I'll vouch for the Sony Digital-8 cameras too. I picked up a DCR-TRV120 at the end of '01 from a fellow who'd barely used it. Included manual, cables, additional higher-capacity battery, camera bag, UV filter, and even a couple of tapes: US$436. eBay is a goodThing.
Good camera. Nowhere near as small as the lovely little MiniDV cameras out today, but for the price, hey -- the picture is brilliant over S-Video. It's got FireWire, and I've got iMovie. It's wonderful. Plenty of features, can do wide-format, yadda yadda. And the tapes aren't hard to find.
NightShot doesn't turn the dark into day, but it afforded me some good clear footage one night after a couple of cars collided on my streetcorner. And even without NightShot, having used it for iChat AV with a friend, I can say it's got better low-light performance than the iSight.
One thing that sold me on this one was the video pass-through conversion, so I can take analog video-in and stream it as DV to my computer. It's purportedly not as high-quality as a dedicated video converter, but again, for the price, I'm not complaining.
I have heard good reports about the Canon DV cameras as well.
As for web resources: My first stop for video-camera info is DVSpot, from the same fellow (Jeff Keller) who runs the Digital Camera Resource Page.
I tried it for the first time a couple of nights ago. FireWired my Sony Digital-8 video camera to my TiBook 667 running Panther. iChat recognized the camera with no configuration and immediately offered a video-chat button for a friend in my AIM buddy list -- he has a Power Mac G4 and an iSight.
Talked for an hour with a constant two-way frame rate of 15fps over a cable modem / sub-optimal AirPort signal. Plenty good for visual conversation.
'Course, there's no need to hack your router for VoIP bandwidth if the VoIP box handles it for you. The Motorola VT1000, the phone adapter currently being issued by Vonage, has a built-in one-port router with "Quality of Service" management. If you install it upstream from the rest of your network, it reserves adequate bandwidth for VoIP. At least in theory.
With these new types of screens, if economies of scale can get the price down low enough, you know somebody is going to put them all over their car. That's all we need. Rolling advertisements. Frankly, I don't want to see popup ads while I'm stuck in traffic.
A moving image on a moving object? Ergonomic nightmare -- that's dynamic camouflage. Guaranteed traffic accident. It'd be banned.
Sugarhill Gang was really the first to do it and they did it rather well, so much so that Rapper's Delight was a VERY different song from Good Times.
Word! And I say that as a lifelong suburban white boy. To my ears, only Will Smith has matched the Sugarhill Gang's ability to re-cast a popular groove into something worth listening to on its own. "Rapper's Delight" still holds up.
I suppose that would work, but have you ever had a caffeine-withdrawl headache?
Yup. After pretty much living on Pepsi and then Coke for my high school and college years (though I was never a coffee drinker), I stopped cold turkey in January 1992. I had a headache -- constant, low-level, not piercing -- until that April. Then my head was fine.
What amazed me most was that my digestion improved dramatically. After about a month, I realized with great surprise that my whole food tube worked smoother than ever; my colon had been virtually tied in a knot for years. This may seem excessively prosaic, but believe me, well-working innards are an unfathomable blessing.
A couple of years ago, in my usual post-prandial sleepyheadedness, I decided to try a Frappuccino. BAM! I was awake! I was mentally productive! I was ON! And, very shortly, my abdomen was vaguely crampy and bound-up. I tried it again the next day: The mental effect was far less pronounced, but the digestive malaise was back in full force. That was the last experiment I needed.
After quitting, I did have a more pronounced fuzz in my head in the morning, much harder to shake off. But I've found that an all-night decongestant removes that and lets me bounce easily out of bed in the morning -- it seems to be breathing-related, not a matter of caffeination (though the two may be linked somehow; IANAMD).
It's hell for a while, but if you stick with it, you may find that quitting caffeine (and paying separate attention to your other problems) makes you a lot healthier in the long run. Did for me.
no more than 10 burns of a playlist containing an iTMS track (fine, make a different playlist)
Make a different playlist...or burn it once and then duplicate that CD as many times as you want. All it takes is a second drive -- doesn't even have to be a writer -- or, hell, you don't even need a second drive: Burn your playlist, read the CD back in as an image, and burn the image 'til the cows come home.
