I'd recommend the Canon Powershot S10. I just bought one off ebay and it pretty cool. Not the quickest, but you can put in quick shutter mode. Digital Cameras are hard to shop for though. So many out there. Try activebuyersguide.com.

I'm telling ya, go for the nomad II player. There's always that discman looking thing that holds something insane like 6 gigs of songs(I think it's called the nomad jukebox) but that's just insane. First of all, do you actually think you'd actually be able to efficiently navigate through 6 gigs of MP3s on a 1 inch LCD...hell no. Secondly, that things huge, just as big and heavy as a discman, If you don't mind lugging it around with you then it's not a big deal, but go for something small and compact. The 32 MB I had was defnitely not enough to keep me happy, however, I think a 64MB card would probably do, and a 128 card would definitely do. Also, the nomad lets you listen to other compressions beside *.mp3. If you're listening to *.wma files on a 64 MB card that's 2 hours of music. Shit, that's all I'd ever need. I was very pleased with the player I had, just waiting for another one to come up on auction.

easybuy2000.com has a thing called MPTrip that plays regular music CDs and CDs of MP3s... and it's under $100

Don't want moving parts.

The "no moving parts" thing isn't all it's cracked up to be. I get awesome battery life on my Rio 300 (64mb), but the damned thing resets if you give it a good knock. No, it's never ever skipped, but it resets sometimes. Annoying as hell.

canoscan fb 620p isn't too shabby...

Here's a review I got off of amazon, thought it might help ya out. It's for the the Nomad II mp3 player. I'd recommend you go read some of the others, this is one of the lower ratings. But, it was too damn funny to not post :-)

Reviewer: a football music fan! from Washington State!
Ok well I don't really know about mP3 players but I don't like how it shuts down if your idle for 1-10 mins. Like if your listening to it and have in your pocket or something it will shut off so you have to get it out and turn it back on and all that crap. Also If you want to change something on the settings the radio/mp3s turn off if your listening to them. The flash card is also hard to take out with the battery in. One more thing -- the headphone look like they are for a little kid! they are really small even though they go on the back of your head. it's kinda weird, I had to use some old ones. But other than those ... 4 things it's great. I mean the radio and voice recorder make up for some the bad stuff. I mean it's great! You can record up to 4 hours! that's cool! Also it was very easy to use/setup. But this is my only mp3 player and first so i dont really know that much about them so .. yeah! k bye!

I'm partial to the Sony memory-stick player, myself. It's not the cheapest around, but since I have a Vaio laptop with a memory stick slot, it's rather convenient... If you'd like, I could show you mine.

I've seen them in pictures before... tiny! The Sony Aibo dogs take them, their cameras take them, their laptops ... Sony is good at defining technologies and using it all across their product line.

Too bad they're so expensive and so small, though. I believe 32 or maybe 64 mb are the largest size they're available in? That was awhile ago, though. What are they up to now?

Still 64MB AFAIK, although I see no reason they wouldn't use more going forward.

only 40 mb though... 64 mb is the MINIMUM I'd deal with per card... on album is usually 64 mb by itself. (Beastie Boys' Hello Nasty is 65 mb, for instance...)

ATRAC is an open standard. There are many converters for MP3 to ATRAC formats around. I wrote my own converter in an afternoon, and use it to convert my MP3s to ATRACs under BSD/OS 4.1, and then write them to the stick writer on my Vaio.

That said, you're right, it's not an MP3 player per se, but it's still a very nice little product.

I'm curious ... why do you use BSD/OS 4.1, if you don't mind my asking?

A few reasons:

1) I have the source code, and have done extensive work on it,

2) My research projects involve my modifying a kernel predicated on BSDI code in obscene ways. What better way to test said obscenities than to run it yourself?

3) It gives me something to play with; also I can point the finger directly at myself or my co-workers when something in the kernel blows up. It's never "damn those MS @#$@s" or "why's linux trying to shove everyone and their dog into kernelspace."

4) Familiarity.

Very good reasons.

I took an operating systems course and enjoyed it quite a bit.

How hard to you find to port things to BSD/OS? How activity is the community?

Well, I should have made one thing clear earlier: I work for a company which makes its own real-time embedded network operating system. It's distantly derived from BSD/OS, but we've taken great pains to ensure complete compatibility, at least with userland apps, and iBCS2 compliance.

It's that OS that I speak of. It's certainly something I do with a passion. I'm involved in the lower level stuff usually - drivers, stack optimizations for packet flow, and vm/paging/scheduling - though we strive to eliminate overspecialization.

And we're very active indeed in developing our OS. It's proprietary, which is something sadly needed in order to ensure market share (there are some really big entities in this area), but the answer to how hard it is to port code to BSD/OS and to our OS is "it depends."

If the (userland) code's been written with some semblance of POSIX.1 or POSIX.4, it's fairly trivial. Even drivers are easy to port over if the spec is clear. The problem is when people get too hacky. (e.g. a certain project which emulates concurrency in userland threads by setjmp()/longjmp() across "virtual-concurrent-control-threads.")

At any rate, this is probably not the right forum to get into this in gory detail. We should meet up some time and generally geek out.

Interesting.

Yes, a geek out is definitely in order.

Thought I might as well look around at some other players before I bought another one. The eGo player seems to get some great reviews and sounds pretty cool. 96 MB memory, also, takes Flash memory cards. Take a look.

As far as scanners go, I have a Microtek SlimScan C6. It's pretty nice, though I'm sure there is a lot better. The good thing, though, is that it is extremely cheap. When I got it, it was only around 100 bucks...and it gets what I need out of a scanner done. Another good thing, as the name implies, it is really small and fits in a pretty small space conveniently.

I've got an extra scanner I've never even taken out of the box. I don't know what kind it is..I'll have to check. You can have it if you want.

One of my housemate's dad gave me one so I'm cool... thanks, though. :-)

Besides, shipping things like that is a hassle.