Kindle Fire
Need I say anything?
Olympus VN-8100PC Digital Voice Recorder
Most of my better ideas - whether they're ideas for stories, concepts or papers - occur when I least expect them to. Of course, I could carry a notepad around, but that's just too tedious. A voice recorder should solve the problem, I'm thinking, if I don't care about being seen in public animatedly talking to a stick. (Couldn't I just use my smartphone? Sure, but a voice recorder is much more powerful, could be used in other scenarios, and generally appeases my personal dislike of multi-purpose non-electrical devices.)
Rigol DS1052E 50 MHz Digital Oscilloscope (2 channels + USB storage + 1 GSa/s sampling)
I have a thing for circuit modeling, analysis and lots of tinkering-around-with-function-generators. Anyone who's used an oscilloscope for any amount of time cannot find fiddling with it not fun. Then again, $400 is a high price to pay for it. What'd I use it for? Well, troubleshooting, signal probing, circuit analysis, study Fourier transforms and to put together my own designs for various electronic applications.
For similar purposes, I'd like the following as well.
Extech EX330 Autoranging Multimeter
Radio-frequency Generator
Resistance and Conformity in the Third Reich, Martyn Housden
This seems to be a good book that sums up the popular resistance to Nazism in Germany during the course of the Second World War (1939-1945) as well as details the effect that the ideological movement had on daily life at the time. A very long-lasting and curious obsession of mine has been the Second World War, and I've covered it in "phases" over the years. First came the weaponry, then the geopolitics, then the strategies, then the ideologies that drove various leaders, and now, the time has come for me to understand the lives of those who resisted the Nazis.
Foyle's Philavery: A Treasury of Unusual Words, Christopher Foyle
There's no particular reason in wanting to read this book but the hilarity of it all when these unusual words are used well. And, of course, there's the bit about wanting to know weird stuff.
Zeikos ZE-HC36 Medium Hard Case
I like my stuff to be safe, immune to all kinds of clumsiness (most importantly mine), and I'd like to exude the impeccability of a man who likes his stuff to be safe. (Yes, I can be quite nervous.)
Celestron 44302-A Deluxe Handheld Digital Microscope (2MP)
Don't tell me you weren't thrilled when you first watched a microorganism under a microscope, and don't tell me that the more you saw, the less you were fascinated about life at such small scales. What makes such a tool even more fun to use is that it's only an intermediary object: by allowing me to magnify things by 150x, I'm only limited by my own imagination to delve deeper into the world around me. Most of the things we know in this universe is, in one way or another, a mimicry of a natural process, and a microscope makes the principles behind these simple processes visible to the naked eye.
MagnaLight IR LED Emitter Bar (12W, 4 LED, 80' x 80' Beam, 9-42 VDC)
Versatile mounting and power options, wide-ass 850-940 nm beam, limited spread/spillage, high durability, heat reduction. *Whistle* Again, $200 is a lot of money to spend on a source of infrared radiation but given the amount of convenience this thing provides, I could build a whole range of censors without breaking sweat. Throw in some customized interfaces and the Microsoft Robotics Studio- voila! If only the people who pulled the purse strings took the "no price on happiness" idea a little too seriously.
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