A new year has just started and I’m happy to invite all my read­ers to datadirt’s first blog car­ni­val: I’m curi­ous about the new hard­ware you bought dur­ing the last year. Which shiny piece of tech­nol­ogy is your favorite gad­get, and which not-so-shiny one dis­ap­pointed you? Feed the inner geek, write about sat­is­fac­tion and dis­ap­point­ment. I’m sure that most of my read­ers expe­ri­enced both sce­nar­ios, so let’s just share them and spread the knowl­edge

This blog has received a nice 5 dur­ing the recent page rank update, so I’m more than happy to give some link juice back. The entrance is wide open: chose any­thing that might qual­ify as a “gadget”.

Rules: There are no rules — except for the fact that I will list all entries on this blog when the car­ni­val is over, so please keep me updated about your entries either via track­back or via com­ment. The best/worst gad­get 2008 blog car­ni­val starts today, 12th of Jan­u­ary, and ends in two weeks on Sun­day the 25th of January.

I’m really look­ing for­ward to your entries — here’s my best and worst gad­get selection:

My favorite gad­get of 2008: Ter­ratec 6fire USB

I’m quite sat­is­fied with my new Sam­sung sync­mas­ter screens, I love my Energy CB20 speak­ers and there’s plenty more gad­gets that come to my mind. But there’s def­i­nitely a high­light: my new exter­nal sound­card Ter­ratec 6fire USB is per­fectly equipped for my needs and offers excel­lent sound qual­ity. 6 ana­logue ins plus 6 outs in com­bi­na­tion with the XLR micro­phone plug (includ­ing a switch for 48V phan­tom volt­age for stu­dio mics) guar­an­tee ver­sa­til­ity for all home-studio and pod­cast­ing needs.

The dri­ver is sta­ble (I’m run­ning Vista64), the ASIO-latency is extremely low and the sim­ple yet pow­er­ful soft­ware allows free rout­ing of all avail­able chan­nels. Very good value for money — at Ama­zon, the sound­card ships for about 200 Euros. I don’t dub my vinyl, but thanks to the routing-per-channel fea­tures the 6Fire eas­ily qual­i­fies for dig­i­tal djs and home-producers. Cin­ema freaks don’t need to switch sound­cards, there’s a dig­i­tal 5.1 out as well.

My worst gad­get of 2008: Log­itech Z-10 speaker system

Com­bin­ing ampli­fied speak­ers with a slick and ele­gant touch-screen dis­play sounds like a bril­liant idea — in the­ory. But I do not even want to know about the fun Logitech’s engi­neers had when declar­ing this piece of unfin­ished work: “Hey, we know that the touch-screen is not work­ing well — who cares? There is not API or soft­ware any­ways.” But that’s not even the worst part: the speak­ers use USB to trans­mit music, which is not such a bad idea after all for lap­top use, but the big big prob­lem is this: as soon as the speak­ers are con­nected, every kind of inter­nal or exter­nal sound­card is deac­ti­vated. Now ain’t that great? I tried using the line-in, which ren­ders all the addi­tional touch screen func­tions use­less and decreases the sound qual­ity quite much. Since the prod­uct is way too heavy to qual­ify as a mobile lap­top speaker, there’s not much us for the Z-10 in my opin­ion. The sound is not that bad for speak­ers of this size — but the money is much bet­ter spent on a pair of JBL con­trol speakers.

But now for your gadget-stories of 2008. Look­ing for­ward to your postings!