Gadgets

The PC on the left is Meloy's. The one on the right is mine.

I've got a lot of gadgets.

I've always been fascinated with technology. As a young child growing up in the early 80s, I was fully expecting to live in a futuristic high tower, have a flying car and eventually take vacations on the Moon.

Well I got the high tower part right.

Growing up I toys, after puberty, I had gadgets. The first gadget that I really attributed as mine was my state of the art desktop. At the time I bought it (circa 1991) the thing was the cutting edge available in the Philippines. It had an top tier Intel 386-DX  processor running at an amazing 33-mhz, and equipped with a mind blowing 4 megabytes of ram. I felt so awesome owning the most high tech device.

For a long time my PC was the only device I really associated with as a gadget. I got my first mobile phone in college, in 1998 and it was the classic Nokia 5110. Soon after I also was able to buy my first mobile console, the PlayStation. So from one device, I had three.

Recently with the maturing of mobile technology, my gadget list has exploded. For a time I would just want to buy gadgets willy-nilly. But now, I realized that each gadget must fulfill a certain niche... or "Use Case" as my colleagues in the software testing industry say. Or I just might be getting older and less susceptible to impulse buys.

Currently I have:
1. A Convertible Laptop - Use case: Content creation (writing/drawing), light gaming, OTG browsing (in tablet mode)
2. My mobile phone - Use case: Light browsing / Audiobook and music device / Wireless hotspot / Navigation and Quick Updates (Twitter, Wayze, Google maps, etc)
3. an xbox360 console - Use case: Exercise (Kinect), Streaming video display (netflix)
4. A Desktop PC - Use case: PC games, but currently idle, since I find myself not playing PC games so often. Plus it's out of warranty video card finally gave out. I'll need to replace it before I can play games on it.
5. A 7 inch Nexus 7 android tablet - Ebooks, some video streaming.
6. The Peripherals:

1. A laser printer that can print on both sides of the page. (Yes, for printing RPG PDFs)
2. A Factory flashed DD-WRT router (So I can get a US IP, share it with all devices in the house and continue watching Netflix)
3. 11000mAH Power Bank (because phones run out of power too quickly)
4. Wireless keyboard - This is a legacy device that I had when I was trying to use my Nexus 7 as a content creation device. Right now it's pretty much idle.

I find myself unable to buy a gadget nowdays unless I can figure out it's use case first. Which is a good thing since gadgets are so expensive!