Clarifi case for iPhone 3G

Quick review of the Clarifi case… with a couple of photos on Flickr… you can get it on Amazon

Flip Video hits the UK – is it overpriced?

I see that the Flip Video camera is now available in the UK. I remember being pretty excited when these things were initially announced in the US, and sent the company an email at the time asking when I’d be able to get one in the UK (answer – they weren’t sure yet).

I have to wonder if these guys haven’t missed the boat and are relying purely on brand recognition to get them through here. The disgo / Busbi Video Plus (see my review) has been available for six months already, and is priced £30 cheaper (available from Amazon UK and Currys). Now, the difference is that the Flip has 2Gb memory, but add a cheap 2Gb SD card for less than a fiver and then remember that the Video Plus has a fold-out screen, and it’s hard to see how the Flip has a market.

I’m not in the market for a cheap video device at this point, but I’m fairly sure I’d think twice about the Flip. If they’d brought the new Flip Mino device straight over the pond it might have been a harder choice, but as it stands, I’d look at the alternatives.

Gadgets part 3: Eye-Fi

Here’s something I’ve wanted to get my hands on for a while now… an Eye-Fi SD card. If you don’t know about these things, essentially they are standard 2Gb SD cards that fit into any camera that will take the format (or others, with e.g. a Compact Flash/SD adapter). The good part is that they make the camera wireless-capable….

So I picked up my Eye-Fi card and the first thing that I noticed was the cool packaging… pull on the tab on the right-hand side of the box, and the box slides out to the left, revealing a USB dongle and the card already inserted. You need the dongle, because you need to use the computer to configure the card.

Once I plugged the dongle into the machine, an Eye-Fi item appeared on the desktop… it was pretty simple to just install the Mac software. Once I’d done that, I hit a small snag… I got a message about the Eye-Fi Manager software being unable to initalise the card. I tried running the Eye-Fi Manager a few times, but the same thing happened… until I took the dongle out of the USB port on the right-hand side of my machine, and plugged it back in on the left. That time, I got a set of dialogs enabling me to register an account. Not sure what happened there!

Actually this seems to be an issue on my MacBook Pro… for some reason the Eye-Fi Manager software will never “initialize” the card when the dongle is plugged in on the right of the machine (although it still shows up as a mass storage device, and Lightroom sees it and offers to import images from it). Worked fine over on the left, but then the dongle is a bit too wide to enable the Magsafe power plug to be connected at the same time. Actually it seems a little random, unfortunately. I raised a problem with Eye-Fi support and they basically talked me through steps for checking that nothing else is using the port, plugging and replugging – nothing specifically useful. YMMV.

Right, so here’s how this thing works. You start the Eye-Fi Manager software, which opens a web page to configure the card. Here, you can add wireless network details (it supports a whole range of network settings including WEP and WPA keys), rename the card if you want, and configure a huge variety of online services. I have configured mine for Flickr… but the software supports Facebook, SmugMug, WebShots, SnapFish, Picasa, Photobucket… and a gazillion others that I’ve not heard of before (oddly, Movable Type, Vox and Live Spaces, but not WordPress – hmm!). Once you’ve done that, you put the card in the camera, and it will automatically connect to the network and start uploading shots any time you take them.

What appears to happen, is this: the camera uploads to Eye-Fi’s site, which then transfers to your chosen / configured photo service. The next time the Eye-Fi Manager sees the Eye-Fi site, it then mirrors the photos to the local disk (you can specify a location in the Eye-Fi Manager). I’m not 100% certain that this is how it works, but that’s what I’ve observed.

