iRiver iHP 120<\/a> (or 140) looks rather spiffy. It acts as a simple external USB hard drive, it can record direct to MP3 from optical line in, and it has a Lithium-Polymer battery (the iPod uses Lithium-Ion) that by most accounts provides well over ten hours of playback. And it has radio. And it’s cheaper than an iPod. The downside is that it doesn’t have the groovy iTunes integration, so I’d have to do lots of manual file and playlist shuffling.<\/p>\nOn the other hand, I’ve just managed to secure a car parking space near where I’ll be working for the next two months, so I’ll be driving my commute instead of taking the bus. That means I won’t need a portable music player for a while, so I think I’ll hold off for the moment. (Besides, economic forecasts suggest that the pound is going to stay strong against the dollar for a while yet.)<\/p>\n
But still…new toys! Woo!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Oh, how we love it when the pound is so strong against the dollar! Suddenly all those cool electronic gadgets seem terribly affordable. It’s a shame that many US retailers won’t ship electronics to the UK any more (hi, Amazon!), but that’s where usefully placed family on the other side of the pond comes in.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1006","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-techie"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1006","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1006"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1006\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1006"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1006"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1006"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"Alphasmart](\"http:\/\/www.sunpig.com\/martin\/images\/2004\/03\/dana.jpg\")
<\/a>In a week and a bit, our personal courier (hi, Susan!) will be bringing us some cool new toys. Abi has bought herself a new Garmin eTrex<\/a> GPS receiver, and I’m going to be getting the Alphasmart Dana<\/a> I have long been lusting after. The wireless one. Oh yes. It will be mine.<\/p>\n