Hi. Today, I bought the 130 CND stereo bluetooth headset for my macbook pro. I intended to use it to listen to music and also take skype calls. I was so impatient, that I opened it up in the mall itself, and had it paired with my cellphone and playing music by the time we got to our car in the parking lot.

It comes with a wall charger, a USB cable to charge it from your computer, a carrying case, a manual and the headset itself. The build quality of the headset seemed a little lacking. I noticed a little glue solution mark on the left side. And the flap cover for the charger was a little loose, letting dust get in. The 'foam' padding on the headphones is pretty hard. Which really hurt my ears and cause pain almost instantly.

The fact that the headphones are uncomfortable to wear was the biggest minus. And is sufficient for me to want to return this thing. But I also noticed some other problems. The headset, when paired with a computer, actually shows two options... Use headphones or use headset. If you select the headset, you can use the mic feature. But if you select to use headphones, you can listen to music in stereo, but can't talk on skype. My USB headset does both these things simultaneously, and switches from music to skype calls seamlessly.

But this thing can't do both. It switches back and forth, which again takes a long time. Plus, the sound quality is not good at all. there is lot of static, and the range isn't very good either. The volume up and down controls are not very easy to press, and infact, actually handa hard to find at first. The big loop at the back, hangs from your ears, and you can't lean back or lie down. Like I said before, MOST UNCOMFORTABLE THING EVER! So I wouldn't recommend any of you buying this.

I really wanted a printer and scanner for my college work and so I went and got myself a Lexmark wireless printer. But since that wasn't compatible with leopard, I took it back, and got it replaced for a Hp C4180 because apparently, HP had drivers available for leopard.

I unboxed it. It came with a lot of useless junk like HP cd labels and hp photo paper sample...ok, I admit that photo paper isn't completely useless, but a USB cord in the package would have been VERY useful. I had no problem setting it up (Because I had kept the USB cord that came with the Lexmark printer) But the huge power-brick hanging from my table irked me. After downloading new drivers from the HP website, I was well on my way to using the printer. But it wasn't all smooth sailing.

First, I had to spent around 15 minutes trying to figure out how the dumb 4x6 photo paper attachment was supposed to go into the tray. I wonder why its even there! Another piece of hardware to take care of and keep track of. huh! Anyways, I gave the print command from photoshop lightroom(photo organizing/managing software) And watched the printer take in the first sheet, and immediately spew out most of it... and in the last part, started printing. And as you'd expect, it didn't finish printing the photo on there, and took in the next sheet too! I have thrown that away, or else, I'd have put up a picture of it here. On other occasions, wanting to print border-less has resulted in disasters... with the paper jamming or the print being misaligned.

Hp scan Pro in photoshop, it always resulted in photoshop crashing. I am using cs3 with all the updates applied. So I was forced to use HP's stupid scan pro application. It does have a nice 'scan tiff to adobe photoshop' option, and it would have been ok, had it not been for the automatic exposure adjustments. It always overexposed the drawings and photos. I had to manually go in for each scan and get the highlights and shadows back to zero. I really hope they work on these things.

The other day, I took some pictures and wanted to transfer them to my computer. And I figured I'd try putting it in the card reader on the printer. And luckily, I could access the card on my computer! So this can also work as a card reader for your computer, besides being able to print directly from the card! But the lexmark one also had a USB port which this one doesn't. But I thought this feature was really neat!

Then the final straw was the smudging of the ink! I print out my artwork for putting up in my room or submitting to the teachers. I also made stickers and was intending to print cd labels. But the ink is so unstable, that slightest amount of wetness will smudge it. I have sweaty palms. And so me resting my hands on those pieces while working with them results in it getting smudged and destroyed. Wet fingers destroyed a photograph by smudging the ink. Plus, my hands got black. Its like the ink never really dries! This is wasting very expensive photo paper. So I decided to take it back.

What I also did like was the lcd screen which can be tilted upto 90 degrees from flat. Its nicely readable, and provides information and access to features. This I thought was a great adition to the printer that can print directly from memory cards. yeah, forgot to add, It also came with another faceplate with instructions in french (canada is bilingual.)

So buy this printer if you don't care about durability or life of your photographs. or if you only want to print documents. the scanner is alright, not very lazy like most, and I didn't get around to testing the copier functions.

Hey! I have found one topic to post here after a really really long time. I just got my hands on an external hard drive, called lacie D2 quadra. I plugged it into my computer, and it was immediately recognized, because it was mac partitioned. but journaling was not enabled. What that means you ask? well, the true meaning was unknown to me too. Until I decided to try and partition the hard drive to make a time machine partition and a storage partition.

But before the thought of partitioning came to my mind, I had already spent well over 30 minutes backing up my home folder onto it. So now I was trying to partition it without loosing the 54 gigs of data. Indestructible partitioning is a feature available in the disk utility on leopard. So I booted into my alternate operating system and tried to do that, only to be told that this can only be performed on hfs+ with journaling enabled drives. Dang!

So I gave in, and decided to let it erase all the data, and make two partitions which I could later move around as and when I want. Now I'm frustrated because that thing has been running for I dunno how long, and still failed to make the new partition map. It doesn't even show any progress bar or time remaining. I am stuck watching the screen waiting for the confirmation. I hope its in THIS lifetime!

I was actually happy with imovie 08 for a while when I made a quick movie and uploaded to youtube instantly from within the application. But then I noticed the diminished free space on my hard drive. I had to look into it, and sure enough, I found out that imovie thumbnails were taking up more space than the actual full resolution movies on my hard drive! That is just SO WRONG! I remembered that I hated imovie'06 because it would save al the videos inside the project files, and hence, the project files would end up being close to 200 megs each! That's humongous for a little laptop drive!

So even though the new feature allows you to make your movies amazingly fast, it ends up doubling the space on your hard drive. I wish they'd find a workaround for this. This is just being wasteful. Even if they have to make smaller versions of the file to keep as thumbnails, they could have implemented something to compress them even more.