My current crop of gadgets is largely Apple-centric, a recent trend for me.
At the centre of everything is the Mac Mini that started my Apple odyssey about 18 months ago. My main uses for the machine are watching TV, managing photos and web browsing. It is not a very powerful machine but manages most of what I throw at it, only when I have a video encoding whilst also doing something else with reasonable processor load do I notice any problems.
I have an EyeTV 310 linking the Mac with a satellite dish. This allows me to watch Free To Air TV and radio broadcasts from the UK. The EyeTV software is excellent for recording TV, allowing me to use the Mac as a PVR. I watch the TV either on the Mac or via an Apple TV on our main television set downstairs. I listen to radio a lot and a wireless headset allows me to listen when I am doing chores around the house and garden.
Photography was a hobby for me before my first home computer arrived. Last year I bought my first digital SLR, a Canon 450D, since when I have taken many more photos than ever before. Combined with family snapshots taken on various digital cameras since 1998 I now have a substantial iPhoto library to deal with.
With all the video and photos, plus a lot of music in iTunes, I soon ran into disk space problems. I have been through a couple of iterations but now feel that I have it right for now and easily expandable for the future. Obviously there is the drive in the Mini itself, here I store only applications and system data. Attached are two Toshiba fanless drives, one for output from EyeTV and the other for the rest of my data. Backup is handled by a Drobo running as a Time Machine; the is my latest addition and deserves a post of it’s own.
The final piece of technology is an iPhone, a 3GS, bought a couple of months ago. This is my favourite piece of tech at the moment. I will also write about this separately.