Quake on the Nokia N810

Zoo Trip

Sunday, Kim, Gwynny and I made a trip to the Cleveland Zoo to visit some of the indoor attractions. We got to visit the Rain Forest and the Cat & Primate Building as well as a few of the outdoor exhibits. Wintertime is a great season to visit the zoo since it is practically empty. Some of the attractions are closed but many of the outdoor animals are more active because of the temperature. Fun was had by all!

More great photos from the trip can be found here.

Doom on the Nokia N810

A short video of Doom running on the Nokia N810.

Canon PowerShot A720 IS

Last weekend we attended a wedding and Kim took along our 2+ year old Nikon Coolpix 4600. I had never really taken many shots with this P+S camera but soon discovered that it's virtually unusable in less than optimal lighting conditions. Kim always complained of this but I chalked some of this up to operator error. :) P+S should mean POS for this old Nikon.

So I decided to research and purchase a new compact digital camera with some of our Christmas cash. I settled on the Canon PowerShot A720 IS for those times when I don't feel like lugging the d70. I hadn't researched compact digital cameras for quite awhile but was blown away by this thing. I originally thought about getting a pocket-sized camera like a Casio EX series or Canon Elph but this PowerShot isn't that much bigger and is packed with features.

This camera has a 8 mp resolution and does up to ISO 1600. It has a 35mm equivalent zoom range of 35-210mm with Canon's Image Stabilizer system. The software allows for aperture, shutter priority and full manual control. It runs on AA's which is a mixed bag. I have a ton of NiMh AA's which is great but flash recycle time isn't that great. Apparently, the li-ion batteries of some of the newer cameras allow for a flash charge time of half of this camera but we all know that built-in flashes suck. I figured the higher ISO and IS are more important. This camera will also work with a small, external flash but it no longer becomes as portable at that point. Oh yeah, it also takes great photos and is fairly quick with virtually no shutter lag. It also has the "face detection" technology that virtually all other cameras have now. Not sure if this is gimmicky or if it really helps enhance portraits yet.

The best part is that I got this locally for only $200. You can find the PowerShot A560 with a shorter zoom, no IS, and 7 mp for under $150 as well and Ken Rockwell loves them. :) Both of these cameras are awesome in the bang for the buck category. I love my Nikon dSLR but Canon seems to have the best pocket digital cameras out there right now.

I'm still blown away by this camera and the $200 price. Now I have to see if it is worth Ebay'ing the old, barely used Nikon.

Steve's Digicam's Review

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Nokia N810 Internet Tablet

I got the new Nokia N810 Internet Tablet and must say that this thing rocks! The processor speed has been bumped up to 400mhz and the browser now completely supports most AJAX and Flash sites including Google Docs and Flickr.  I love my iPhone but the N810 makes an excellent device to carrry around instead of a notebook with it's 800x480 resolution screen and builti-n thumboard..  Add a bluetooth keyboard and it can virtually replace a notebook.



I love my MacBook but let's face the facts. It's hot and has a crappy battery life of 2-3 hours. The N810 is pocketable and you never really shut it off. It just goes to sleep. It does VOIP through Gizmodo and Skype, makes a great IM client with the built-in keyboard and I can remotely access computers with VNC, Remote Desktop and ssh via the terminal application. The built-in thumboard makes applications like terminal and VNC practical now for real work.

Multimedia is not as good as the iPhone. The iPhone has a 600mhz processor and dedicated video subsystem. It can easily playback movies that I have encoded in full DVD resolution for my AppleTV. While the N800 has a higher resolution screen, it lacks the horsepower to properly playback full resolution DVD movies. That being said, properly encoded movies play just fine and the built-in speakers are stereo while the iPhone only does mono. The N800 also can access the Rhapsody "all you can eat" music service wirelessly. You can't download music from the site onto the device but you can queue up songs from you library and stream them just fine.

The N810 also includes a built-in GPS chip and has WayPoint navigation software built-in. This software is less than stellar but you can download and install Maemo Mapper for free. It also comes bundled with a car cradle and stand for use as a car navigation system making this a very nice car computer. Time will tell if developers capitalize on the built-in GPS for other applications.

Overall, the N810 is an excellent device with great build quality. It's another stellar device from Nokia. I wish they would market this device differently. Calling this an "Internet Tablet" is misleading. This is a full-blown pocketable computer running LInux.

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Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard Bugs

Well, Leopard finally arrived and there are some really cool features packed in. It definitely blows away Vista and I'm amazed at what Apple can churn out. Unfortunately, there are some glaring bugs in this version. Some of the new features just don't seem to work at all. Here is a partial list:

- Windows shares just don't show up in Finder as advertised.

- Can't change the Windows network name in system preferences. Whatever I put in there is not saved at all.

- "Back to My Mac" feature just does not work even with their recommended router. 

- Time Machine seems buggy and there is a "progress" window that you just can't get rid of. I thought this was all handled in the background?

