It was a great Christmas, I do have to say. All around fantastic. I spent 5 days in Toronto in early December to have an early Christmas with my mom and family, and had a quiet, if snowy, Christmas at home with Ianiv and my family here. Ianiv and I, without knowing it, each got each other a fun ‘big’ gadget for Christmas. Nothing camera related this time around (shocking, isn’t it?).

I got Ianiv the Cuisinart Griddler and Ianiv got me the Dyson Handheld Vacuum Cleaner.

My intention was to buy an upgraded version of the George Foreman Grill for Ianiv – something with grill plates that could be removed to clean or go in the dishwasher. We hated that our old model couldn’t do that. However, when shopping around I fell in love with the Cuisinart model. It came with 2 grill panels (grooved and flat) and could be used as a press or could open and lie flat for pancakes or something of that nature. It works with far better results than our previous indoor grill, and we have used it quite a lot already.

The little Dyson handheld was on my list for this year after I stumbled across it on their website. Earlier in the year we replaced our vacuum with the Dyson Canister vacuum. It’s lighter, quieter, easier to maneuver on the stairs, and gets up a really incredible amount of dirt and dust. Far more than anything we were getting up before. I love it, but even with its light size shouldn’t really be carrying it up and down the stairs with my injuries.

So, in steps the new handheld. If there’s some cat hair or something really bugging me on another floor of the house, I can grab the little handheld and clean it up. It has the same power as the canister vacuum, but is easier to use. Primarily I wanted it because it promises 5 minutes of full power work. Our previous handheld did about 30 seconds of “sort of” cleaning. Not picking up everything, but kind of helping. Drove me nuts.

So, those are our new gadgets. What did you get??

Well, as soon as Apple made the announcement, my order was in, and on Thursday my new MacBook Pro arrived!!

I really haven’t had a huge amount of time to play with it. But I just *love* it already. I think anything fast would have made me happy, but I must confess that the whole machine just works beautifully. We ended up doing the merge for most of my applications so I could use it right away, so probably there’s a lot of extra crap floating around that I don’t need. But SO happy!

And see, Guinness loves the new MacBook too!!

Click to enlarge

To highlight, important changes include:

• Contents of text field saved at quit
• Can now take a photo or use an existing photo
• Photos are saved to the camera roll
• More tweets received during refresh (100 instead of 20)
• Added an “everyone” setting from the public timeline
• New location feature (like Twinkle) – with bonus options to add maps to your tweet
• hashtag tweets are now linked to search.twitter.com
• Scroll positions are preserved

I’ll be downloading this tonight to play with it. But it sounds like a major upgrade. If the app crashes less & saves tweets that fail to upload, it may turn into my primary Twitter app on the iPhone.

In just 13 weeks, you can have your very own WALL•E remote-controlled robot. Disney has begun pre-sales of this new action figure. It can talk, dance, play music, follow you around (with obstacle avoidance sensors) and lets you create more than 1000 action sequence combinations. His eyes even light up and blink. The WALL•E robot has audio and motion sensors to mimic curiosity and responsiveness. He has real working treads and arms that can move & hands that can grib & rotate.

Play modes include Follow-U mode, Explore mode, Dance mode, MP3 Music mode and Program mode plus he has an interactive Talk Back feature

So cute!!

Tip thanks to Buzz on twitter ; Tags: wall-e, walle, wall e, WALL•E, wall e toy, wall-e robot, robot, disney, action figure

To answer the age-old question of "will it blend?" The answer re: the new iPhone 3G is… YES.

Via boing boing Tags: iphone, will it blend, iphone 3g

iPhone 3G with Griffin Wave cover (actual is more fuchsia)

• After looking at Fido’s participating iPhone locations list, we went to Capilano Mall in the morning. Only to learn that Cellular Baby stores can only handle new Fido accounts, not renewals (existing customers). Something the website fails to mention.
• We got to Park Royal at 10am and received numbers (30 and 31) to guarantee our iPhones. There were 35 iPhones shipped to this location. 
• We were told to come back at 1pm to pick up our phone. By then, however, only 8 customers had been served. Both Apple & Rogers/Fido were down, making it nearly impossible to activate the phones. 
• We returned again at 4:30 and, after waiting a half an hour, were able to jump the line (since people with numbers ahead of our own were not there). My account took some time, as I was already tied into a contract and had to pay the ECF fee (rumor has it this may be waived later this month). I was also the last person to receive an iPhone before Fido shut down activations (we later learned commissions were not being tracked properly). We were there for nearly 2 hours.
• The iPhones don’t fully activate right away, so we left. We both encountered problems – Ianiv’s wouldn’t connect to 3G, mine the SIM card did not activate (so, I couldn’t make calls or connect to 3G). Voicemail was broken for both of us during this time. 
• The next morning, Ianiv called Fido to get them to activate my SIM card (which took about 30 mins). They hung up on him before he could get his phone fixed.
• We went to the Fido store again to get them to fix Ianiv’s issue. Their computer records don’t access the full account information, so they also had to call in to Fido. After an hour, it turns out 3G had not been enabled on Ianiv’s account because it was so old.

So, many many hours into the process, we have two working iPhones. Ianiv has had to reset his SIM card once already, probably a bug. I bought a cute pink case for mine already (as shown in photo), and Ianiv has ordered his. Aside from the stress of the whole process, I love the iPhone. It is very intuitive, and we’ve already been thankful to have internet access when away from home. That said, I need to create personal boundaries to make sure work doesn’t intrude too much into my personal time – something I’ve been strict on for some time. 

Tags: iphone, fido, iphone 3g

I couldn’t resist posting these. Gijs Gieskes has taken the “gameboy looks like a brick” concept a lot further and created gamebox bricks. The same size as a standard brick (and as the gameboy), these bricks are made with a custom mould. They come in natural brick color, though you could paint it yourself.

Via interior design room Tags: gameboy bricks, bricks, gameboy, design, funny

What time is it? Time to not care! Whatever Wall Clock from Wrapables.

Tags: whatever, whatever clock, clock

The HomeDepot newsletter today had a great pet-lovers product feature. The Waterdog Automatic Outdoor Pet Drinking Fountain from Contech Electronics. Simply attach to an outdoor faucet and adjust to the height of your dog. WaterDog’s sonar proximity sensors will turn the water on when your dog is near, so there is always fresh cold water to drink.

Tags: pets, dogs, waterdog, waterdog fountain, dog, automatic drinking fountain, outdoor pets

Via collegehumor Tags: iphone