So now what about the downsides to this? Well for starters, the only supported file format is JPG. That’s OK, but of course Flickr now supports video too, for instance. Oh, and by the way, this is going to upload all your photos, anytime you take any, so I’ve set the default privacy option to private for Flickr uploads so I can review and tag etc. before publishing. The photos are obviously not titled or anything when the Eye-Fi uploads them, and they get a simple tag “Eye-Fi” set, but that’s all. So you will want to go and change title, tags, description, potentially rotate and so on once the image has been uploaded. Now that Flickr has Picnik integration, you can of course do some simple editing later as well. This does all bypass my “standard” photo workflow of Lightroom import, catalog, edit, and then upload, though.

One thing that the Eye-Fi does not support is wireless networks with certificates. Other than that, Open, WEP, WPA/WPA2 are all OK. It’s only going to work with networks it knows about, too (although you can configure more than one) – there’s no UI on the camera for configuring the card, you have to use the Eye-Fi Manager software while the dongle is plugged in to the camera.

Also, because there’s no UI on the camera side, there’s no visual indication as to what is happening… the Eye-Fi will silently upload your shots, and there’s actually no way of knowing that it is doing it, or when it has finished doing it. Of course it would be amazingly difficult for this to integrate with every camera if the makers had tried to build the Eye-Fi into the camera’s user interface, so I understand why this is the case – it’s just a little bit disconcerting! One nice feature is that there appears to be support for “interrupted” uploads, I see there’s a “Receive interrupted” comment in the Eye-Fi manager UI, so I think it will support partial upload and then resume.

Overall, it’s a neat idea, and certainly pretty cool for quick shoot-and-upload scenarios. Of course I often want to catalog my shots and touch-up on the computer first, but I can see cases where this could be really cool. Very handy for conferences etc. (oh, and that USB dongle can act as a reader for any SD card, too – handy). A qualified thumbs-up!

Here’s a link to a nice review, and here’s some news about the new models coming soon.

(post updated 14th May 2008 – a couple of additional details about workflow, the card initialization error, and the screenshot of the local machine import was added)

Gadgets part 2: Bamboo Fun

Until recently I’d hankered after one of the higher-end Intuous graphics tablets from Wacom, but a few friends have bought Bamboo models lately so I began to think that this might be a good option for me[1]. So far, it seems that way. What’s this all about? Well I’ve wanted a tablet for a while to help with photo / graphics work, and to try out sketchcasting (see below).

The product

The Bamboo Fun is a bundle which includes the tablet and stylus, plus a mouse (slightly redundant given I have a Mighty Mouse already) and Photoshop Elements – only version 4 for the Mac, annoyingly, but I guess I could always upgrade. To be honest, I’ve not even installed it yet.

The Bamboo comes in very stylish packaging reminiscent of something Apple would make… the box unfolds neatly, each item is wrapped in that thin foam bag packaging, and the driver CD is in a square box exactly like the ones that Apple uses for OS X CDs! So, first impressions are good. After that, basically it’s just plug-and-play… there’s a driver to install which provides some System Preferences to customise the tablet sensitivity and behaviour of the shortcut buttons, but that’s it.

Negative marks go to Wacom for having their registration page (and most of the website, it seems) “temporarily unavailable” for over a week. Not cool, and they are ignoring my emails too.

Usage – OS X and a tablet

In use, it’s been something of a mixed experience so far. The tablet itself is great, but it takes a lot of getting used to over a mouse (which is something I fully expected). The issues have been around the software support, and specifically in my case Lightroom. Two major annoyances – one that the zoom wheel at the top of the tablet doesn’t work in Lightroom, and secondly that although a single tap/click will zoom in, it is then really hard to get Lightroom to zoom back out with the stylus (should just be a simple tap/click again, that’s how it works with the mouse anyway).

On the plus side, it works beautifully well in Pixelmator.

Although OS X has handwriting recognition built in (the “Ink” system), actually I’ve not found this entirely reliable so far. [For éampe ltd to intSome word Son tbeTABLET] For example, I tried to write some words on the tablet just then, and you can see what happened. There doesn’t seem to be a way for the system to learn handwriting styles either. There is some software called inkBook that looks promising and somewhat more functional than the in-built software in OS X, but I don’t think I need it just yet (here’s a review). Handwriting was never going to be the primary focus of this purchase.

