Personal

Bought a Canon HF100 Digital Camcorder

It arrived yesterday then from Amazon. A HF100 camera, 2 x Transcend 16Gb memory cards and the bigger battery. Each 16Gb card gives 2 hours of the highest resolution video. You can specify lower qualities and end up with 9 hours of video at the lowest setting on a 16Gb card. It looks like ANY SDHC card will work so 32Gb should work fine. Battery life with the 918 battery is about 2 hours 40 minutes which is cool. The video quality etc looks very good from the limited use so far. The only complaint would be the handling. It's pretty small and using it one handed is tricky if you want to keep the camera steady and operate zoom and start/stop video. The problem isn't the buttons, it's just small. A second hand to steady it makes a huge difference.

I found out that there is an even bigger battery. The 918 is 1600Ma, the standard one is 900 and the 'big' one is 2700. If the 918 gives 160 minutes of battery then figure the 2700 will add at least an hour. Wish I'd known about the 2700, you can never have enough battery. Charging the battery takes a while, figure 4 hours for the 918 so it's an overnight charge for most people.

Overall so far, very happy with it. I'll be using it at a swim meet next weekend so I'll post more then.

External drive failed, not worth fixing

I use a 320GB WD external USB drive at home to time machine backup my iMac. The drive failed a month ago and today was time to fix it. I went to Best Buy looking for a new bigger internal SATA drive to put in the enclosure but they were all pretty expensive. I ended up buying yet another external drive, 750GB again from WD for 140 bucks. There was an IoMega 1TB drive for 180 but the extra 250 wasnt worth 40 bucks to me.

What is beginning to suck here is that it's just not worth reusing these enclosures. The external drives are cheaper than an internal drive now.

Time for a new camcorder, Canon HF100

My old JVC minidv camcorder broke last week so I've been looking around for a replacement. I need something that works in low light, I video a lot of stuff in indoor swimming pools and gyms. I also wanted something robust that maybe I could use in my race car for videos also. That rules out tape, hard drive and DVD camcorders. Flash camcorders it is. It looks like there are two price ranges now which also map to Standard Definition (SD) and High Definition (HD). The manufactuers seem to have used this to also put the cool stuff only on HD camcorders. Cool stuff means optical image stabilisation and low light handling. Typical. SD ones costs under 500 bucks, HD above that.

I ended up choosing a Canon HF100. This is a HD camcorder with no built in flash memory. You use a SDHC card which can hold up to 32GB. 1GB is around 7 minutes of HD video. I bought 2 16GB class 6 cards for 40 bucks each. Each card holds 112 minutes then so thats plenty. I didn't buy a camcorder with builtin flash because Canon wants 200 bucks for 16GB of memory, the card is 40 so that make no sense at all. It has 12x optical zoom which is needed also.

I also bought the extended battery which cost 90 bucks. Total cost with one day shipping is 780 bucks. I bought from Amazon.com. They had the camcorder for 600 bucks. Locally, I tried a small camera specialist but they disappointed me in that they were'nt any more skilled than a local big box store. I asked the difference between the HF10 and HF100 and they picked up the box and starting reading. I can do that, I was looking for expertise to justify their higher prices (799!!) for the HF100. 200 bucks for the same service as a typical big box store. The local big box store didn't have the HF100 in stock so I went to Amazon.

All the reviews I've read on the web point to this unit as the 'best' one right now to buy so I'll post more then it arrives next week.

Tip of the year: Don't lose your iPhone!

I thought I'd lost my iPhone today. ATT didn't want anything to do with it. A replacement one is north of 500 dollars. EBay prices are still sky high. ATT is unable to locate the last tower that talked with the iPhone, this is would incredibly useful and you just know that they should be able to do this but are basically refusing to make the ability available probably on privacy concerns. There is also no way to black list the phone. You can receive a stolen way and it appears that you'll be able to get a contract on it despite the fact it's stolen and has a IMEI number.

Anyway, I'm just happy I found it in the evening under my bed would you believe. I looked in to insurance today but ATT don't sell their 5 buck a month insurance for the iPhone. I'll double check tomorrow however at the store. 5 bucks is cheap to what losing one of these will cost you.

Upgraded to Lotus Notes 8.5 Beta 2 for the mac

I took the plunge yesterday after backing up my notes data folder and the 7.0 app I was using. So far, so good. Seems stable, looks a little difference but no other real differences that I've spotted so far.