- iChat quit on my forcing a reboot that led to non-working WiFi that required an AP Extreme reboot as well as a 2nd MacBook reboot.

More to come...

 

Thinking Different

Perhaps people experience a mid-life crisis when they discover the truth. Life is nothing as well as everything. You can reboot your life at any time. Escape the slavery and free your mind. You have all of the power in the world. Use it.

We Are Living in a Matrix

I realize that there is probably a ton of misinformation in the Zeitgeist movie but I believe the underlying premise. We are all slaves to this system. Slaves to "the matrix" mankind has created. Slaves to debt, slaves to media, slaves to religion...

You can break free. Take the red pill.

Latest Project

I have a Kill-A-Watt power meter coming today from New Egg. I've got way too much crap on 24x7 sucking down juice and want to meter that appropriately. I got a new logic board battery for my PowerMac to allow it to sleep again so I don't have to run it 24x7. Perhaps I can use WOL to bring it up remotely as well. My RAID-5 Linux box seems like overkill. I really don't need the RAID-5 protection since it's mainly just a backup disk. I want a machine that provides NAS, ssh tunneling, and perhaps iTunes serving. I'm thinking of just using the Mini-ITX PC that was my media computer. I'll connect 1 gb of disk to it via usb. It's small enough to fit in my stereo stand that I use as a network rack. Unfortunately, I'll have to run XP. I'd much rather run Linux on it for many reasons but using it as an iTunes server is key.

The best thing would be to use a Mac Mini as a server but I don't want to spend the cash right now. It could replace the PowerMac G4, Mini-ITX PC and the Linux RAID server. Perhaps I'll keep my eye out on Ebay.

iMovie 08 Not As Bad As First Thought

I have nearly finished editing my first video in iMovie 08 and there are more than a couple of things that I like about it. Unfortunately, it is definitely a version one product and needs quite a bit of improvement. First of all, the skimming feature really makes editing a breeze. Everything you do is nondestructive. This is something that I've wanted in iMovie for a long time. The audio editing is terrible to non-existent. Even changing the volume in multiple clips is quite a chore.

I've seen some complaints that iMovie is unstable but that is not my impression at all. In fact, it seems much more responsive than 06 ever was. iMovie 06 used to always pinwheel no matter which Mac I was running it on. I'm hoping that we some updates to this program over the course of the year. I'd hate to have to wait another year for more features to be added to flesh this thing out.

iMovie 08 Immediate Impressions

I'm about to turn in for the night but I've played a bit with iMovie
08. After our mini-dv camcorder bit the dust, I picked up a Sanyo
Xacti C6 digital MPEG-4 camcorder (damn you Adam Curry!) and I have
not made a DVD since. I have moved on to posting to Google Video. I
usually avoid YouTube because of the size restrictions. That said, my
initial impression is that iMovie 08 is geared more towards web video
publishing. After all there is no iDVD integration. I think the
writing is on the wall for home-made DVD's. Burning DVD's is time
consuming and wasteful to say the least.

Now after playing with this for awhile I must say that I'm lost. I
guess I'll have to go over the tutorials when I have a bit more time.
It's not at all intuitive.

Restarting this blog

So, I'm redoing my website in iWeb 08 and trying to bring this blog back to life. I was using Tumblr as a blog but have decided to put my original posts on this site. They will still be aggregated at Tumblr.

I was able to throw together a basic iWeb site very quickly that looks decent. I just don't have the time nor the inclination to develop anything too elaborate or customized at this time. My previous homepage was done with Google's fee page editor but thought it really looked bad. This new look is much better.

Fascinating High Res Galactic Imagery

Stunning pictures of galaxies and nebulae. Many of the photographs are large enough to use as backgrounds for all but the largest monitors.

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'Bride' Stripped Bare

Cool article about the digital gear and process used to make the animated move "The Corpse Bride".

David Weiss: A Tour of Microsoft's Mac Lab

David Weiss: A Tour of Microsoft's Mac Lab

Geek to Live: Develop your (digital) photographic memory

Great ideas for using your camera phone + flickr to record and catalog things other than just snapshots.

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Iraq War TImeline

Here is a timeline that I found documenting the current conflict in Iraq. On May 1, 2006, it will have been 3 years since Bush declared "mission accomplished" in a military flightsuit abord the USS Lincoln.

ILM’s state-of-the-art (storage) studio

Industrial Light & Magic uses high-speed NAS servers with a distributed file system, 10gb/sec Ethernet, and a 5000-node renderfarm to store and move 170tb of content.

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Apple's Mac Os X 10.5 Leopard Will Probably Run Windows!

Rumors have been brewing that Jobs and co. are taking steps toward allowing Windows apps to run on Macs. Now evidence has surfaced that Apple has begun the process toward doing just that!

Is this the beginning of the end for Microsoft's juggernaut 95% market share?

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Babies decide what words to learn

Like teenagers, babies don't much care what their parents say.

Though they are learning words at 10 months old, infants tend to grasp the names of objects that interest them rather than whatever the speaker thinks is important, a new study has found.

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