Curiously, when reading the parent posting, I initially read the first two sentences of the main paragraph, then the quoted material above it, and then the remainder of the posting.
I probably read it in exactly the order in which it was written!
For as long as I can remember, I've been able to echolocate people moving around me while I'm near a CRT -- especially when I'm sitting at a computer. I can...shall we say, "feel" the movements of people behind me. (It's a spatial sense. Not sure how else to describe it.) It's not as if I can tell what they're doing with their hands or anything detailed like that (you know, dodging projectiles and such), but I'm aware of their general position.
So now, of course, my primary machine has an LCD. No more echolocation. (Luckily, it's a laptop, so I can keep my back to the wall.) I don't have the 15.7 KHz whine of an electron tube to bounce off things around me. Ye gods, that infernal CRT whine...most people can't hear it, but it drives me bats.
You answer and there's nobody in the call centre available so you get a silent call. I've had 5 of these in one day. As the caller id is blocked I can't even discover which set of brain dead idiots it is calling.
I used to get tons of those too. I'm in New Jersey and my local phone provider is Verizon, and I signed up for their Call Intercept service as soon as it was announced (for an extra monthly fee; it's included in some plans). Any incoming call with anonymous or "Unavailable" caller ID gets answered by a Verizon computer, which (1) plays a recording that says the caller must press 1 to continue; then (2) requires the caller to record their name; and then, if the caller successfully does all that, (3) rings my phone with a distinctive ring (three short rings, in my case). If I pick up the phone, the computer says there's a Call Intercept call and please press 1 to hear who it's from. If I do that, it plays the caller's recording. If I want to speak with the caller, I press 1 again and it connects me. If I don't, I just hang up.
As soon as I activated Call Intercept, the house went eerily silent. No more telemarketing calls. Period.
No, wait...I actually had one person (a real estate agent) go through the rigamarole. One telemarketing call in about two years.
I'm delighted with the prospect of metadata-as-files and files-as-directories (ergo, metadata-as-directories?) -- but here we have another problem to address: Insufficiently escaped data. Human-readable data fields (including filename, if the user can read/write it) should be able to contain any human-readable characters. Filenames should be free to contain normal punctuation; path separators -- again, if the user can read/write paths -- should be selected from outside the normal punctuation set, or else the stuff between the separators should be escaped. Or the user-accessible file and path names should be stored as metadata.
Can't tell you how much frustration I've endured over other people's improperly escaped data. This just looks like one more case.
(Mac OS <=9 used a colon as a path separator, making it the only forbidden character for file/folder names, which could have been avoided so easily: How about a pipe, guys? or (shiver) a backslash? Or, even better, some control character unique to the Mac, akin to the Option-Shift-K Apple logo? Programmers. Sheesh.)
This looks familiar, and it bodes well. Steve Jobs left Apple (involuntarily, admittedly) and started NeXT, which was bought by Apple. Result of management merger: Apple's current product line. Result of technology merger: Mac OS X.
I'm still pretty darned satisfied with my Palm M500, and I'll happily keep using it, at least until the merger/shakedown results in a new product. As for competitive pressure: Sony, if not others, will still keep Palm on their toes.
I'm still saving up for an iPod, but I've been reading up, asking around, and visiting my local Apple Store.
The radial menu of the iPod is really efficient, but evidentally Apple doesn't know/care. The latest revision of the iPod does away with the buttons laid out around the edge of the wheel, replacing them with 4 similarly-labeled buttons above the wheel.
The original, circular arrangement of the iPod buttons makes for one of the most gorgeous, pure-Ive creations ever, but the outermost circle of buttons (top: menu; left: skip back; right: skip forward; bottom: play/pause) are just that, the outermost, which makes them inefficient for one-handed operation -- say, in your jacket pocket. You've got to slide your thumb (or other finger, if you like RSI) all the way across the middle of the circle to reach the other side, which (1) is too much of a stretch and (2) risks messing with the scroll wheel.
