On July 9th, I will turn fifty years old and it is a big deal for me. My forties were rough and I’m hoping that my fifties will be better. I never really had a big birthday bash, and although my wife is struggling with physical difficulties, she is organizing a fiftieth birthday bash for me. Sometime around my fiftieth birthday, I will send my 5,000th tweet.

Perhaps a bigger thing for me is that I grew up loving the writing of Hermann Hesse. I’m told that Hesse once said you should never read anything he wrote before he was fifty and you should only read it after you turn fifty. I’ve always thought of turning fifty as a special point in literary production and I’ve wondered what turns my writing will take after July.

I was brought up in a very frugal family, and it has stayed with me throughout my life. Our financial difficulties over the past few years have further caused me to hold back on dreams of gadgets I would like and so birthday magic often seemed to elude me.

Smartphones

Yet this year, perhaps there was room for a little something special. Was there anything that I would like? My cellphone is three years old and my wife asked if what I thought of different smartphones. I talked about the iPhone, the Blackberry, the Palm Pre, the Nokia phones that support QIK. I was thinking that the new iPhone might be nice, providing it isn’t too hobbled. Friends have complained about how AT&T has hobbled Skype and Sling Player. That hasn’t been a big concern for me. I’ve never used Sling and I’ve rarely used Skype.

I’ve been more concerned about the photography aspects. Ideally, I would like to have a phone I can stream video with, like the Nokia phones. Well, today, Apple announced the new iPhone 3GS. It has a better camera which supports 3 megapixels. That’s much better than the 1.3 megapixels that my phone currently supports, but isn’t as good as other cameraphones. Yet the reports are that AT&T will not support MMS for the iPhone, at least not initially. I find this very odd. I have a three year old phone on the AT&T network, and AT&T supports MMS on that phone.

From my current phone, I take a picture and then email it via MMS to several services like Facebook, YouTube and Flickr. Just about every service I use is contacted via email, so if I can email my pictures and videos from an iPhone, that would probably work. However, the iPhone GS does not support video streaming either, and I’ve long wanted to use that. I’ve been interested in QIK for a long time. It seems like the phones that QIK users like best are the Nokia N series. I also see that the Google Andriods support QIK, and either Nokia or androids might actually be a better phone. The top of the line Nokia phone, however, is very pricy and I’ve read mixed reviews of all of these devices.

So, for the time being, it may be better just to stay with my three year old phone and wait until the cellphone companies and mobile carriers get their act together a little better before upgrading.

Besides the lack of MMS support, and another thing that is coming to the iPhone is tethering, or the ability to use an iPhone as a wireless modem for a laptop, which AT&T is also not initially supporting caused a lot of consternation amongst people following the Apple announcement, myself included.

The New York Times Blog reported “Mark Siegel, media relations executive director of AT&T Mobility and Consumer Markets, said the carrier would roll out both soon. ‘It’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when,’ he said.”

There is still some question about whether MMS support and/or tethering support would cost even more. So, until these issues are resolved, the iPhone is probably off my birthday list. It had been at the top of my list as the gadget I would probably use most often.

However, there are other gadgets that I’ve been interested in. They are things that I would use less often, and are less important to me, but would be interesting to play with.

XLR connections

I go to a lot of conferences and usually they have professional audio systems which support XLR connectors. I’ve been interested a few different possible XLR connections. One is essentially a sound card on a cord. It has a USB connection on one end and an XLR connection on the other. In theory I ought to be able to use such a chord to connect my laptop to the professional sound system. I could then stream professional quality sound from conferences that I’m at.

If I got a good XLR microphone, I could also use it for making better audio files. I imagine my daughter might enjoy that more than I would since she probably would record more audio than I, but it would be a fun toy. There are other options that get more interesting, like a mixing board that takes several XLR sources, mixes them and feeds them into the PC via a USB connection. The Blue Microphones Icicle XLR Cable to USB Conversion Adapter sounds like a very nice device as does the MXL USB Mic Mate. The LightSnake STUSBXLR10 LightSnake USB Microphone cable also seems good. However, with any of these I would need to get a good XLR microphone and cables. I don’t do enough recording to make this especially interesting.

The other device that I saw when I was down in Washington for XLR connections was a telephone audio interface. The folks from BlogTalkRadio used it to hook into a professional audio system and then dial into BlogTalkRadio to stream the show from the professional audio system, over the phone network. I believe the device was something like the JK Audio RemoteMix C+. This is an expensive device and not one that I would be likely to use very often.

A related device that might work even more nicely is a Camcorder XLR Adapter/Preamp. This allows you to take XLR signals, mix them and send them out on a 3.5 mm jack. The idea is to send this to a camcorder that could support 3.5 mm inputs. Unfortunately, my camcorder doesn’t support external mics. I suspect I could connect this to the microphone input on my laptop, and it might even be that with a little creative wiring this could be used as an adapter/preamp for an iPhone. That would perhaps be really interesting, if it were time to get an iPhone.

Tripods, etc.

Changing gears a little bit, I’ve often thought that I should get some sort of Monopod, Tripod, or camera stabilizer. All of the pictures and videos I take right now are hand held. You can see the jiggle in plenty of the videos I shoot. The problem is that there is a wide range of systems. I’m not really into getting a fullsized tripod. They just seem to cumbersome to carry. A monopod might be nice, but I don’t know which monopods are good. However, I did see a review of the Manfrotto 585 ModoSteady 3-in-1 Camera/Camcorder Stabilizer and Support System. I’ve heard good stories about this and it looks like it might be a very nice device. On the other hand, I also recently read about a camera stabilizer that seems much closer to my style. It is a zip lock bag full of sand. It probably doesn’t work all that well for many of the times I’m looking for a camera stabilizer, but the price is right and it seems highly usable.

OBD-II

Another interesting technology, that seems even further from my normal area of interest is OBD-II readers. OBD stands for something like Onboard Diagnostics. It is the computer interface for checking the status of your car. Different cars have different protocols that they talk over this connector and you can use it to find out what the Check Engine light is trying to tell you and a host of other bits of information. I’ve read a little bit about different OBD-II readers and scanners and was surprised to find that there are relatively small and inexpensive devices. What I am most interested in is seeing what I could read from the OBD-II port on my 2001 Toyota Prius. Different readers have different ways of handling the data. Some just show data on a handheld device. Others support USB or Bluetooth to send the data to a PC. From what I’ve heard, the ElmScan 5 Bluetooth, seems to be the most recommended, but there are all kinds of different options out there. ODBCOM looks like a nice, cheaper version that is only USB, and Sterntech has an open source reader, but that looks like too much work.

Like other gadgets, this would probably be fun to play with for a little while, but I don’t see me using it all that often.

So, I’ve looked at the various gadgets out there. Many of them are somewhat interesting, but none of them really seem all that much worth it. Are there gadgets out there that I should be considering and have overlooked? Are any of the things I’ve described above better than I’m giving them credit for? Let me know your thoughts. However, perhaps all that I really want is a new belt and a happy and healthy family.