Hiya.

My name is Tony Ballinger, and I'm a web designer living in Oak Park, Illinois.
When I'm not designing for the web, I enjoy music, go to concerts and play with gadgets.

Archive for the 'Gadgets' Category

Movie Trailers for Your Video iPod

Sunday, September 10th, 2006

I don’t know about you, but sometimes on a Sunday afternoon I’d like to go see a matinee. The only thing is I don’t want to have to go home and find out what’s playing and then look up trailers to see what looks good. Now with the one-two punch of Life2Go for movie times [...]

Mac Pro: A Whole Lot More Machine

Wednesday, August 16th, 2006

This thing is a monster: four cores, four drives, and capacity for 12GB of RAM. While I’m drooling over the specs for the Mac Pro, I’m still glad I purchased a refurbished dual G5 earlier this year for $1299, since the Adobe (Macromedia) software I depend on still isn’t native. The specs on this beast [...]

Instant Handbrake

Tuesday, July 4th, 2006

I love my iPod, but to be honest the video capabilities have very little to do with it. The idea of paying $2 per show to watch TV programs on 2″ screen is pretty underwhelming. However, there are those rare occasions when having a bit of video on your iPod can come in handy when [...]

Opera Mini 2.0

Sunday, May 14th, 2006

If you have a Motorola phone like I do, you may have learned pretty quickly that the built-in web browser stinks. I’ve read online that it’s actually the worst browser shipping with any cell phone these days. But no worries, I had installed Opera Mini within days and have been happily surfing the web on [...]

The Buddha Machine

Tuesday, April 11th, 2006

I picked up a Buddha Machine this weekend from Hard Boiled Records on Roscoe. If you haven’t heard of the little gadget, it’s a hardware loop player put out by the electronic music group FM3. The Buddha Machine is about as simple as simple gets. It’s a small plastic box with a volume control/power switch, [...]

Brand New Bag: Dual 1.8GHz PowerPC G5

Saturday, March 25th, 2006

Nothing motivates like a system requirement for a new Brian Eno gadget – and since his new software “77 Million Paintings” is going to require a G5 to create it’s generative soundtrack, then so it shall be. Not that I’m getting a new machine just to run video paintings. I’ve had the same dual 800MHz [...]