The linear arrangement of those four buttons on the new-design iPod, while not nearly as visually elegant, makes for a much more ergonomic interface. The wheel-touchpad and its center button get their own dedicated space, and the transport controls get theirs. As a user of several past Sony VCRs, I can tell you that having your transport controls separate is far more sensible than having them visually melded with, and thus placed too damned close to, a rotary control.
And they're "touch" buttons, rather than mechanical ones, allowing for easier accidental pushing than the mechanical ones, besides the fact they no longer guard the touch wheel... all in all, meaning you had better have the thing locked when it's in your pocket.
Actually, the "touch" buttons are harder to accidentally push than the mechanical ones. I've been told that you have to set the hold button on an original iPod just to put it in your pocket; otherwise, something gets pressed, or the scroll wheel (on the early, mechanical-wheel models) gets spun, none of which is good for uninterrupted listening. The new "touch" buttons don't trigger on contact with clothing or even an accidental brush with a finger. The touch wheel doesn't need to be guarded, and you don't have to lock it for your pocket.
It seems like they're willing to throw away good design to get upgrades.
The original design has a beautiful geometric simplicity, but don't mistake geometric simplicity for higher usability.
Don't get me wrong: I love the look of the original iPod, and someday I'll pick up a dead one on eBay just to hold and ogle. The thick transparent faceplate, with its sharp edges, is too gorgeous for photographs to convey. But, as with the buttons, it's not a better design.
For me, this is the mother of all silly karate movies. I watched this countless times on HBO when I was in high school. Kill and Kill Again (the sequel, I believe, to Kill or Be Killed) knows what it is -- campy, with a lot of karate -- and plays it up beautifully. (It also has barely any killing, making the title a nice in-joke. For instance, the biggest crowd-fight scene ends up with the mob of, oh, a couple dozen bad guys tied up in a parachute, wriggling.)
This movie delivers one of my favorote lines of all time: "Usually when I hit a man, he stays hit."
You know, I just realized that one of the reasons I like Iron Chef so much is that Chairman Kaga reminds me of Steve Chase, the lead good guy in this movie.
Sigh...what I wouldn't give for a double-feature of A Circle of Iron and Kill and Kill Again.
Was to be a Bruce Lee movie; he died before filming. David Carradine, who was to play the protagonist, took over Lee's role(s), and the lead was re-cast to Jeff Cooper, a very different martial artist, portraying the Everyman probably better than Carradine would have. Plenty of fighting to watch, and a truly Zen conclusion that will, I guarantee, disappoint non-philosophers. What is it you seek? What is at the end of your journey? What do you do with it? You'll put a brick through your TV if these questions aren't of deep interest to you -- but if they are, A Circle of Iron is required viewing. Another one that needs to come out on DVD.
Absurd quasi-spy comedy with John Ritter and James Belushi. I can do almost entirely without Ritter, who falls flat in the comedy department (this may just be the writing) but -- and this is why it's "almost" entirely -- actually works really well when he's given a chance to react realistically. Belushi is good as an impossibly competent spy -- makes James Bond look like an amateur (and this is definitely the writing). There's wonderful randomness in this movie, sort of like Buckaroo Banzai (my solid favorite) without a sense of direction. This deserves a DVD release.
I don't see anything in the review about the keyboard being detachable. If it's permanently attached (case hacks aside) to the main body, then this computer has the form factor of a laptop -- a laptop that's too bulky to put in your lap.
Sony makes some good stuff, but every once in a while they come out with a design that just makes me scratch my head.
Space sauna? Think: a big, hot, wobbly sphere of water. No, wait, that's a space hot tub -- a space sauna would be a zero-g steam cloud. Oh, man, those cockpit windows are gonna fog like a bitch.
The space-savings inside the car itself are remarkable, and allow for all sorts of kooky things, such as a floor-to-ceiling windshield. (how weird would that be on the highway?)
"Weird" isn't the word. If I've got to scratch a random itch or make an, er, "adjustment" while I'm on the road, I could do without all my fellow commuters watching.
