Lifehacker has a nice look at how to Turn Your Point-and-Shoot into a Super-Camera using the CHDK hack. It's a non-destructive hack to turn on a bunch of features on your Canon camera. You can hit the download page on their wiki to get a list of supported cameras, or hit the in brief page to get more info. As usual LifeHacker does a great job of boiling it down.
Some Pentax K20D porn for you photogs in the audience who shoot pentax (probably only me I figure). Someone posted the Pop Photo K20D review - March 2008 over in the DPReview forums.
I really wish I could understand the complaints about the high ISO performance. I shoot at max 1600 and in that I know that the pictures will not be useful for much more than the web, and people are bitching that the performance at 3200 is "irritating". Maybe I'm just used to "bad" performing old cameras and figure photography should be done in good light. Improved AF in low light performance would be great, I was bitching about slow autofocus last night with my *ist-D. I presume that the K10D, and of course the K20D is much better though.
Here's another article with some more news.
Think your EEEPC is a bit light on addons like USB ports, bluetooth, or storage? Check out the Eee PC Internal Upgrades page that my buddy Brian sent over. Wow, some dedicated hardware hackers out there....
Anyone interested in how SDD (Solid State Disk) compares to HDD (Hard Disk Drive) can check out this (albeit biased) comparision of Samsung SSD vs HDD. Although it's done by a company whose object is obviously trying to sell SDD technology, their comparison appears pretty simple... two computers which look exactly the same, two fingers click the power button and time the startup time, etc etc.
This of course relates to the announcment yesterday from MacWorld of the MacBook Air.
LinuxHardware.org has a nice look at the Intel Core 2 "Penryn" and Linux including what projects will see improvements, and which won't.
Anyone want to get me a really great birthday present? Or need a bit of spare hard drive space for music, movies, porn, or (if you must) real data? If so, check out the Apple Xserve RAID 7TB that's on sale on eBay. If you live in the UK mainland you even get free shipping.
A super-sexy demo of the Fusion IO drive. 640G solid state drive, 800mb/s read, 600mb/s write.
Gimme!
Coding Horror has a great article on Choosing Dual or Quad Core. Nicely done because it's simple, basically a list of screenshots of the CPU meter playing various games and doing various apps, and letting you know how much improvement you get if you go from a dual core to a quad core (something I've been thinking about).
Hint: not worth it unless all you do is run either rendering software (POV-Ray) or benchmark apps. The list of apps isn't huge either, at least, it didn't include my Battlefield 2142 crack. Interesting to see that about half the the apps tested actually lost performance from 2-4 cores.
Gizmodo has a Hands On D3 and D300 Impressions (the latest Nikon digital SLRs) from a Nikon event. Both cameras are 12mp cameras, the D300 being APS sensor size with 5fps and the D3 being a full frame body with 9fps. Awhoooga!
...when I fired the D3 on burst mode, I felt like Arnold firing the minigun in T2 between the rapid clacking and the weight.
Somehow my 6mp 2fps Pentax *ist-D is starting to feel very, very wimpy :(
Very cool, this would be (almost) perfect as a little router / nat box... the fit-PC only draws 3-5 watts of power, is the size of a paperback, and still has enough power to be a decent system. The ONLY addition I'd want is a third NIC to allow me to use dual WAN connections. Still, pretty good for under $300 right?
Any Pentax users rejoice that after a Meeting With PENTAX there is news of new cameras and lenses.
There will be two (2) you heard it, at least two new DSLR's coming out in the Fall, that will not conflict with the K100 or the K10D!
Now these Multi Display Mac Setups have given me a serious woody. 1x30" and 2x23"?!?! I could deal with that easily enough I think :)
More for me than anyone, here's reviews of Five FM transmitters for iPods and personal players.
Man, Top Gear is cool. So for a crash test they decided not to show you the test footage but instead, well, see if the new Renault Megane (a british car) handles crashes in real world situations. So in this video they put a guy in a car and crash it at 30mph... no special precautions, helmet, anything. Super cool, and hell, I'd buy a Megane if it was available in Canada right now. Nothing like putting your money where your mouth is where safety is concerned :) I'd hate to be the guy making that call to Renault about the car they sent over (not to be crashed) :)
O'Reilly has a link to a good deal on a CF card, 16GB CF Card for $159. Of course, putting 16G of images on a CF card is a dangerous thing to do (all your eggs in a basket anyone?), it's still a great deal.
Well, the Optimus Keyboard Got a Price Tag of $1500. Ugh. Didn't part of the original hype include a "it'll be expensive, but no more than that of a good cell phone"? Didn't realize they were including the hollywood diamond encrusted versions!
For the two or three of you who does not know what I am talking about, the Optimus concept computer keyboard has a small OLED display in every single key, allowing the user to customize to whatever program or alphabet he is using.
It'd be interesting to compare the pre-and post promises. The images in the linked article look like the original renderings, whereas I thought that the actual keyboard was now with keys all the same size and only black and white. Anyone know or have time to dig that up?
Post on a PS3 board about HDMI and an answer to the question of the difference between a $10 HDMI cable and a $150 HDMI cable. This post from someone who claims to "live and breath digital and analog signals every day" to help people understand HDMI cables.
That answer is, "No, an expensive HDMI cable will make NO difference in the quality of your picture OR sound"
I'm sure the audiophiles will be up in arms about it, but that is probably just because they feel silly for paying $150 for cables and their $20 diamond studded connectors :)
Coding horror has good info on Mouse DPI and USB Polling Rate and how to change them.
