A Sleek Home Base For Your Gadgets

Our gadgets are useless when the batteries fade or we misplace their charging cables. Bluelounge’s Sanctuary elegantly solves both problems, charging and storing your electronic devices. The rounded, Plexiglas box conceals a dozen power tentacles to juice up mobile phones, PDAs, iPods, and more. But the Sanctuary is a tease for hard-core gadgeteers; its size only accommodates a few devices.

Things That Make You Go Hmmm

Your Mac is already great at Web surfing, but the ATI TV Wonder HD 650 lets it surf TV channels too. If you have a fast system, the USB TV tuner feeds fluid broadcasts from analog and digital over-the-air channels, cable TV, or another source. The device even buffers live TV and saves shows like a standalone digital video recorder. But even with a high-end computer, the included software sometimes disappoints—and it has a confusing interface. Plus, the tuner can bog down a midrange Mac, slowing down all other apps in order to keep the video smooth.

One-Trick Pony Gets Analog Video Onto a Mac

Computers can’t understand the analog waves that make up old VHS tapes and pre-DV camcorder videos. These curvy patterns contradict the binary world of “off” or “on,” so you need to digitize those sources before your Mac can “see” the picture. Pinnacle’s Video Capture for Mac is a fin-shaped box that handles this job—and little else. Plug in an analog video source, and the unit translates it into a 640-x-480-pixel MPEG-4 file your Mac can recognize. It works, but armchair archivists will immediately wish it had a few more features beyond its single trick.

Say you drive your three beautiful children to school every day, and you’re trying to think of a way to get this task done more quickly. You could go for a faster car—say, a Lamborghini. That could get your kids to school in no time—except that you can no longer fit said children into the car, seeing as how it’s a Lamborghini.