On the other hand, it might give a little cleanliness nudge to those who tend to let a thick mulch accumulate on the floor. Double-edged sword.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll vouch for the Sony Digital-8 cameras too. I picked up a DCR-TRV120 at the end of '01 from a fellow who'd barely used it. Included manual, cables, additional higher-capacity battery, camera bag, UV filter, and even a couple of tapes: US$436. eBay is a goodThing.
Good camera. Nowhere near as small as the lovely little MiniDV cameras out today, but for the price, hey -- the picture is brilliant over S-Video. It's got FireWire, and I've got iMovie. It's wonderful. Plenty of features, can do wide-format, yadda yadda. And the tapes aren't hard to find.
NightShot doesn't turn the dark into day, but it afforded me some good clear footage one night after a couple of cars collided on my streetcorner. And even without NightShot, having used it for iChat AV with a friend, I can say it's got better low-light performance than the iSight.
One thing that sold me on this one was the video pass-through conversion, so I can take analog video-in and stream it as DV to my computer. It's purportedly not as high-quality as a dedicated video converter, but again, for the price, I'm not complaining.
I have heard good reports about the Canon DV cameras as well.
As for web resources: My first stop for video-camera info is DVSpot, from the same fellow (Jeff Keller) who runs the Digital Camera Resource Page.
Have you ever used iChat AV?
I tried it for the first time a couple of nights ago. FireWired my Sony Digital-8 video camera to my TiBook 667 running Panther. iChat recognized the camera with no configuration and immediately offered a video-chat button for a friend in my AIM buddy list -- he has a Power Mac G4 and an iSight.
Talked for an hour with a constant two-way frame rate of 15fps over a cable modem / sub-optimal AirPort signal. Plenty good for visual conversation.
The iChat interface is great, too.
'Course, there's no need to hack your router for VoIP bandwidth if the VoIP box handles it for you. The Motorola VT1000, the phone adapter currently being issued by Vonage, has a built-in one-port router with "Quality of Service" management. If you install it upstream from the rest of your network, it reserves adequate bandwidth for VoIP. At least in theory.
A moving image on a moving object? Ergonomic nightmare -- that's dynamic camouflage. Guaranteed traffic accident. It'd be banned.
Word! And I say that as a lifelong suburban white boy. To my ears, only Will Smith has matched the Sugarhill Gang's ability to re-cast a popular groove into something worth listening to on its own. "Rapper's Delight" still holds up.
Yup. After pretty much living on Pepsi and then Coke for my high school and college years (though I was never a coffee drinker), I stopped cold turkey in January 1992. I had a headache -- constant, low-level, not piercing -- until that April. Then my head was fine.
What amazed me most was that my digestion improved dramatically. After about a month, I realized with great surprise that my whole food tube worked smoother than ever; my colon had been virtually tied in a knot for years. This may seem excessively prosaic, but believe me, well-working innards are an unfathomable blessing.
A couple of years ago, in my usual post-prandial sleepyheadedness, I decided to try a Frappuccino. BAM! I was awake! I was mentally productive! I was ON! And, very shortly, my abdomen was vaguely crampy and bound-up. I tried it again the next day: The mental effect was far less pronounced, but the digestive malaise was back in full force. That was the last experiment I needed.
After quitting, I did have a more pronounced fuzz in my head in the morning, much harder to shake off. But I've found that an all-night decongestant removes that and lets me bounce easily out of bed in the morning -- it seems to be breathing-related, not a matter of caffeination (though the two may be linked somehow; IANAMD).
It's hell for a while, but if you stick with it, you may find that quitting caffeine (and paying separate attention to your other problems) makes you a lot healthier in the long run. Did for me.
Holy crow! What's the resolution on that?
Make a different playlist...or burn it once and then duplicate that CD as many times as you want. All it takes is a second drive -- doesn't even have to be a writer -- or, hell, you don't even need a second drive: Burn your playlist, read the CD back in as an image, and burn the image 'til the cows come home.
