If you've been following me on Twitter, flickr or Facebook, you may have noticed that I'm in the middle of a trip from Connecticut down to Fort Lauderdale. My niece is moving down to live with her mother, and I volunteered/got suckered into the trip. So far, it's been ok - I'll have another post with other stuff like hotel reviews (one not awesome, one really good so far), photos, and other thoughts.

In the meantime.... My brothers-in-law and sisters-in-law have all chipped in and bought my neice and got her a GPS unit. We got a Garmin nüvi 205, which has proved to be invaluable to us so far. Yes, I have printed directions from Google Maps, and from the hotel websites to get us there. But what if we make a wrong turn? Then we're pretty much boned, right? Well, not now. We have, on this trip, come close to a wrong turn or two. And on one occasion, we were driving to get some food and left the GPS on by accident. With this thing turned on, it tells us that we have to give it a second while it figures out where we are, and then tries to re-route us accordingly. It's pretty cool, and I hope she makes extensive use of it.

When we went to New Hampshire for our summer vacation, I borrowed a more "robust" model from a friend for the trip - considering we had been to the area once before, and to the park we went to once before (Story Land), we had some idea of where we were going for things - but what about some more out of the way places? Or if we got lost? Not a problem anymore. If it was up to me, I'd buy one now - never know when it will come in handy.

So far, it's been easy to operate, which is going to be key for my niece. When I got it I had to register it and then download some upgraded maps - almost 3gb worth! Considering it's for the whole US, I guess that's pretty reasonable. It hooks up to my computer (yes, Mac compatible!) via USB, and the Garmin applications (for setup, updating and POI loading) are not only usable, but easy to use and not a complete and total pain in the ass. Very good move, Garmin. After I change the registration info, I hope to have her get the apps for her computer and keep it up to date herself.

Another good purchase I've made recently:
A-DATA 16GB Secure Digital High-Capacity (SDHC) Flash Card. I bought it to use with my ExpressCard SD card reader for an experiment - I wanted to load Mac OSX onto it and see if it loads faster than the built in drive for various reasons - not the least of which was that Snow Leopard was coming out. Testing a newer, faster, leaner OS on a faster interface is a win win situation, and I wanted to see how it might also help out with battery life - unmounting the hard drive while booted from the flash drive would remove a pretty significant drain from the battery, I hope.

Anyway, after taking some photos and videos yesterday, I decided to try to use it in my camera - after a quick reformat, it showed up fine. I can take more than quite a few photos (9999+, and that's just a sign that there's room for TONS of photos), but there's also apparently room for about 135 minutes of video - and I think that might be just for one clip. Can't be sure on that until I have that much footage to shoot - and I think that I'd probably run out of juice before I got to that point.

So, there you have it: two little gadgety things that I've been using for a couple of days, but so far, they're working out well and will probably be becoming a part of my regular geek kit.