I recently upgraded from a Garmin Forerunner 305 to a Garmin Edge 500 as my number-producing gadget for cycling stats. While the Forerunner is still what I’ll use whenever I go on runs, I’ve used the Edge on several rides now and have found it to be a huge improvement over the Forerunner.

Since it’s still relatively new (i.e., it was announced ages ago but it recently started actually shipping finally) and I couldn’t find a ton of data on it yet from other folks who have gotten their hands on it, I’m going to write up what I’ve noticed so far hoping it helps someone out who’s deciding on whether to pick this one up or not. Continue reading →

Recently, a couple of new Vista Sidebar Gadgets came out from the Windows Live side: a search gadget and a traffic gadget. They’re really well done and useful.

The Windows Live Search gadget by default is a general search utility but it has a few options that allow you to configure it as a search engine for a specific site only. An example use of that would be to configure it to only search MSDN for information for a developer.

The traffic gadget supports many major cities, is scrollable by dragging (much better than the traffic gadget I used to use), and is well integrated with maps.live.com.

Check them out if you’re using Vista. Chances are you’ll want to keep them.

I haven’t tried these yet (writing this from my Mac) but will later tonight. It seems there are a couple of new Vista Sidebar Gadgets available: Upcoming Appointments and Tasks. Robert McLaws posted about them here and links to a post by Ryan Gregg announcing them.

Robert mentions “at this rate I’m going to need sidebars running on both sides of my screen…” I’m guessing Robert is aware of this but I’ve encountered several folks who were surprised to see a bunch of Gadgets spread out across my desktop. It turns out you can “detach” Gadgets from the Sidebar and place them anywhere on your desktop. The other little known feature (at least from what I’ve experienced) is how the Start+Spacebar shortcut bring all your Gadgets on top of all other windows. This is pretty handy when using a bunch of detached Gadgets.

I’m debating whether I should get an invisibleSHIELD from ShieldZone for the Motorola Q. The video review (which is as thorough a review as I’ve ever seen) really seems to make it look like it really does the job and is well done. I’m just wondering if it’s also good long-term and if you ever want to remove it from the device how fun that process would be. They also seem to have these “shields” for tons of other products like iPods, tablet PCs, watches, gaming systems, and I just noticed they even have them for camera LCD screens (like the Nikon D70). I think I’ll order the camera shield first and see how it goes. Anyone have any experience with these?