Curiously, when reading the parent posting, I initially read the first two sentences of the main paragraph, then the quoted material above it, and then the remainder of the posting.
I probably read it in exactly the order in which it was written!
For as long as I can remember, I've been able to echolocate people moving around me while I'm near a CRT -- especially when I'm sitting at a computer. I can...shall we say, "feel" the movements of people behind me. (It's a spatial sense. Not sure how else to describe it.) It's not as if I can tell what they're doing with their hands or anything detailed like that (you know, dodging projectiles and such), but I'm aware of their general position.
So now, of course, my primary machine has an LCD. No more echolocation. (Luckily, it's a laptop, so I can keep my back to the wall.) I don't have the 15.7 KHz whine of an electron tube to bounce off things around me. Ye gods, that infernal CRT whine...most people can't hear it, but it drives me bats.
Oh dear. In all honesty, I wasn't trying to pun.
I used to get tons of those too. I'm in New Jersey and my local phone provider is Verizon, and I signed up for their Call Intercept service as soon as it was announced (for an extra monthly fee; it's included in some plans). Any incoming call with anonymous or "Unavailable" caller ID gets answered by a Verizon computer, which (1) plays a recording that says the caller must press 1 to continue; then (2) requires the caller to record their name; and then, if the caller successfully does all that, (3) rings my phone with a distinctive ring (three short rings, in my case). If I pick up the phone, the computer says there's a Call Intercept call and please press 1 to hear who it's from. If I do that, it plays the caller's recording. If I want to speak with the caller, I press 1 again and it connects me. If I don't, I just hang up.
As soon as I activated Call Intercept, the house went eerily silent. No more telemarketing calls. Period.
No, wait...I actually had one person (a real estate agent) go through the rigamarole. One telemarketing call in about two years.
I'm delighted with the prospect of metadata-as-files and files-as-directories (ergo, metadata-as-directories?) -- but here we have another problem to address: Insufficiently escaped data. Human-readable data fields (including filename, if the user can read/write it) should be able to contain any human-readable characters. Filenames should be free to contain normal punctuation; path separators -- again, if the user can read/write paths -- should be selected from outside the normal punctuation set, or else the stuff between the separators should be escaped. Or the user-accessible file and path names should be stored as metadata.
Can't tell you how much frustration I've endured over other people's improperly escaped data. This just looks like one more case.
(Mac OS <=9 used a colon as a path separator, making it the only forbidden character for file/folder names, which could have been avoided so easily: How about a pipe, guys? or (shiver) a backslash? Or, even better, some control character unique to the Mac, akin to the Option-Shift-K Apple logo? Programmers. Sheesh.)
True, but it's a normal Mail.app screen with nothing in the inbox. That's some damn good spam filtering.
This looks familiar, and it bodes well. Steve Jobs left Apple (involuntarily, admittedly) and started NeXT, which was bought by Apple. Result of management merger: Apple's current product line. Result of technology merger: Mac OS X.
I'm still pretty darned satisfied with my Palm M500, and I'll happily keep using it, at least until the merger/shakedown results in a new product. As for competitive pressure: Sony, if not others, will still keep Palm on their toes.
I'm still saving up for an iPod, but I've been reading up, asking around, and visiting my local Apple Store.
The original, circular arrangement of the iPod buttons makes for one of the most gorgeous, pure-Ive creations ever, but the outermost circle of buttons (top: menu; left: skip back; right: skip forward; bottom: play/pause) are just that, the outermost, which makes them inefficient for one-handed operation -- say, in your jacket pocket. You've got to slide your thumb (or other finger, if you like RSI) all the way across the middle of the circle to reach the other side, which (1) is too much of a stretch and (2) risks messing with the scroll wheel.
The linear arrangement of those four buttons on the new-design iPod, while not nearly as visually elegant, makes for a much more ergonomic interface. The wheel-touchpad and its center button get their own dedicated space, and the transport controls get theirs. As a user of several past Sony VCRs, I can tell you that having your transport controls separate is far more sensible than having them visually melded with, and thus placed too damned close to, a rotary control.
