Roberto Machorro

After a while of having the XACT Visor (read my review about it), I was ready for something more. Since I liked the Visor’s quality, I went back to XACT’s website and took a look. I found the Replay (XTR8CK) and when I saw the features and the price I was happy as can be. I bought a package at Costco that for $119.00 got you the radio with the home and car kit.
The major deal about the Replay is that you can pause, rewind and forward (once you have something in memory) a live broadcast. Kind of like a TiVo / DVR. This is great when you are listening to a cool song and want to hear it again, or when you get interrupted in the middle of a show and don’t want to miss a thing. And since the title/artist of a song/show are stored, you can actually pick from a menu the last 45 mins worth of programming. On the downside (and this applies to live programming with a TiVo as well), when you flip a channel, you loose the recorded stuff.
A feature that isn’t mentioned much - but I thought it was also pretty awesome - was that you can store the name of your favourite artists, songs or sports team. When one of those favourites come on (or a game is about to start), then you are notified about it and have the option to change channel and listen to it. You can store up to 20 songs/artists and 1 favourite sports team (if they increase this number to 2 NFL, 2 college football, 2 MLB and 2 NBA we are rockin’!).
The screen is clean and clear, it has a blue back-light LCD display that you can adjust brightness and contrast to. It’s big enough to hold the current channel number, name, artist/song, category, time, band and signal strength. All without crowding the area.
I found it pretty interesting that you can view the signal strength of the satellite and terrestrial reception. Usually if you are at less than 30% for both, you are out of coverage.
There are 30 slots for memory presets, divided into 3 bands. But I found that I rarely use that, since it’s easier to enter the channel number directly or search by broadcast category.
On the downside (and this may not affect everybody), the buttons are a bit small. My clunky fat fingers have issues with the buttons on the actual device, but the remote saves the day, it’s so well done and comfortable that I use it all the time, in the car, office and home.
Since I got the home kit, I have to throw in that the desk stand is very stylish and actually looks nice on a desk with the radio. So far I’m happy with the purchase and it’ll probably stay that way until the Stiletto comes out.

On father’s day my wife and kids gave me a XACT Visor, which is a plug and play for Sirius. I’m loving every minute of that thing! I listen to it on my close to 90 mins. work commute (both ways) and while at work. For a long time I had compared Sirius and XM, in my opinion XM has the best devices for the best price, but Sirius has the best programming as far as music material, news & talk shows (can’t beat having Bubba The Love Sponge, Playboy Radio and Howard Stern!). Plus for the serious side, there’s two NPR (National Public Radio) exclusive channels, E! and the Discovery Channel. Their comedy channels are great and I can’t get enough of Court TV and Radio Classics (Twilight Zone, etc). The Visor costs about $49.99 and then you have to pay a monthly fee of $14.95 (includes tax) a month, plus a one time sign-up fee of $12.00. There’s several payment plans and options. For now, I’m on monthly but will probably switch to the two year plan. On an average weekday, I listen to it about 14 hours a day (I’ve got kits for the office, home and car) OK, I’ll stop now, before I start sounding like an Ad for Sirius… Go get one!

Everything is now about the community when it comes to the Internet. And for a long time del.icio.us was bringing together the world of bookmarks. However, I never thought that it looked that good (yes, UI matters), I also wasn’t able to actually store some other stuff I wanted to bookmark (like code snippets - think post it here). I also tried Yahoo Bookmarks, I’ll spare you the pain of that disaster. So now I’m using Markaboo and I’m very happy, it’s missing some stuff (like multi-level tag browsing and notifications when someone comments on a link) but it’s none critical enough that now I have all my junk in there and use it on a daily basis.