This Changes Everything

Wired has a great article this month about the RED digital movie camera designed by a team assembled by Jim Jannard, the founder of Oakley. It's insanely affordable ($17.5K for a professional movie camera), comes very close to film quality, and outputs in an easy-to-edit digital format. Moreover, it even handles focus similarly to film, allowing striking photography. Check out this sample:


BIKER teaser from Macgregor on Vimeo.

But what I'm even more excited about is a DSLR version that is supposedly in the works. It bodes well for our future if one day consumers can own a camera such as this. It could make our digicam shots today look like Polaroids by comparison. Given that RED is releasing a $3000 camcorder version of the RED One next year, maybe that day will be here sooner.

Sorry, we're out of Beverly

Here's news about the upcoming 100-flavor soda stations (which will make ordering a Coke in the South even more interesting since all soda is known as Coke). Brings back two fond memories: first, mixing Suicides at 7-Eleven: combining all flavors of fountain drinks (or Slurpees or both) in the same cup. Second: taking relatives and guests to The World of Coca-Cola and innocently getting them to try a healthy sample of Beverly from in the sampling room.

Sail-van Concept

Normally, I usually say, "WTF were they thinking?" when I see concept cars at auto shows. But in the case of the VW Caddy Topos Sail, I'm in love. The wood deck may not be practical (like having to recline on a grimy, bird- and bug-stained roof or keeping the neighborhood kids and my co-workers off of it), but it's strangely enticing. Must...have...impractical, gimmicky Eurovan...just for the teak deck with railing.

(Bleep)ing Stripped PS3 Screws!

Armed with a new 320GB Hitachi drive, a small Phillips screwdriver, and a great step-by-step guide, I went about upgrading the 60GB Seagate Momentus 5400.2 hard drive in my Playstation 3. What should have been a 4-minute hardware swap ended up being more like 20 minutes thanks to a stripped screw on the drive carrier.

Yes, the guide warned that the screws are easy to strip, but I think these screws were easier to strip than 20-year old paint (or use your imagination). As careful as I was, one of them stripped with only slight pressure. I ended up using a pair of pliers to grip the sides of the screwhead to loosen it. If that didn't work, I would have had to break out the rotary tool to cut the damn thing off.

Aside from the screw, the upgrade was fast and easy, including the backup, restore, and formatting. My PS3 now has a ton of space and an empty partition for Yellow Dog Linux (grumble about the 10GB fixed partition size limitation--gotta either pick 10GB for one OS and the other gets the rest of the drive).

Anyway, given the tons of money in components that the PS3 has, you'd think Sony would have spent, oh, a few more cents on some hardier screws on the only user replaceable part in the unit.

Let's See How Far We've Come

It's been about 15 years since I started working with laptops, and I started thinking about how far technology as come since ThinkPads I was setting up and servicing back in the early 90's and it's descendant, low-end, netbook of today:

	IBM ThinkPad 700 (1992)	Lenovo IdeaPad S10 (2008)	Percent Change
Processor	25MHz IBM 486 SLC	1.6GHz Intel Atom	+6,400%
Std. Memory	4MB	512MB	+1,280%
Hard Disk	80MB	80GB	+1,000%
Screen	9.5" monochrome, 640x480	10.2" color, 1024x600	infinite ;-)
Weight	7.5 lbs.	2.4 lbs.	-68%
List Price	$4,000	$429	-89%

Stats from Ken Polsson's Chronology of IBM Personal Computers and from Lenovo's S10 press release

Amazing stuff!

Vancouver or London?

As I watch the Olympic Closing Ceremony--incidentally, not nearly as amazing as the Opening one despite Beckham and Jackie Chan--I think my wife and I have decided to try to make it to one of the upcoming Olympics. So that's either the Winter Games in 2010 or the Summer Games in 2012. It will probably be Vancouver, since we're closer and it holds more appeal to us than London.

Some of my fondest memories are from attending the '96 games in Atlanta, where I saw the torch relay, watched USA baseball and basketball, and hung out in the Centennial Olympic Park and traded pins. So I really hope it will work out that we can get there.

PixelJunk Eden

Not that the PS3 needs more eye candy, but a title that has that and more is PixelJunk Eden. A download title from the PlayStation Store, it's a gorgeous puzzle platformer with a great techno/chillout soundtrack. It's kind of hard to describe but IGN and 1Up have done a good job explaining the premise of the game.

I've downloaded the demo, and as soon as I get my PS3's hard drive upgraded, it will be the first downloadable title that I'll buy. Even the wife was fascinated by Eden, and she's not really into console or action games. Check out a video of the action to get an idea why it is such a unique title--and a bargain at $10.

My Economic Stimulus

It's been an expensive week for me, but happily, on discretionary purchases. Among them:

• Seagate 120GB Freeagent Go (2.5" USB 2.0 external drive) [EDIT: Seagate cancelled the order--must have been a price mistake or out of clearance stock]
• Hitachi TravelStar 2.5" 320GB SATA internal drive (to upgrade my PS3's hard drive)
• Lenovo IdeaPad S10 netbook, in red
• A few A/V cables from my trusty cable source, Monoprice
• Some overpriced photos from my cousin's wedding ($6 for a 4x6!)