Actually, the "touch" buttons are harder to accidentally push than the mechanical ones. I've been told that you have to set the hold button on an original iPod just to put it in your pocket; otherwise, something gets pressed, or the scroll wheel (on the early, mechanical-wheel models) gets spun, none of which is good for uninterrupted listening. The new "touch" buttons don't trigger on contact with clothing or even an accidental brush with a finger. The touch wheel doesn't need to be guarded, and you don't have to lock it for your pocket.
The original design has a beautiful geometric simplicity, but don't mistake geometric simplicity for higher usability.
Don't get me wrong: I love the look of the original iPod, and someday I'll pick up a dead one on eBay just to hold and ogle. The thick transparent faceplate, with its sharp edges, is too gorgeous for photographs to convey. But, as with the buttons, it's not a better design.
For me, this is the mother of all silly karate movies. I watched this countless times on HBO when I was in high school. Kill and Kill Again (the sequel, I believe, to Kill or Be Killed) knows what it is -- campy, with a lot of karate -- and plays it up beautifully. (It also has barely any killing, making the title a nice in-joke. For instance, the biggest crowd-fight scene ends up with the mob of, oh, a couple dozen bad guys tied up in a parachute, wriggling.)
This movie delivers one of my favorote lines of all time: "Usually when I hit a man, he stays hit."
You know, I just realized that one of the reasons I like Iron Chef so much is that Chairman Kaga reminds me of Steve Chase, the lead good guy in this movie.
Sigh...what I wouldn't give for a double-feature of A Circle of Iron and Kill and Kill Again.
Was to be a Bruce Lee movie; he died before filming. David Carradine, who was to play the protagonist, took over Lee's role(s), and the lead was re-cast to Jeff Cooper, a very different martial artist, portraying the Everyman probably better than Carradine would have. Plenty of fighting to watch, and a truly Zen conclusion that will, I guarantee, disappoint non-philosophers. What is it you seek? What is at the end of your journey? What do you do with it? You'll put a brick through your TV if these questions aren't of deep interest to you -- but if they are, A Circle of Iron is required viewing. Another one that needs to come out on DVD.
Absurd quasi-spy comedy with John Ritter and James Belushi. I can do almost entirely without Ritter, who falls flat in the comedy department (this may just be the writing) but -- and this is why it's "almost" entirely -- actually works really well when he's given a chance to react realistically. Belushi is good as an impossibly competent spy -- makes James Bond look like an amateur (and this is definitely the writing). There's wonderful randomness in this movie, sort of like Buckaroo Banzai (my solid favorite) without a sense of direction. This deserves a DVD release.
I'll tell you later.
True -- but in that sense, "obsolete" may not be the best word choice.
But let's not kid ourselves: Much better! Now let's remember E.B. White's immortal directive: "Omit needless words." Thus: There ya go. Pro bono.I don't see anything in the review about the keyboard being detachable. If it's permanently attached (case hacks aside) to the main body, then this computer has the form factor of a laptop -- a laptop that's too bulky to put in your lap.
Sony makes some good stuff, but every once in a while they come out with a design that just makes me scratch my head.
Well, I'm grateful someone got it.
Now, if someone with moderator points would get it...
Experts want to grow new genetically modified varieties but there are fears people won't want GM bananas.
Hell, if these people can make a SAAB sauna, I can't see any problem with a GM banana.
we should have a sauna in the space shuttle
Space sauna? Think: a big, hot, wobbly sphere of water. No, wait, that's a space hot tub -- a space sauna would be a zero-g steam cloud. Oh, man, those cockpit windows are gonna fog like a bitch.
The space-savings inside the car itself are remarkable, and allow for all sorts of kooky things, such as a floor-to-ceiling windshield. (how weird would that be on the highway?)
"Weird" isn't the word. If I've got to scratch a random itch or make an, er, "adjustment" while I'm on the road, I could do without all my fellow commuters watching.
On the other hand, it might give a little cleanliness nudge to those who tend to let a thick mulch accumulate on the floor. Double-edged sword.