Oh, and it turns out that there are some issues with Ink and 64-bit apps in 10.5.x … I found that iScrobbler started to crash, and it looks like Ink is responsible. Weird.

Sketchcasting / sketchblogging

One of my main interests with the Bamboo was trying out Sketchcasting. Dave Briggs blogged about this a couple of months ago, and I’ve been fascinated since then. My first effort, though, was not the best… it’s way over-long (mainly as I fumbled around to work out how to get the thing to work) and not as well-planned as it might have been. Actually I think the Sketchcast site is somewhat limited… there’s no way of making things private, no friending, few social features at all. So instead, I picked up ArtRage and will try using that and Screenflow to create sketchcasts, and probably share them via my Viddler account, which will at least enable things to be embedded on WordPress.com.

More recently I’ve also noticed that Sacha Chua has been sketchblogging… using her Nintendo DS. Sacha is very creative and this seems like a really cool way of using a DS, although it looks like you need a bunch of homebrew software to make it work. Worth a look if you are interested, though.

[1] and, evidently, the only way I’m going to get a custom header image is to MAKE ONE MYSELF. This comment is aimed at no-one in particular. That is all.

Gadgets part 1: SATA/USB enclosure

It’s a three-part miniseries on gadgets now that I’m back from Las Vegas. If you’ve followed my Flickr then you’ll know what I’m about to talk about. Techie geekery starts here. Yes, I probably shouldn’t get quite so worked up about technology, but here I am.

One thing that I’ve not found that easy to get hold of is an external enclosure for SATA disks. IDE/USB caddies have been pretty widely-available for a while now, but most disks now use the SATA interface so I needed something that would let me backup my Thinkpad onto a spare 200Gb 2.5″ disk I’d been given.

I had a look through a bunch of enclosures in Frys and I have to say I just pretty much went with what seemed simplest (a NexStar SX from Vantec), without really spending too much time on the features… the decision was mainly based on cost ($20) and size. So when I finally (!) got around to opening the box today, I was completely astounded at the quality of the product, given the cost.

The box itself was solid cardboard (not the flimsy sort of stuff I’d expected). Inside was a soft carry case, and inside that was the metal enclosure itself. The product also ships with a USB cable with a “pass through” socket which seems to enable more devices to be attached, a driver disk, some screws and a screwdriver – very complete.

Once I took the enclosure out of the carry case I had another pleasant surprise. It’s metal and very compact. There are two small squeeze clips at the back… press them in and the top and bottom are released to slide off. The other USB enclosure I’ve previously purchased was really poor compared to this, with ugly screw lugs on the top and a very loose lid… this thing is really elegant.

The only small issue I had was that the Hitachi drive I’d been supplied for my Thinkpad initially would not fit into the actual case, because it is so compact. The side screws made the drive just a little too wide to fit. I had to remove the top cover of the drive (see photo), but since Vantec provided a screwdriver this was no big deal.

That’s really all I have to say, but I just wanted to point out that this seems to be a really good quality bit of kit at a decent price. I probably ought to look for a 3.5″ version and then I can whip out the drives from my old Linux tower before decommissioning it!

New compact camera

(aka Vegas toys, exhibit 2)

It’s a while since I got back from Las Vegas, and I still haven’t posted everything I wanted to write about.

For a while now, I’ve been wanting to pick up a small digital camera as a sidearm / for situations when I didn’t have a DSLR handy. I’d previously owned a compact – a Fuji 5700 which was ~3-4MP, and which I’ve now passed on to my father-in-law. I got frustrated with that due to the lack of creative options as I was getting into photography more seriously, and moved up to the Canon EOS 350D. However, I’ve been to Vegas several times in the last few years, and not had a camera with me, so I was beginning to get itchy. And some days I just want to go out without a large bag with SLR and a selection of lenses!

