The northlondonhippy

Archive for December 15th, 2008

There’s only ten days left till xmas and if you haven’t fin­ished your shop­ping yet, I’m here to help.

Its a short list of poten­tial gifts, but ones that will be cer­tain to impress and daz­zle the recip­i­ent. Also, you can order them online and have them ready to dole out on xmas with­out hav­ing to leave the com­fort of your home. That’s the best way to xmas shop!

Kodak Zi6 HD Video­cam­era
Ama­zon UK: £ 89.99

The Kodak Zi6 HD Video­cam­era is an impres­sive lit­tle piece of kit. While pocket sized, this lit­tle mar­vel shoots in glo­ri­ously rich and detailed 720p High-Def, while record­ing onto cheap and read­ily avail­able SD cards.

The Zi6 also shoots in stan­dard, YouTube friendly VGA, has a built in USB con­nec­tor and works like a dream. On my Mac, it just appears as a hard drive on the desk­top, you drag the files onto your desk­top, then into iMovie, which can han­dle them in HD quality.

On a PC, the Zi6 includes built in edit­ing soft­ware, that you can run from the cam­era. Sweet.

It also shoots stills, has a 2x opti­cal zoom and works off stan­dard or rechar­gable AA bat­ter­ies. I am so impressed with this cam­era already.

I bought mine a few weeks ago and paid £119.99, which means at £89.99, its already a major bar­gain! If you’re look­ing for a sim­ple to use pocket video­cam­era that won’t break the bank, this is the cam­era for you.

iPod Touch
Ama­zon UK: £149-£254 depend­ing upon stor­age (8gb, 16gb or 32gb)

I know I go on and on about my iPhone, but what if you are already happy with your cur­rent mobile deal, but still want to play with the coolest hand held gad­get ever? The iPod Touch is for you!

The iPod Touch is basi­cally an iPhone with­out the phone. It does nearly every­thing an iPhone can do except make and receive tele­phone calls, send and receive SMS mes­sages, take pho­tos and have proper GPS. Other than that, it does every­thing else.

You can run most apps on an iPod Touch, you can surf the net, send and receive emails, it does have some loca­tion aware­ness based on wi-fi posi­tion­ing. Oh and it plays music and videos and dis­plays pho­tos too.

I bought one for Mrs. Hippy last xmas and she absolutely loves it. She used it for music until the Apple App Store opened and that’s when she really got hooked. She now uses it for surf­ing, for gam­ing and its rarely not in her hands.

The 2nd gen­er­a­tion iPod Touch is even slim­mer than the first and its added a small speaker and the abil­ity to input audio via an exter­nal micro­phone, mak­ing it even more flex­i­ble than the orig­i­nal model.

The only neg­a­tive Mrs. H has come up with on it is it makes her wish she had an iPhone. The lack of con­nec­tiv­ity when there is no wi-fi avail­able is a real stick­ing point. Other than that, its nearly a per­fect device, guar­an­teed to be used daily by who­ever you might give it to.

Vol­cano Vapor­iser
everyonedoesit.com — £279.75 for the stan­dard model

I bought one of these a few months ago, but it is some­thing I’ve cov­eted for ages. Near as I can tell, its the only vape that really works and con­sis­tently deliv­ers good results.

The Vol­cano Vapor­iser does one thing and does it very well, it takes your favourite herb (like weed) and turns the active bits into vapour, while leav­ing the nasty bits alone.

When you smoke weed, you burn every­thing, includ­ing the carbon-based bits which con­tain the known car­cino­gens and other nas­ties. You also burn a good chunk of the THC, before it reaches your lungs.

A vapor­iser only burns the THC. leav­ing the other com­po­nents alone. The weed doesn’t actu­ally burn, but it does get a bit toasted and turns brown.

The Vol­cano works by fill­ing a small cham­ber, which holds your weed between two screens. You place this cham­ber on top of the base unit, where it is heated to the proper tem­per­a­ture. You then engage a small fan, which blows air up through the cham­ber, fill­ing an attached bal­loon with very sweet, pure vapour.

When you inhale it, you can def­i­nitely taste the weed, but your throat and lungs don’t feel any­thing at all. The vapour is at room temp, so its not hot and dry like smoke, and it is very light, though you can see it when you exhale.

The head on vapour is also dif­fer­ent from smok­ing and is hard to describe. It is decep­tively strong, clean, clear and every enjoyable.

By far the most impres­sive thing about using a Vol­cano is how lit­tle weed you actu­ally need to get high. A week’s worth of what I would smoke, would prob­a­bly last 5–6 weeks in the vol­cano. A spliff’s worth in the cham­ber is enough to get 4 peo­ple pleas­antly stoned and then some.

And when you are done vap­ing the weed, don’t throw it away, there’s still some THC left in it, which you can extract by mak­ing cannabut­ter. You could even smoke it if you were des­per­ate, though that would kind of defeat the pur­pose of vaping.

I know the Vol­cano is expen­sive (and I bought the even pricier dig­i­tal ver­sion), but it will more than pay for itself with the money you will save on weed. Add the health ben­e­fits and you’ve got a really use­ful, ben­e­fi­cial device that will change your life.

I bought mine because I am plan­ning on giv­ing up cig­a­rettes in the new year. When I do, I’m going to want to cut down on my spliffs as well and I think this will help loads.

That’s it for this year, just three hi-tech toys which will amaze any­one you might decide to give them to. And if you’re shop­ping for your­self, even bet­ter, you’d love them all too!