is a fair enough title - though we call our backyard our back garden, but whatever you call it the fact is that if you live in London, as I did for about 10 years before moving to Cambridge, or any other large city the light pollution makes star gazing difficult.

My wife and I once went to Arizona to visit some relatives who live in Tuscon and one night whilst driving across the desert we stopped the car, got out and stared at a night sky that was so big that it made me feel small and slightly scared in a way that was different to how I sometimes felt small and slightly scared whilst in North London.

So that view of the Arizona night sky caught my imagination - but not as much as the view of the night sky we had whilst once on holiday in Turkey. The holiday was a last minute booking via teletext (which I reckon is still the best and cheapest way of booking last minute holidays) for a week in a place called Karaagac. It was a small resort in the mountains that rise up from the sea in the south western corner of Turkey.

Here is a photo of the view:



The whole place was fantastic, just a few stone cottages, a small restaurant and bar, a pool, a few wild tortoises and very little else. It was the kind of place where you could just feel all that was tiresome and bothersome and irritating just fall away.

By the pool there was a telescope. I think it was a fairly basic one but the views through it of the full moon in the clear sky were extraordinary, and this time I didn't feel small and a little scared - maybe because I'd drunk too much Turkish lager - but I just felt exactly how you'd imagine a slightly drunk bloke halfway up a Turkish mountain staring at the moon would feel.

(If you can't imagine it - and if you can bothered just make something up)

The effect this view had on my wife is quite easy to explain - inspired by the mysteries of the Universe she decided to quit her job in IT, go back to university and become a scientist. Her mentor in this was a friend of ours who had a doctorate in chemistry and who was an amateur astronomer. We would meet him in a pub by the canal that runs under Caledonian Road in North London and we would sit in the pub garden and as dusk fell he would point out the constellations and the planets, before getting quite animated about the importance of physics (I think he saw chemistry as a branch of physics).

My wife did intend to study physics - but somewhere along the line she changed her mind and instead of looking up at the sky she started looking down at the ground - and decided to become a geolgist.

Anyway I rang my chemist friend up today and I asked him about the telescope and he said that it was a very good one for beginners and seeing as he knows more about astronomy than anyone I know that is good enough for me.

Gadgets for Indoor Plants.

This is not really my area of expertise as I tend to kill plants with a swaggering, though thoroughly unintentional ease. However I saw these indoor plant gadgets in today's Telegraph and was most taken by them - especially the Smeg Home Garden because it really is quite beautiful and clever - though at £900 it is beautiful, clever and expensive. (If you click on the photo it will take to the Smeg Catalogue and you can see how much cleverness your £900 will get you)




My wife does like gardening - and she does spend a huge amount of time growing herbs - which are then devoured by the vast oregano, thyme and basil gorged slug army that live in our garden. So, because I'd much rather have homegrown oregano with my pasta than the freeze dried stuff you get from Tescos, the gadget that the Telegraph recommended that I liked the most was the Aero Grow. I know you can grow herbs in traditional pots - but every time we try we tend to kill them - so this could be the solution.



The Telegraph also recommended the self watering plant tray, and I'm not sure if the one in the above advert is the type they were writing about - but it does look pretty useful if you live in a flat (or are forgetful). I've also added the self watering stone pots because they got a good review and I thought they looked pretty nice.

The Telegraph also suggested the Streamgarden - which I thought looked like something out of a British Sci-Fi show from the seventies. You can read more about it here.
They also recommended the Plantpal watering system - and their homepage is here.

Finally the first two books about indoor gardening in the advert below both have good reviews - and the third has a brilliantly odd title. (Why 37 plants? Surely there must be more than 37 idiot proof plants that I could grow.)

The Canon Digital IXUS 70. An Independent Review.

Before Christmas my wife decided that she wanted a new compact digital camera. Usually when it comes to buying gadgets it is usually me that makes the decisions and I straight away suggested the Sony DSC - T200 as it tended to come out top in most surveys that I had read.

But my wife ignored me totally. She made a list of criteria that the camera had to meet, did her own research and came back with this camera.

What she was after was a camera that was small enough to fit into a handbag or pocket, a camera that had a reasonable zoom, a decent mega pixel image quality and a camera that had a short shutter lag.

... and it had to be reasonably priced

And this camera ticked all the boxes. Hopefully as the photo shows the camera is ultra compact - my wife is a geologist and she wanted something small that would not be too bulky for her field trips and this was dead easy to tuck away in her rucksack. It also fits easily into her handbag or my jacket pocket. It really is about as bulky as an average mobile phone. The 7.1 mega pixel quality is more than enough for what we use it for, and the zoom is a 3X optical zoom - which means that as it zooms in there is no discernible loss of quality, (and if you need more "zoom" you can use the digital zoom feature to get that little bit extra).

Where we disagreed over her choice was over the question of shutter lag (the time between pressing the shutter button and the image being captured). Shutter lag is a problem with digital cameras and if like us you have a small child who has much better things to do than sit still it is important to get a camera with a short shutter lag. The Canon IXUS 70 has a shutter lag of about 0.32 of a second which is not too bad - but that is without the flash. With the flash this time became a second - which I think is rather high.

My suggested camera - the Sony DSC T200 has very quick shutter lag - (0.15 seconds) and with the flash this only went up to 0.48 seconds. However it is also a lot more expensive being about £230 - where as the Canon Ixus 70 is £125.

It is worth pointing out that the Canon Ixus 70 does has a nice LCD viewfinder, and it has that clever feature of flicking photos round from landscape to portrait in the viewfinder when you tilt the camera up (which is kind of what the iphone does - so that was a nice bonus because I can't imagine myself ever getting an iphone). We have also been really impressed with the camera's quality at recording videos and we have found the controls very easy to use.

In conclusion I think that the Canon Ixus 70 is a great camera for the price - but if you can afford the extra £100 then the Sony DSC T200 is a better compact digital. However for a real bargain it may be worth getting the Canon Ixus 75 - a camera that has received very good reviews, with all the great features of the Canon Ixus 70 but with some improvements in picture quality. It does tend to get very good reviews. At the time of me writing this it is currently on sale at Amazon for under £140.

Please note that if you do buy the Canon Ixus 70 then you'll need to get a memory disk - (my wife recommends a 2 GB SanDisk) and a camera case. All the prices quoted above may change and whilst I think that my facts are all correct you should double check by reading the manufacturers specifications.

Hope you found this useful.

Sound ASleep ipod - mp3 player Pillow. An Independent Review

I bought one of these pillows for my sister for Christmas and she seemed to be delighted with it. It's a pretty simple device - you plug the cable into your Ipod/Mp3 player with the cable which comes attached to the pillow (shown below) and you can hear the music through the pillow.








The sound quality was pretty good - (certainly better than the RadioShack Pillow Speaker which I own, and which I think sounds tinny). Your whole pillow acts as a pair of headphones and whilst the volume remains low - the sound is clear. It's perfect if you want to lie in bed and listen to music, whilst resting or reading, without using the earphones on your ipod. It's also quiet enough not to disturb anyone else in bed.

The reason why my sister liked it was because she has a 4 month old baby and she is now able to listen to music (or podcasts or even television shows) lying in bed in a way that does not disturb her baby, and because she does not need earphones she can still hear him.

It's also a very comfortable pillow and it is very reasonably priced.