So, I popped in to the large branch of Fry’s just out of town and spent some time browsing their selection.

I was pretty sure I wanted a Canon IXUS. I actually wasn’t going to force myself into it, but the selection criteria were essentially:

• very small
• optical viewfinder
• 7MP or better
• NOT taking Memory Stick (so Sony was out), and preferably not xD either (so Olympus and Fuji were not high on the list)
• preferably with image stabilisation (IS)

The Canon PowerShot SD800 IS Digital Elph / IXUS 850 IS met all of those criteria. Although the LCD is 2.5 inch rather than anything larger, it retains the optical viewfinder, which both Ola and I prefer to have available alongside the digital display on the back.

The other IXUS on display was 10MP (I think) and cheaper, but had no IS. Besides, that many pixels on a small sensor are going to lead to more noise.

When the sales guy rang it through on the till, it ended up $50 cheaper than on the label, and they also threw in a 2Gb SD card for a knockdown price (the camera itself came with a <sarcasm>HUGE</sarcasm> 16Mb SD card… I mean… wow). The 2Gb is a slow card, so I’ll almost certainly pick up a faster one at some point, but it’s enough to be getting on with. The camera is also compatible with the new high capacity SDHC standard, too, so should be fairly future proof.

Credit has to go to the folks who came electronics shopping with me, for waiting while I dithered over whether to buy a camera at all; and to Alex and Ben for having the patience to put up with my verbal deliberations on the subject.

So far I’ve made use of it in Vegas, and on travels to Windsor and Edinburgh, and Ola has taken it to Paris. Impressions are good. It’s totally pocketable. Image quality is pretty good. The only issues I have are that the lens shows some distortion at the wide end, there is a little bit of fringing on some of the detail, and the exposure can be a bit… err, playful (but then, I’d rather not have to shoot against plain grey clouded skies). It’s not the same as a DSLR, and I need to accept that. I’m sure I’ve barely explored the functions yet, so I’m looking forward to using it a little more.

Images taken with the IXUS are tagged with ‘ixus’ on my Flickr photostream.

Technorati tags: canon, elph, ixus, camera, digital camera, compact camera, photography

Mighty Wireless Windows Mouse

I mentioned the other day that I now own a wireless Apple Mighty Mouse. I wasn’t sure whether it would work with Windows. It does – for me, anyway.

I switched on Bluetooth on my Thinkpad T60p and scanned for devices. It found a mouse. I paired to it using the key ‘0000′. The drivers installed themselves.

A few issues:

• The mouse works fine, but the scroll ball doesn’t go side to side, and the side buttons don’t seem to do anything.
• On suspending and resuming the laptop, the mouse seems to lose the connection, and I have to re-pair. Really annoying. The Macbook copes with this with no issues.
• Once it was paired with the Windows XP laptop, the Macbook lost it. I had to remove it from Windows via the Bluetooth options, and then re-pair with the Macbook. Once I’d done that, I kept getting prompts on the Windows machine that a mouse wanted to pair with it. Confusing!

An interesing experiment, but I think I’ll keep the mouse native to the Macbook. I quite like the Trackpoint on my Thinkpad, anyway.

Useful Mighty Mouse links:

How to Configure a Mighty Mouse (in OS X)

Bluetooth Mighty Mouse Review

Technorati tags: Apple, mice, mouse, Mighty Mouse, Bluetooth, Windows, Thinkpad

Vegas toys, exhibit 1

Mighty

Originally uploaded by andyp uk.

Whilst in Vegas I picked up a couple of gadgets. The first one I’m highlighting is a lovely wireless Mighty Mouse.

Actually my first wireless mouse at all. Works perfectly with the MBP and did so from the moment I switched it on and pointed the laptop at it. The buttons on the side are a little hard to squeeze, but apart from that I like it. The rollerball for horizontal and vertical scrolling is a nice touch.

