This year I decided to invest some money in new gear, especially in the computing side. My tablet was way due to be replaced, I had a 2.5 years old Nexus 7, which was great a the begin, but in the past few months it became extremely slow, and the power/wake up button didn't work well anymore, and I decided to replace it.
I was undecided between an iPad Air and the new Nexus 9, the iPad would works nicely with my Macs, but at the end I opted for the Google tablet, as I had an android tablet for a long time and I do really like that OS, also the lower pricetag and the better specs of the Nexus 9 did play a part on my decision.

When I left my previous job, I had to give back the laptop I had as it was the company laptop, to be honest I didn't needed a big and powerful laptop, as the times when I need it is mostly when I travel, or when I want to work on the couch for coding or writing blog articles like this one, so as to be decently fast, but not a proper work horse for heavy Photoshop duties, as I already have a Mac Mini with 16GB of ram and an i7 @ 2.3Ghz, so after a few weeks looking at the Apple Store, in the refurbished section, until I saw the computer I'm using now to write this article, a nice Macbook Air 13 with 8GB of ram, 256GB SSD Drive, and an i7 @ 1.7Ghz processor. It's the previous generation, but to be honest I don't care, especially because it's just 100Mhz slower, but in this way I nearly saved 300 euro, and the computer when arrives to you it's practically new as Apple replace the battery and give a new hand of paint or they replace the case completely, so if you are not that fuzzy the refurbished mac store is the place to go if you want to buy an Apple computer.

Then a few days ago, while travelling back home to Italy for Xmas, I popped into Dixons Travels, a chain you can find in many airports in Europe, I pass in their shops everytime I'm at the airport, not because I always want to buy anything, but just to pass some time while waiting for my flight, but last time, while watching for cameras, I've noticed a lens that I wanted to buy from a while, the Fuji XF 35mm f/1.4 R, one of the very first lenses that fuji did for their X-Mount cameras, and I saw the price was insanely low, only €319, while generally in any shops in Dublin the same lens costs around €550, which is quite a lot, and an used one is around €400. I still not sure if that price it was an error by someone in the shop, but I couldn't miss the chance and I bought it straight away.
I've used this lens in the past few days, I didn't shoot anything special apart from cats and landscapes around my home, but so far I'm very happy with that lens, yeah the AF it's not a Formula 1 car, but it's decent, and optically it seems to be a very good lens, but I'll wait a while and a few hundreds shots before I can say if it's good or not, so expect a review at some stage in the near future :-)