Good and bad.

The Olympus 9-18mm MFT lens for my Panasonic G1 is a joy to use, small, light and sharp. Add in my custom distortion correction profiles and you have a cracker of an ultra-wide zoom at a very reasonable price.

After a poor start with the original AppleTV (another Apple Toaster design, running dangerously hot) the second generation AppleTV gets it right and is a tremendous tool for showing your photographs on any big screen TV you connect it to. At $99, with included remote, it’s a bargain.

And finally, if you crave screen area as much as I do, try the Newer Technology USB to DVI adapter which allows you to add up to four displays to your OS X computer. It doesn’t support Quartz rendering (meaning some of the latest screen savers default to black) and does not permit screenshots, but other than that it’s proving to be a powerful addition to my desktop HackPro, which now sports no fewer than three displays.

But it would be disingenuous to write a piece like this without mentioning two genuine stinkers.

One is, by a considerable margin, the worst piece of hardware I have used in a decade, the Kindle. Poorly made, designed by a committee seemingly totally ignorant of the word ‘ergonomics’ and faulty in just about every way imaginable. It simply defies understanding why this piece of garbage sells at all. Sure, you save a few dollars compared to an iPad but then you could save more by not buying rubbish in the first place.

And finally, let’s not forget the Fruit Company which has made some of the least reliable hardware in the history of computing. Yes, that would be Apple. My most heavily used OS X machine is my HackPro simply because I cannot risk making my living on an Apple desktop. My MacBook Air is too new to permit any quality judgements, though the iPad with its cool running A4 CPU augurs well. But I have such an awful history with Apple’s awful hardware that I’m not about to say anything good about the reliability of the company’s computers; I use Macs rather than PCs primarily because of the robust OS and applications they run. Check back here one year hence to see if the iPad and MBA finally start bringing me around on the issue of reliability and heat management.

The best reason to use Apple’s awful hardware.