With the favourable exchange rate it was actually a reasonable price. I also picked up a spare battery in the Apple store on the Fashion Show mall at the same time.

More to come.

Going 28mm – new glass

I briefly twitter’ed last week that I’d got my hands on a Canon EOS 28mm f/2.8 prime lens. I won it on ebay, and as well as being in great condition and working out cheaper than retail, it came with a hood and a skylight filter. The reviews of the lens indicate that it is technically OK… again I didn’t want to spend a fortune, so I went for a good deal on a basic lens. Having bought a 50mm prime last year, I wanted something a little wider. Ideally I’d get something much wider, but anything in the 10-22mm range is a significant degree more expensive.

I’ve thrown a few test shots up on Flickr. Viewed at full size, you can see just how much detail is being captured. Parts of the image do look a little soft, but in general I’m impressed.

Plus, I’ve posted a couple of shots of the lens on the camera… unfortunately they show just how beaten up my camera is getting

Technorati Tags: canon, eos, Flickr, lens, photography, 28mm

Technology gets Everyware

A few weeks ago, Roo and I met Kim at Hursley. During the discussion we covered Declarative Living, Twitter, etc. and she recommended the book Everyware by Adam Greenfield. I ordered a copy there and then.

Subtitled “The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing”, the book covers a number of themes around the emergence of pervasive technology and devices, and the path to a possible future which might be more of similar to that depicted in the film Minority Report, or aspects of the world from Philip K. Dick’s book Ubik (talking, self-aware doors, anyone?).

Having explained his vision of ubicomp, Greenfield argues that all of the components needed for a seamless experience (or, preferably, a seamful experience “with beautiful seams” for me to customise) already exist. He focuses on ultra-wideband as having the potential to provide near universal connectivity and RFID for identification. The last section of the book is particularly compelling, as it attempts to address the need for standards and concerns over privacy and so on – and his enthusiasm for Hong Kong’s Octopus card system is nearly enough to make me try Oyster, after all my wrangling and concern about it. I’m intrigued by his idea that we as developers and users can force the emergence of standards in the same way that web standards emerged and browsers were forced to support the same HTML functions during the 1990s. We’ll see what happens.

I have to say that it’s a great, great book. It is written as a series of 81 “theses” (chapters) of between 1 and 4 pages, so it is really easy to consume, and much like Ted’s book on blogging, I was able to spin through it a few chapters at a time in the evenings. The style is also very accessible, and Greenfield builds each argument very persuasively.

One surprise is that the book never mentioned technologies like motes, but perhaps that’s a little too recent. The future looks both exciting, and still somewhat frightening.

Technorati Tags: Adam Greenfield, books, Everyware, RFID, reading, ubicomp

Thoughts on a MacBook Pro – the hardware

A number of decisions were involved in choosing my new laptop. I’d pretty much known I’d go for the Core Duo option (i.e. the Pro). However, it wasn’t until I was in the store and asked Adrian where the white and black ones were that he explained the Pro only comes in brushed metal. No matter.

The first choice was screen size. Pretty straightforward – 13″ too small, 17″ too expensive. 15″ is nice. I spent my test drive in the store using a 17″ model, but that would have been even bigger.

I did struggle to make a choice over the type of screen… glossy or matt. I tried both: played movies, viewed photos. The contrast and saturation on the glossy one was really good. Both are very sharp. There was a bit of reflection on the glossy screen though, and when I got to the point of ordering, the sales assistant asked what I’d be using it for and recommended matt for photo processing. Ironically, I think the Apple website recommends glossy for photo processing, I’ll have to go back and check

I wanted the upper spec in terms of memory and CPU, since I knew I’d be working on photos later.

So that was that. Now that I’ve used it a bit, my impressions of the hardware are (mostly) extremely positive.