I'll probably have buyer's remorse once I get my credit card statement, but I'm a sucker for a good deal, wedding photos not withstanding. And there's still one more day left in the week, and it comes with newspaper ad circulars...stay tuned.

Lightning at Sunset

I have a new desktop wallpaper: Lightning at Sunset by Sam Javanrouh. Aside from being a great photo technically, the detail, colors, and the lightning make it a fantastic wallpaper. As a completely amateur photographer, this falls into the "I hope I can take a photo like this before I die" category.

Thanks to Sam for making a high-res, widescreen version available on his Flickr collection, and for Lifehacker and Kaelri for featuring it.

Songbird hits Beta

My favorite music player, Songbird, has just hit beta after being available as developer and preview releases. It's a free, open-source, cross-platform player built on Mozilla code. As a result, it's really customizable (with add-ons and skins--called feathers) like Firefox.

After being a long term Winamp user (dabbling in WMP and iTunes, trying out Foobar2000 and Media Monkey), I've settled in on Songbird primarily because of its open-source nature and add-on system. Need a CoverFlow-like interface? Check (MediaFlow). Need to retrieve album art? Check (Album Art Manager). SHOUTcast streaming? Check (SHOUTcast Radio). Say What? (Lyrics plugin). And so on.

It's also tightly integrated with the Web, with tabbed browsing, searching, downloading from the web to your song library, and more.

My hat's off to PotI and the Songbird development community!

Battle of the Cola Points Programs

As a graduating senior in college, I loaded up on "easy A" classes, and one of them was a marketing course taught by a former Coca-Cola executive. Aside from being an easy A, it was pretty interesting to see the psychology of advertising and how much it drives our lives.

I mean, look at rewards/points programs. Ever since we were seven years old and figured out that it cost our folks 50 times more to pay for those skee-ball tickets than it would have been to buy those stuffed animals and plastic spider rings, we knew that they're a way to get our compulsive sides to make other people lots of money.

But knowing that, I still collect the codes for the Coke and Pepsi rewards points--to the point that I'll dig through the recycling bin if my wife doesn't save them. And although you have to drink a hell of a lot of soda (or collect the codes from someone who does), I have gotten a couple of decent things from the Coke program: free product coupons and a nice NCAA basketball.

I'm relatively new to collecting the Pepsi points, but since the Mrs. prefers the anti-Coke, I'm stuck.

The biggest thing that annoys me with the Coke program is that it's built on Flash. Not only is the site always slow, it's a 10-min. affair to enter codes when I'm on a terminal connection. Plus, it sucks being bombarded with product, sweepstakes, and survey pop-ups. The designers there should be fired.

I like how the Pepsi Stuff program partnered with Amazon. Not only does it use a common sign-on with Amazon, but it's painless and quick to enter codes. I can actually use a Flash blocker and still enter them. Kudos for the DRM-free MP3's and DVD movie rewards. Yet, if I stop to think about it, I have flashbacks to the Chuck E. Cheese prize counter, considering the sheer volume of Pepsi I'd have to buy to get just one.

Got to go...it's time to dig through the recycling bin...and my neighbors...

New TSA Laptop Bag Rules

The TSA just implemented new rules on laptop bags that can be sent through the X-ray machines without removing the laptop from the bag. As someone who's been used to taking out--and occasionally powering on--my laptop for more than 10 years when traveling, I wonder how much of a time-saver this is actually going to be.

I mean, depending on the mood of the screeners that day, you have to remove your shoes, outer clothing, belts, glasses, wallet, keys, change, liquids, and other items, so it's really not that big of a deal to me to grab your laptop, dump it into a tub, and then reassemble everything at the other end--usually in an awkward bundle with the hope of finding a chair to sit down to repack everything.

It's the hassle of travel, isn't it? Is there really a need to buy another $100+ laptop bag $220 laptop bag to save maybe a minute or two per trip?

Miracle fruit?

I recently came across Miracle Berry Fruit Tablets at one of my favorite shopping sites, ThinkGeek. They are supposed to make bitter and sour foods taste sweet.

I'm sure we all remember experiments in elementary school science class where you map the different regions of the tongue to sensations of taste. So while the name "Miracle Berry" is a bit too hokey for me, the science behind it makes sense.

I'd love to give these tablets a try sometime, but at $1/dose, I think I can imagine the magical sweetness and put it to better pharmacological use, such as Zyrtec, which also costs a buck a day but when your allergies are out of control, it's priceless.

Ode to Firefox

Only a few years late to the party, I jumped ship from IE to Firefox when 3.0 was released, and now I'm willing to name my first-born Mozilla (Moe for short).

Having been using browsers for over 15 years now (back to Netscape Navigator on X-Windows), Firefox wasn't unknown to me. But as a religious user of IE7 and Opera as my alternative browser, Firefox 1.x didn't call to me. Then I heard about memory leakage problems with Firefox 2, so it wasn't until the latest generation that I decided to make the leap.

Boy, what I was missing! The killer feature for me is the add-on system, and I've racked up a healthy number of them, which I'll share here over time. Aside from the occasional compatiblity problems, it's my main brower now since Firefox combines the performance of Opera with the mainstream appeal of a browser like IE.

If it gets any better, I might just have to really write some poetry about it. :)