I went to NYC for a few weeks recently. It sure was fun to spend my breakfast working furiously at my laptop in various wifi enabled cafes around Brooklyn.
Two that I can reccomend are Gorilla coffee in Park Slope

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and Atlas Cafe in the less hip area of Williamsburg.

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Before my trip I procured a nice new gadget. Its called the H4N handy recorder by Zoom of Japan.
Its not as small as I would like as I prefer to travel light. Literally one carry on was all I had for my laptop, gear, and clothes. But it does everything you could want in an audio gadget, well nearly.
It is primarily a field recorder.
Recording to SD flash memory. I used a handful of 512mb and 1gb chips I had for my canon e320. I plan on picking up some SDHC jobbers in the near future.
It works extremely well as a field recorder. I got some great snippets of subway noises, streetcorner preachers and some kickin tunes of some bands I saw, such as 5 dollar priest and Marcia Ball. In addition to that it can also be used as a plain old 4 track, think Tascam 424MKII. I have yet to explore this option as I have a perfectly good laptop with Twelve Tone/Roland's Sonar 7 producer. Who needs 4 tracks whenyou have unlimited!
This is also where the H4N does its big trick. It's also an audio interface!
I was skeptical of the utilityof this, but it works great in ASIO mode, even in Windows 7!
You can even record from the built in mics straight to Sonar.
Needless to say, this has replaced my blackberry 8320 as my new favorite toy.
If you are ever in NYC and are a camera, video, or audio geek, you sincerly owe it to yourself to stop by B&H. Fry's has nothing on this place for sheer geekery.

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