Ok, so I’m not normally much a tech nerd, but I have to say — OMG iPod Touch ultimate geek toy!!!
This little beauty was my Christmas/birthday present (I don’t mind a joint present between the two when it’s this cool), and it’s a seriously useful little gadget. Named Mira (because all my electronic widgets are named after stars), there’s a load of miscellaneous software downloadable for it completely free. Even most paid stuff is less than a quid.
This isn’t even geekery for geekery’s sake though. These little applications are actually pretty useful in my studies! Aside from having WiFi internet access, I’ve got a no frills Wikipedia app, an RSS reader, a unit converter (for things I actually need like electron volts and wavenumbers), a molecule viewer… even an SSH client to check how my experiments are running. I haven’t actually started setting it up yet, but via WiFi I can even use it to control a powerpoint presentation.
Seriously, being essentially an iPhone, sans the actual phone, it’s more like a tiny computer than an mp3 player. When I was a kid, I wouldn’t even have believed something like this could exist, let alone that I might own one.
Ahhh, technology.
Re: Asimov on hand-held computers…
Asimov truly was a visionary, when all his contemporaries were envisaging huge machines covered in buttons and tape reels… But 50,000 years in the future! I have to wonder what Asimov would’ve made of some of the things human technology can do today!
Asimov on hand-held computers…
Hi InvaderXan
At the start of the “Foundation” (1951) novelisation Asimov has Hari Seldon pull out a hand-computer (“calculator pad”) and call up a string of equations on it to figure out some Psychohistory problem. Seeing iPhones like that makes me think of that scene. And to think Asimov had set the scene some 50,000 years in the future…
No kidding!
I’m guessing you’ve been less than productive since getting that… :P
The ultimate procrastination tool!