Alex Kidman

You get the idea.

A very busy week wound up with a review at CNET.com.au and a whole bunch more of Gizmodo posts. Normal, slightly quieter service resumes next week, but it’s still not going to be “quiet” by any reasonable measure.

Dell Inspiron N301: “Dell’s inexpensive Core i3 Inspiron isn’t incredibly inspiring, but it’s not intolerably insipid either.”

And then over at Gizmodo, a whole bunch of not-always-all-that-brief posts:

New iPods? We’re Going To Need New Cases

Breakfast Wrap: Best Of Wednesday Night

Aussie Apple TV Owners Get Short Shrift

ABC’s Mobile Division Cracks New Records

Hitachi Gets A New Life(Studio) Down Under

Buy An Avatar Or Headset, Make A Wish Come True

3D Glasses – Perhaps I Need A Smaller Head

Microsoft’s Home Of The Future Is Suspiciously Clean And Shiny

Breakfast Wrap: Best Of Friday Night

Hands On With Telstra’s Ultimate USB

An Appropriate Solution To Australia’s Election Woes

Am I The Only One Creeped Out By What’s Happening To This Flash Drive?

What’s The Oldest Gadget You Still Regularly Use?

You know that whole idea of a work/life balance? Right at the moment, mine’s so tilted it’s essentially a work/work balance with the life hanging onto an edge somewhere by the very tips of its fingers. In fact, I think I just heard it scream as it inevitably let go.

Inbetween running a household and running after three kids and supporting an overworked prac student (who happens to be the woman I love), I’m also writing. A lot.

From what could be called my regular assignments, there’s a MacTheMag blog entry:

MacTheBlog: A support issue: “It was at this point that I remembered the only other person I know of that readily identifies himself as a Genius. That would be Wile. E. Coyote, and I’m well aware of the success rate of his plans.”

At Geekspeak, musings on the use of a 1TB broadband plan:

Geekspeak: What can you do with 1TB of data? “What 1TB does buy you is a fair amount of security…”

At CNET.com.au, even more iPhone 4 cases have been tested:

30 best and worst iPhone 4 cases: “It’s raining iPhone cases around here, so we’ve added more to our original story, bumping up the case count from 25 to 30. More choice is good, right?”

And that’s not getting on to the other big writing task for the week as I take up a guest editor role at Gizmodo Australia. In just two days, I’ve written the following stories:

Breakfast Wrap: Best Of The Weekend
Vodafone/Three Pump Up Contract Data Caps
Telstra Unveils Ultimate Wireless USB
Get Your Kicks (On Your Wave) On Route 66
The Best Free WiFi Is Fast Free WiFi
Breakfast Wrap: Best Of Monday Night
Internode Fetches IPTV For Early Adopters
Even Apple’s Making The iPod Refresh Obvious Now
Confirmed: Xbox Live Price Increase Isn’t Coming Nov 1
Is This The Ugliest iPad Stand Ever?
Nice Power Brick. But Will It Fly?

And it’s still only Tuesday. The week is still young, even if I’m not.

Today, it’s all about data, data, data and waves. First up at Hydrapinion, I opined about the odd nature of Optus’ latest data promotion:

Hydrapinion: Half price data pricing makes half as much sense: “I mean, really, which sounds better to you — the ‘fake’ 4 to 8c per MB, or the actual 0.5-1c per MB?”

I’m not done with data analysis yet, though, as Internode’s announced changes to its broadband plans go under the analytical hammer at PC Authority:

How do Internode’s new mega-allowance plans stack up? “How do Internode’s new plans compare to Telstra’s recent drastic price drops? We crunch the numbers to assess the real value.”

And then finally at Geekspeak, I go over the basics of Google’s soon-to-be-defunct Wave product:

Geekspeak: Waving Goodbye: “Not every tech product is an instant hit, even when it’s backed by a big brand name.”

As I write this, I’ve been awake since 2am with the mother (and father, and possibly great-aunt) of all head colds. Yuck. I’m going to go crawl under a duvet and pretend to be dead, but don’t my zombie state let that stop the virtual presses. Not one, not two but three more articles to finish out the week, all at PC Authority:

Believe it or not, but Telstra BigPond is our new winner for best wireless broadband: “Telstra’s reputation as expensive crumbles in our wireless broadband test. Read why we believe Telstra is changing their ways, and why Telstra wireless is now finally attractive…”

Dell Laptop Buyer’s Guide: Inspiron R vs XPS vs Alienware: “If you’re looking for a mid-range Dell laptop, the range now includes the brand new Inspiron R, as well as XPS and Alienware laptops. So how does the value stack up?”

