#Technology

The New Canon 30D

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Canon 30D

As I was doing my late-night news roundup, I stum­bled upon some inter­est­ing new Web 2.0 apps. The top two that are on my list to beta-test are Fold­era and Fly­spy. I can’t wait to see how Fold­era works, it seems that it’ll be use­ful at work and at home. As for Fly­spy, this thing should make it eas­ier for those of us “remotely” work­ing from home. I hope it saves me a ton of cash so I may have some left for some other good­ies later this year. Not to men­tion, a cou­ple of expenses dur­ing my big trips (Hawaii, Japan and P.I.).

Any­ways, a lit­tle birdie that a new toy has just been unveiled, Canon’s 30D. It seems that it is using the same sen­sor as the 20D. But a cou­ple of more intrigu­ing changes can be high­lighted as stated by Rob Gail­braith:

a 2.5-inch (diag­o­nal) rear LCD, increased burst depth, Pic­ture Styles, a shut­ter with a higher duty cycle rat­ing and a long list of other cam­era usabil­ity changes.

A cou­ple of things that I did like with the new 30D fea­tures are:

  • Canon’s more flex­i­ble Pic­ture Style menu, which replaces the Para­me­ters menu of the 20D
  • ISO 100‑1600 is now selec­table in 1/3 stop increments
  • Increased burst depth: 11 frames for RAW CR2 shoot­ing, 30 for Large Fine JPEG and 9 for RAW+JPEG
  • Switch­able High-Speed Con­tin­u­ous (5 fps) and Low-Speed Con­tin­u­ous (3 fps) frame rate set­tings are now included
  • An Auto set­ting in the Long Expo­sure Noise Reduc­tion Cus­tom Function
  • The abil­ity, like sev­eral more-pricey Canon dig­i­tal SLRs, to simul­ta­ne­ously apply long expo­sure noise pro­cess­ing to one pic­ture while cap­tur­ing another
  • The addi­tion of a 3.5% spot meter­ing mode
  • A more-precise 4-increment bat­tery charge indicator
  • No more new fold­ers cre­ated every 100 pho­tos; in the 30D, a folder can hold 9999 pho­tos (this one is a 50/50 like/dislike to me)
  • Dur­ing play­back, the image+shooting data screen will dis­play either an RGB or Bright­ness his­togram, file size and will option­ally dis­play AF markings
  • The Jump fea­ture dur­ing image play­back can now leap back and forth 10 pic­tures at a time, 100 pic­tures at a time or by the date shot

So yah, “nothin’ seri­ous.” It looks like it’ll be ship­ping mid-March (US) with an MSRP of $1399. $1399? That was how much I got my 20D for back in Decem­ber through Costco.com. Oh well, you can’t beat a rebate of $300 for it. Any­ways, I might have to take Costco up on their 100% return/warranty pol­icy later this year. Good times.

Web 2.0 and the Super Bowl

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Oh the things you find while Blingo–ing. Since it’s that time of year again for the Super Bowl, with it comes: the backyard-BBQ par­ties, the trash-talking between teams, the millions-of-dollars-worth of bets, funny & cre­ative com­mer­cials and last but not least, the office Super Bowl Pool. A cou­ple of friends and I have been doing this for the past cou­ple of years now. Too bad, no one wanted to do it this year. Don’t know why?

Mean­while, hav­ing the feel­ing of just try­ing to get into the spirit of the Super Bowl (even though the teams weren’t my pick from the start of the sea­son), I asked around MA to see if we are doing one this year. Turns out there wasn’t even one for last year’s. So, I just vol­un­teered not remem­ber­ing how John-John facil­i­tated it.

Any­ways, with a call to J2 and some Blingo-ing, I found some tem­plates. The best one I found was through:

Num Sum. Easy, Sharable Web Spread­sheets. Keep your records, lists and spread­sheets in one place online. Eas­ily slice, dice and share with others.

It’s FREE. You have the abil­ity to share with friends and fam­ily that don’t even have an account but with they just won’t be able to update the sheet directly and save it. You may also inter­act with a group or team, and share a sheet for col­lab­o­ra­tion. It’s a nice, FREE and great web app.

Other obser­va­tions that I found while study­ing and using Num Sum was it’s home­page lay­out. It strikes sim­plis­tic sim­i­lar­i­ties with the very-outstanding Base­camp in its early days. Why not, right? Why not fol­low some­thing that has done very well in performance.

So, after spend­ing some time to get every­one to join in on the fun, I man­aged to get a 10x10 (100 squares) Pool filled out . The pot is big—$500. It’s $5 per square and you get $75 for the First, Second/Half and the Third. Then a humon­gous sum of $275 for the Fourth/Final, no OT. I was get­ting wor­ried Wednes­day night (after send­ing the email on Mon­day morn­ing about the Pool), that only half of the Pool was taken. But alas, every­one came through to chip in for a cou­ple of squares and com­plete it eventually.

