Trumblog

In Spanish there’s a word “antojo” which means a little thing that you want, not because you need it, but because you just want it. I’ve got three. They are all around the $150 price point and perfect for Father’s day if you ask me.

1. The Netflix Player by Roko - the new set top box for Netflix that allows you to stream movies from Netflix.com to your television.

Do I need this? We rely on the DVR a lot, use Comcast’s On Demand like crazy and watch shows online. We don’t use our Netflix subscription nearly as much as we should; I have one DVD from them that was shipped 6 months ago back in November. I’ve watched videos streamed from Netflix maybe twice and the number of available videos is pretty limited.

So why do I want this instead of flipping around until I find Taledega Nights again? It’s just such a damn good idea. It’s so logical I can’t believe that it wasn’t done before. The beauty of the idea alone makes me want it.

2. The Chumby - this is the mini monitor with wireless access that will display just about anything that you that’s online. So it can be your alarm clock, be a picture frame, a radio, a video player, an updater of news or weather or social network or weather or just about any other information that you can find online .

I have a home theater system, a smart phone, a laptop, why do I need this when I can get access to any of this content through so many other channels? The neat factor. This small window into the particular part of the web that you want is just enough functionality to push your creativity into new ways to use it.

3. The Flip - a no frills video camera that you can whip out to capture life’s little moments with hardly any startup time. The flip-out USB arm allows you to download and share video just as quickly and easily. Tres-cool.

With my background in film and video, and my wife still in the business, we actually have a few video cameras and this does not surpass them for features, video quality or anything else except for size. We also have several digital cameras, each of which will record video, which I imagine is roughly the same quality as the Flip offers, and phones with cameras too. I am not lacking for video options.

Why does another video camera that offers no benefits interest me? I don’t know, but it does. Back in the 80s there was this kid’s video camera that shot poor quality video on an audio cassette. PixelVision’s low tech, low quality, cheap source made it interesting to experiment with for us just out of school film geeks. This little thing evokes memories of that for me.

Those are my three geeky antochos, What are yours? What have I missed?