YaK's Favourite Tech Toys

YaK is a coder, which makes him a geek by default; and it is a distinguishing characteristic of geeks that they really enjoy cool tech toys. YaK is certainly no exception, and living in reasonable proximity to Fry's Electronics and getting paid a decent amount, coupled with having no dependents, means that Yak keeps himself adequately supplied with appropriately techno goodies. Here is where I am gonna mention some of the coolest ones.

Toy o'the moment on 9 Feb 1997

Turbo-Express

Not exactly cutting-edge tech now, I agree, but it's a lot of fun. The Turbo Express is a portable version of the Turbo-Grafx game system, which is the US version of the PC-Engine. I had a PC-Engine on Japanese import a few years ago, and enjoyed playing some of the great games thereon - stuff like R-Type, Galaga 88 and the very excellent Devil Crash pinball game. I always hankered after a portable Engine, but they were way expensive, so I never got one.

Until a year ago, that is, when I spotted a loose Turbo-Express in a retro computer shop in London, for fifty quid. I picked it up, but without an adapter it wouldn't run my Engine games, and I had no US games, and the shops don't carry them anymore, so it languished for a while... well, on my trip back over Xmas I went to see my old mate Tony Tak (and we had a mega gaming session in his home theater room, including way too long playing double games of Super Wonder Boy 3 on his Engine/CDROM setup (must resurrect my own when I get back to the UK!)) and as it turns out he had a spare Kisado Adapter, which allows me to use all my Engine games on the TX. Lovely! The flight back was a lot less painful as I could while away the hours, and a few Duracells, playing Devil Crash and Twin Cobra and Fantasy Zone :-)

The Turbo Express is definitely one of the best handhelds, and the only one with an active-matrix display; and it's particularly cool for me because I have an absolute shitload of PC-Engine games that I can now play again :-)

Top gadget at 12 Oct 1996

Sony MD-Walkman

Definitely a very tidy gizmo. Now, I held off getting one of these for ages, due to the recording versions being very expensive, and frankly, I couldn't see much use in getting a play-only device and just ending up with a weird, expensive CD player that used a severely nonstandard format. My getting one basically resulted from seeing that the price had gone down a bit, and me being in Heathrow airport in need of some cheering up (I had had a very stressful previous 24 hours, thanks in a very large part to a git on Virgin Atlantic, who I usually fly partly because they're generally OK and play Pink Floyd and show cool graphics videos prior to takeoff, and partly because British Airways were so shitty to them - but they are *pushing it big time* after last time I can tell you. *And* British Airways have a smoking flight and Virgin don't. But I digress...) ...anyway, there I was in the airport, and whenever I feel pissed off I usually buy some hardware, never fails. So I bagged one, pausing only for a last fag or three before the flight and a *sob* last pint of bitter at the Shakespeare pub (with a sign displayed prominantly outside with "Last Chance for a Proper British Pint" written on it in large, tempting letters to cause just such entities as me to dive desperately in despite it being only half ten in the morning) and buggered off back to California.

Anyway, I got back here and didn't use it for a few days, basically coz I was far too busy playing Super Mario 64 on the new Nintendo to care about things like music, food and bowel movements. Eventually I emerged from that trance, muttering "mama mia!" to myself and hallucinating spinning stars with eyes rotating on top of my fridge and wondering whether I should grow a moustache and wear a red cap with 'M' on it that would enable me to fly (hey, who needs acid when you've got Mario)... After a few days I stopped being unkind to turtles, and set about playing with the new gizmo.

Now I like to make compilation tapes. Have done for years, sometimes just for my own use, with my fave choons off my current most popular crop of CDs, and sometimes for my mates, as in "You haven't heard any NIN? Well shit, lemme do you a tape of some really good stuff you'll really like". Kinda thing. You know how it is. Of course, you do it on the tape deck, and you can never quite get the transitions between tracks perfect, there's always a click or a blip or a bit where the tape tension changes and it sounds funny. And you finish the tape and then decide that you thought of a much better track 7 and that tracks 2 and 9 would be better juxtaposed, but you can't go back and do it without re-taping half the bloody tape, so you don't bother.

