I Love These

I am not a gizmo enthusiast but am able to keep up with the broad developments in electronics by virtue of being married to one who lives and swears by then.

Anyway, today i thought i'd write about 3 particular objects that i've been using lately and which i quite liked - the Kindle e-book, Sensei digital photoframe, and the Sennheiser cordless headphones.

Yeah, you heard me right - this beauty (not really, its quite chunky) can be plugged into whatever device your music is stored and you can listen to it wherever you're in the house. Its superb 'ambient noise cancellation' technology means you could actually be adding tadka to dal and still float on the soft melodies of Swan Lake. Me? I usually plug the thing to protect my years when i scrub and wash D during the weekend. The scene is Chaplinesque in its incongruousness - she screaming and kicking, me clutching her limbs in a vise and nodding frantically to Rehman's 'O Humdum sunio re'.

A lot of book columnists and bloggers lament the (gradual)  demise of the book in its physical copy. I was completely allied to them previously but having read books on the Ipod Touch, the Iphone as well as the Kindle ebook, i can confidently say that the experience leaves very little to be desired. In fact, one of the things that i'd find really cumbersome while reading books earlier, was the entire deal of marking lines and passages and jotting notes. Though i'd index them at the book's end, some would inadvertently be lost. With the Kindle ebook, marking passages or bookmarking a page has never been easier. I really think it's a superb device for serious book reviewers.

My only grouse with the Kindle ebook is that it doesn't have a backlight option, like the Kindle app on Iphone does. Which means it functions pretty much like a regular book which requires reading lamps. I'm a lil fussy when reading and prefer a dark room, fan at medium speed and the text to be read by means of the backlight function of the device. I can't explain the strange intimacy that develops as you read about people and stories and places.

The digital photoframe and me got together almost by accident. Someone gifted it to us and we started using it. Like any other modern deviCe, it has hazaar apps and can do too many things, but I think it should be used as a photo frame and nothing much. Of course you can customise your own music to play as these photographs float across slowly.

The idea is this: you can't dump photographs indiscriminately on it. Choose the 'Tracy's face' of your life and select some 80 odd pics - from the earliest ones to the latest ones - and watch them flit across the screen as you lie in bed. Trust me, nothing gives as good a feeling as this. I have pictures of D from when she was like a scrawny chicken - just a few weeks old, pics of the day she first turned over, her first playgroup in the US, climbing a tree at Yosemite National Park, peeping from under a water pipe in Fremont and so many more. At the risk of sounding foolish, those snaps sustain me when others have been unkind or behaved in unexpected ways.

Go for these, you'll love them i'm sure.