Vintage Tech: Ye olde 3.5″ floppy disks now surprisingly expensive: “We might laugh about 1.44MB floppy disks, but they were the storage medium champ of their time. And nowadays they’re not exactly cheap.”

First up, today’s Vintage Tech column at PC Authority, which looks at the granddaddy of the modern graphical browser:

Vintage Tech: Looking back at Mosaic: “The DNA of Mosaic runs through pretty much any modern Internet browser. So what did it look like, and why was it so special?”

It might be obvious that I’ve been pretty flat out of late. But it’s nothing in comparison to a month ago, where I was running all over town (and across several states) testing wireless broadband solutions. Testing them at home. Testing them in Queensland hotel rooms in the middle of a monsoon. Testing them by a river in the middle of regional New South Wales. Testing them (to the amazement of the staff) in a coffee shop in the CBD of Sydney. There’s nothing quite like pulling out half a dozen netbooks and firing them all up at once to run tests to draw stares. Well, more stares than I draw normally, anyway.

The end result of all this bandwidth burning and city hopping? A comprehensive guide to mobile broadband performance and mobile broadband deals, in this month’s print edition of PC Authority which should be on sale now. Tell them I sent you, and you’ll get no discount whatsoever, but may get stared at funny, just like I tended to while testing!

Another patently false lyric. You just have to know where to stab…

(insert dark laughter here…)

Yeah, OK, I’m not quite that grim. I’ve just been listening to too much Alice Cooper today. Well, too much of a single Alice Cooper album anyway. This was meant to be part of my “listen to lots of new music” gambit, but instead I spent the day listening to an album I got hooked on when I lived in a heavily junkie-infested household back when I was an innocent wee eighteen year old.

Shut up! I was innocent.. once. Or maybe twice.

Anyway, I don’t think it’s influenced my writing today. Well, not much. Let’s see, shall we?

First of all, some news at APCMag.com:

MyNetfone launches Naked ADSL2+: “MyNetFone’s naked ADSL2+ packs surprisingly good value — $39 a month for 5GB peak usage. You could pay that much to Telstra just in line rental.”

Then there’s the June issue of Australian PC User Magazine, in which I’m featured pretty heavily. In TestBench, you’ll find my review of the Telstra Turbo 21 Modem. In Cool & New, my reviews of the Nokia E63, Microsoft Sidewinder X8 Gaming Mouse and DualSIM Slider, and in Games, a review of WWE Legends Of Wrestlemania, with a fabulous screenshot of “Dancing” Jim Neidhart. Well, OK, only one other person reading this blog knows why he’s “dancing” Jim Neidhart, but anyway… it’s on store shelves now. Go forth and purchase, people, otherwise I won’t be able to afford to subsidise the golfing-heavy lifestyles of certain 70′s-era Shock Rockers!

Yep, it’s this week’s hot-button topic, again, this time at PC Authority:

iPhone Plan Picker: Best deals for Light, Medium and Heavy users: “To go with Telstra, or not to go with Telstra? Weigh up the decision with our full analysis of the best deals in three scenarios, as well as the best overall iPhone 3G plans from Optus, Vodafone, and Telstra.”

C’mon… you know the Onion will be doing it.

In the meantime — an iPhone story! What a shock! This time, at PC Authority:

Vodafone confirms iPhone prices, Telstra reveals which shops are stocking: “Low-cost monthly repayments are good, but 24-month plans seem mandatory. Plus, why we’re worried about Telstra’s iPhone plans.”

Apple’s NDA on the iPhone 3G expired this morning at 12:01am, local Sydney time, and predictably, there’s a flood of reviews online right now. Like, for example, mine, live now at GadgetGuy.com.au:

Apple iPhone 3G: “Apple’s 3G iPhone isn’t quite as revolutionary as the hype might have you believe. Indeed, an awful lot of what it does is replicated on any number of other phones. Where it absolutely leaves those phones in the dust is in ease of use, thanks to the slick interface, excellent embedded browser and ease of adding applications to the phone. It doesn’t hurt that it’s a phone that’s also genuinely fun to play with, either.”

(as a side note, can people please stop referring to it as the “Jesus Phone” now? By definition, when Jesus returns, he’s not going to need a phone. He comes, as it were, with inbuilt communications facilities…)