That is the *main* thing that makes the MD so cool. It's like being able to cut your own CDs - transitions between tracks are silent, and once you have recorded a disk you can delete tracks, change the order and generally fart around with them in a most extensive way that you just can't do on the old sequential media. If you do any taping at all, you'll love it, it's like the difference between tape and hard disk - random access makes all the difference. Me, I'll never go back to using tapes again, and I bloody wish I had an MD deck in my car.

Of course the MD is not perfect - it uses a lossy compression technique that serious audiophiles might quibble about (but hey, it sounds fine to me and a hell of a lot better than bloody tapes, that's for sure)... and of course CD-R is finally gonna take off (but for a Walkman-type device the form factor of the MD is a lot nicer, you get to carry around something that is actually Walkman-shaped and not at all like carrying a saucer around in your pocket, which is what it's like with a portable CD).

*And* it's anti-shocked, so I should be able to take it skiing. Plus it's the quintessential cool Sony device, small but serious tech, and on the plane back to England one can seriously out-cool one's fellow passengers with a neat pile of shiny MO disks stacked on your tray table. If you're really sad you can pretend you're the cool guy out of Johnny Mnemonic or Strange Days jacking in a few "gig" of "black ware" into your "trodes" (i.e. your headphones).

heh heh heh....

Whatever - it's cool, it'll do until gig flash gets really cheap :-)

Favourite Playthings at 22 May 1996

Wacom Art Pad II/Fractal Dabbler bundle

Now this is a very cool thing, and a snip at around 180 bucks odd... it's a digitising tablet with a pressure-sensitive stylus, packaged with a graphics program by the very excellent Fractal Design, who make the awesome but a-bit-too-expensive-to-justify-as-a-toy Fractal Paint program. Dabbler's kinda Fractal Paint's little brother, but contains a lot of the same cool natural-looking drawing tools. You get pencils, crayons, charcoal, all that kinda thang, with which you can doodle on textured paper, and the media behave much as they would on real paper in the real world. I had Fractal Dabbler before, and it was cool, but with the Art Pad, it becomes a seriously fun toy. Since the stylus is pressure-sensitive, you can vary the thickness of lines, and the intensity of colour that the tools deposit, just by varying the pressure that you put on the pen as you draw. Just like in real life, except that you can't wear holes in the paper :-)

Believe me, once you have tried this thing, you will never use a mouse to draw anything, ever again, as llong as you live. The digitiser is very high resolution, and on my P-166, there is almost zero perceptible lag between your motions of the pen and the output onscreen. And it's just hellacious fun, and at that price, you can justify the cost as a tech toy, even if you're not a serious artist. Version 2.0 of the Dabbler software comes with extra goodies on CD-ROM, including extra textures, some photos for you to manipulate, and a library of stencils (that includes *two* camels, a cow, and several goats).

The stylus can also be used as a mouse for Windows in general, which feels kinda weird at first. Maybe I'll get used to it. Anyway, you're supposed to be able to have the mouse and stylus on concurrently, but on my PC there is some kinda an IRQ conflict so it's one or the other. You may be more fortunate. (Isn't it amazing that PCs only have two serial ports? I could do with at least half a dozen on my machine...)

There's even a little eraser on the other end of the stylus, which rubs out your drawing in a most realistic way (apart from the aforementioned holes in the paper). The pad is thin, small enough that it doesn't eat up a lot of desk real estate, but large enough and hi-rez enough that you can draw with great precision and accuracy. A very cool toy indeed, all told.

Kodak DC-50 Digital Camera

Okay, this is a bit expensive for a tech toy, but hell, it was my birthday and I fancied giving myself a treat. The DC-50 is one of the better low-end (yeah, even at a grand, it's low end - pro digital camera backs that image at 4000x3000 odd cost upwards of fifteen grand- ouchie!) digital cameras. It images at 756x504 pixels, accepts PCMCIA flash memory cards that allow you to stash away a lot of pictures, and is a generally excellent littke gizmo that is a lot of fun to have around. You will probably be seeing some of its output knocking around on this very Web page in the not too distant future.

Of course, now is not a brilliant time to buy a digital camera, as this tech is moving very fast indeed, and unless you're Geek of the Week and absolutely gotta have it, you might be better off waiting a couple of years, when I firmly expect to see DC's that are hi-rez, compact and cheap. But Yak's just an unreconstructed chiphead, and he loves his tech toys...

More cool toys as and when I get them :-)