cooking up the offense like he's cooking ravioli

I got quite a few great gifts for Christmas this year and it caught me really off guard. I couldn’t think of anything that I wanted so it surprised me so much that my family was able to find perfect gifts.

I received many non tech related gifts, but tonight I wanted to write about two gifts that were given to the electronic enthusiast in me.

My parents gave me a pair of winter gloves that allow me to still use my iPhone when worn. The gloves have tiny metallic nubs that allow me touch, tap and swipe on the phone while keeping warm in the winter. My mom saw these gloves featured on the Today Show and they are a great replacement to my previous iPhone gloves – a pair of knit gloves with the finger tips cut off (or rather not knit closed). I have only used the gloves sporadically so far, but with the temperatures here dropping am going to start using them fulltime.

My father-in-law, also known an P1 around these parts of the internet, gave me an Eye-fi with Geolocation. An Eye-fi is a special type of memory card for cameras that has built in wi-fi. When you snap a picture and are in range of a wi-fi network the card knows about, the eye-fi card will send the image to the Eye-fi servers. From there, I have the picture sent on to Flickr. I have all the pictures marked as private on Flickr so you don’t save to see all the bad ones I take. In addition to sending to Flickr, the Eye-fi is also set up to download the photos and import into iPhoto for me. I no longer have to ever worry about syncing the photos off the camera with my computer. The Eye-fi also geocodes each picture when it can. I haven’t had amazing success with this feature yet, but it seems to work pretty good. It knew the location of the photos when I took them at my parents house, but can’t get the location of my apartment. I am hoping the reason for that is not an error in the way I set up the Eye-fi.

Also, while it isn’t exactly tech, my parents gave me the first two seasons of Burn Notice, a show about a quirky spy trying to get back into the CIA by finding who burned him. It is one of my family’s favorite shows, but I hadn’t seen it yet. Since getting home, Rachel and I have been on a tear to watch every episode. It’s a great show and getting me ready for my favorite spy drama/comedy – Chuck.