After hav­ing indi­vid­u­als pick from a som­brero (lit­er­ally, the one from Chevy’s), I got the fol­low­ing num­bers (Steelers/Seahawks): 5/1, 3/5, 5/4 and 4/7. The 5s might be hard to get but there is very great hope on the jewel “4/7″ combo: 14 & 7, 24 & 7 and 24 & 17 to name a few. I can’t wait. This should be a fun way for MA to do some­thing together. Good times.

Update
Here’s the com­plete Pool. Ain’t it col­or­ful? Damn skippy, it took a while try­ing to get the same background-color when some­one wanted to add a square. I hope Num Sum adds the fea­ture to do some kind of eye­drop­per tool to just pick the same color, font-style, size or what have you.

SearchFox Bites the Dust

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I just got an email from Este­ban Kozak, Prod­uct Man­ager of Search­Fox, with the fol­low­ing sad news:

Search­Fox will shut down on Jan­u­ary 25, 2006

Thanks for all your help in mak­ing Search­Fox what it is. We have enjoyed pro­vid­ing this ser­vice, and hope that you have enjoyed using it. Please export all of your links and an OPML file with your RSS sources before the site shuts down. In accor­dance with our pri­vacy pol­icy, we will delete all per­sonal infor­ma­tion on Jan­u­ary 25 after we shut down the services.

This came as a com­plete sur­prise to me. Noth­ing in the blo­gos­phere sig­naled it’s peril or what have you. Oh man, I guess it’s back to News­ga­tor for me till I find another web-based RSS-reader that can do the job the way Search­Fox did it.

Con­tinue reading →

Protopage Reboots

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protopage-v2

Pro­topage just seems to keep get­ting bet­ter and bet­ter. Lately, they updated to ver­sion 2.0. That’s “2.0″ as in “Web 2.0″—HA! *snicker* OK. I admit, it’s still too early on the week for such fool­ish word­ings but all is fair in the land of web tech­nol­ogy and blogging.

Mean­while, Pro­topage jam-packed their release with a slew of new fea­tures. Some new fea­tures that stood out for me were:

  • abil­ity to add new pages
  • rounded cor­ners on panels
  • new color schemes for panels
  • and rich-text editing

There are plenty more that I still have to try out. So, if you missed my write-up on Pro­topage last Sep­tem­ber and still haven’t tried it out—it’s not too late to do so. By the way, did I men­tion that it’s FREE?!

Do you need another rea­son to jump in and have a look at it? If so, then lets just say that the BBC cov­ered Pro­topage. Any­ways, what’s a bet­ter rea­son than to just help you get orga­nized in life.

Keep it simple—and FREE!

iPod Video

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iPod 5G Video

The iPod 5G (aka. Video) is sup­pose to drop in stores this week. What the heck was Apple think­ing by doing this? I mean come on, it hasn’t even been a year since the iPod Nanos dropped, and here its—the new 5G!

Besides that, I am won­der­ing whether upgrad­ing to a 30GB 5G is even worth it and a smarth move. The pros that I see with the 5G over my Photo would prob­a­bly be:

  • the video of course!
  • lighter and smaller form factor
  • sleeker design

And the cons would be:

  • the price dif­fer­ence I’ll need to cover when I upgrade
  • time it’ll take me to re-organize and synch with the new iPod and my PC
  • the money I need to spend in terms of acces­sories for it (i.e. cover, fm trans­mit­ter, etc.)
  • acces­sories that used the top-connector would be abso­lete with it

I guess one major fac­tor that needs to be addressed would be, “will I even enjoy watch­ing a movie for 1–3 hours on a 2.5-inch, 320 x 240 pixel dis­play?” Right now, I don’t think so. Just imag­ine hold­ing your iPod and hav­ing it in a com­fort­able posi­tion were your neck won’t be sore after watch­ing a movie. I just can not see any sce­nar­ios right now were this would be beneficial.

Besides, I just freak­ing went eBay crazy these past cou­ple of days. They were mostly sport­ing good pur­chases con­sist­ing of the following:

  • Colum­bia 300 Ric­o­chet Rebound Bowl­ing Ball (14lbs. 3oz.)
  • Mizuno Crush 2 Base­ball Bat (34 inches, 27 ounces)
  • Knobcuffs (for my bats)

Not to men­tion, I’m look­ing into invest­ing into some seri­ous glass for my pho­tog­ra­phy addic­tion. Alas, tech­nol­ogy… it gets bet­ter by the minute. I just hope peo­ple do as well.

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