Holy crap... looking through the worklog on HardForums and found the worklog for Project: Galaxy 4.0, including this post with pictures. Look at all those SATA drives. Can't find in the thread what size they are, but 30 x (the potential of) 750G = 22TB. Wow. Wish I had that disposable income :)
Found some good links on RAID setup and options. In essence it says that RAID-5 (which this server is built on) isn't the way to go, and RAID1 is way better (even though you lose disk space). I'm now having to re-think my new desktop install dangit!
Links are:
Pentaxlife points to the new lens roadmap for all you pentax (D)SLR users out there. Exciting for me is the 60-250/F4 and nthe 200/F2.8. Interested also in the differences in quality and size between the DA16-45/F4 (which I have now) and the upcoming DA* 16-50/F2.8 (probably really expensive though.
Sad though there still isn't an "all around" walk around lens of 20-150 or so. Breaking it up at 45-60 (67-90 @ 35mm) is just a bit too close to a range that you'd use all the time. Of course, my dream lens of 10-300/F1.4 in a pancake profile is probably still a ways off :)
Stefan Didak's Home Office. Wow. I want. Rather, I want mine to be that clean. Make sure you check out the FAQ as well :) The comments are great as well:
UNHOLLY BALLS OF SATAN!!!!....I just wet myself.
Whoah, I guess Everything I Know About Disks Is Wrong! At least with my constant battles with hardware here on the good 'ol UFies box (all still good touch wood) I know that MTBF (mean time before failure) is more like MTBIARITTF (mean time before it's a really inconvenient time to fail) :) Good abstract of this paper from this slashdot article.
On the trail of my own hardware and noise issues I found a link on Gizmodo which promises to Banishes That Noisy PC to a Faraway Closet. Basically it allows you to use a computer that's up to 250 meters away. More details.
Looks like the Apple keynote is now done, and The Apple iPhone is real. A combination full screen video iPod, phone and internet communicator device (has wifi, web browsing, etc). Full screen touch screen, system runs OS/X and has all the sexyness that Apple brings to not only hardware and software. Everything it runs is like the desktop app as far as contacts, safari, ichat (for sms messages), etc. Visual voicemail, imap, push imap, google maps, etc.
Dana's comment is that he has a smartphone already and half the stuff that the iPhone does doesn't really matter (80/20 rule). I say we'll see. The first iPod that was introduced was poo-pooed as well as being useless and no one would ever use one. Personally I am confident in Apple's ability to create a market.
They also changed their name to Apple Inc, from Apple Computers Inc. Change of focus maybe? Something more ominous?
Not sure if this Enemy Territory: Quake Wars Movie will compel me to dump my just-purchased GeForce 7950 GT for the just-released 8800 monster, but dang, it does look good doesn't it? Personally I can't wait for the niftyness of ET:QW to arrive, how about you? Old ET fans, time to start revving up your engines!
So what does anyone think of these Five Zune TV Spots? They are a bit reminiscent of the XBox 360 water balloon fight ads, all ending with "Find your audience".
Personally they are a miss for me. I honestly zone out because there's no focus or anything to draw me in or make me watch all the way to the money shot. Most of the commercials really have nothing to do with the player or any advantages it has. The first three basically are random shots of people socializing in a park, with some of them listening to generic looking mp3 players as a complete aside (to my eyes). The features that the Zune has that set it apart (large screen for video, wifi, landscape mode, comes in black, xbox integration, "social networking", etc) aren't mentioned, or highlighted. In fact, in watching the five spots, other than it's use for listening to music, I saw only one quick reference to watching videos (I think, it was a quick shot of someone turning it sideways, perhaps a reference to the landscape video mode) and perhaps a reference to the filesharing abilities by showing two zunes sitting beside each other.
The videos are very... "amateur looking". Not as if they weren't done professionally of course, but that stylized look. Definately focusing on the social aspects rather than the technology itself (maybe on purpose?).
Compare this to the iPod ads. They are a lot simpler, concentrating on the hardware itself and the enjoyment of music, or at least that's how I interpret it. Following the Apple simplistic style I particularily think that this U2 Video iPod ad is well done. A simple music video, and it just pulls out to show it's playing on an iPod, saying a lot.
Of course, I have a feeling most of the Zune marketing has been the grassroots kind that's over at ZuneInsider.
Anyway, I'm interested to hear what others think about the Zune marketing so far.
So right on schedule, two days after I order my first dual core computer, quad cores are released (or at least announced to release early November. Luckily, quad-core is overkill!
Well that makes me feel better!
Gizmodo has a fondle of the GeForce 8800GTX. What a monster this thing is. A Direct-X 10 (Vista) based car. They say they aren't sure if the pics are faked or not, but the specs say 768mb of DDR4 RAM, water/fan cooler, and what looks like 4 separate power connectors. Oh, and about 3 feet long (ok, maybe only one).
If you don't think this should be a problem, feel free to contibute via the paypal link though!
Actually my XP2600+ seems to run it just fine, but I'm sure it could be even better....
Funnily enough, the image of the hard drives looks similar to the ufies box full of drives.
Available in 3 different sizes, 45", 51", and 57" inches, with resolutions up to 3840 x 1024 pixels, 's new Cinerama Displays are the world's largest and most compelling personal imaging devices ever designed.The resolution seems a little low for a 45", but hey, I won't toss it off my desk for eating crackers over my keyboard. The main thing I like is the (almost) elimination of the seam between the monitors, which is the one thing that I don't like about my dual monitor set up.
While drinking certain dark beers in the sun, I came to think about how to keep the beer cold until I finished it. Normally this isn't a big problem as I usually finish them before they get warm, but on really hot days this can be a problem.