The power adapter is a work of art, for starters. Magnetic attachment to the laptop. Clip to keep the wire in order when coiled away.  The plug or cable slides sideways onto a little lug which prevents the cable being kicked out of the power brick – very thoughtful.

The machine itself is weighty, and obviously longer than any Thinkpad I’ve ever handled due to the widescreen, but very very slim.

I do find the catch on the case to be a bit fiddly to press in, since it is very narrow (clearly I have fat fingers), but I like the way the sleep light comes on when the machine is in standby.

Keyboard excellent, although the narrowness of some of the keys bothers me a bit, I’ve missed the enter key a few times and switched caps lock on accidentally. I’ll adapt. I like the way it lights up according to ambient light levels.

I’m still getting used to a single mouse button. I love the Trackpoint on the Thinkpads, and have never used the trackpad even on the ones that have it. In the shop, I kept on tapping the trackpad to click. I know you can turn that on, but having used the MacBook for a bit now, I think I’m adapting to the button. I did actually try the tap-to-click function, but found it easier to use the button in the end.

The MacBook Pro comes equipped with Bluetooth. I checked for nearby devices and it immediately found my old Sony phone, generated a random pairing key, and then offered to sync with the phone book – nice – no need for additional software. 

It took me a week before I picked up the remote. I wasn’t sure what to expect. It looks like the old type of iPod shuffle. Press the menu button, and the MacBook immediately switches to Media Player mode, with a choice of playing a DVD; going through your iTunes library; browsing photos (although I’ve yet to work out how to stop it from playing annoying music when it puts on a slideshow); and looking at movies. The movies option also has a pretty trailers option which connects to the QuickTime trailers on the Apple website – advertising yes, but a handy touch when I didn’t have any actual movies to watch in the iTunes library.

I’ve not plugged it in to an external display yet – a moment of potential joy for the future. I like the range of ports on the machine, and the arrangement along both sides… The only thing I’m not so keen on is the lack of PCMCIA or ExpressCard slot – USB or FireWire peripherals all the way.

The only actual, physical concern I have is that the SuperDrive is unbelievably noisy. Is this normal? It makes a really nasty clicky clunky noise when a disc is inserted. It seems fairly quiet after that, though, and reads discs without any issues.

Currently I’m using an old Thinkpad backpack to carry it – I need to look around for a suitable case or shoulder bag.

We were watching an episode of Sex and the City the other night, and I noted that the Apple logo on the top of the iBook that Carrie was using was the other way up to the one on my MacBook Pro. That one was facing the user when the lid was closed. Mine faces away from me, so that it’s the “right way up” to an observer when the lid is open.

And with that statement… I’m going to be one of those Mac fanboys, aren’t I? You can tell already.

Technorati tags: Mac, OS X, MacBook Pro, Apple, hardware, SuperDrive

Switcher

Should I or shouldn’t I?

Originally uploaded by Aidy Spender.

I was at the opening of the new Apple store in West Quay, Southampton yesterday. I met up with Adrian in the queue. Quite an excited crowd even at 8.15 in the morning… it was a new world to me, overhearing people asking their friends whether they were using iMovie HD or not, were they going to get a Mighty Mouse, etc.

As Adrian noted, the opening itself was slightly embarrassing as it was filled with the staff whooping and cheering, probably induced by beatings

So I’m now the owner of a 15″ MacBook Pro.

The abuse has started already – one of my friends says I’ve “really sold out now”.

Why did I do it? Partly peer pressure, I must admit – Kelly, Roo and Adrian have all said great things about Macs. Partly love of shiny things. Partly a desire to learn something new, and I’ve always loved the look of OS X and the knowledge that it is based on a UNIX shell. But, mostly the fact that our Thinkpad R40 frankly isn’t going to run Vista after all, and it still has a tiny hard disc which isn’t going to withstand my photographic ambitions…

No time to blog in more detail right now, as I’m busily installing various bits of software to make myself more productive. I’m switching strictly for home use – I’ll still be on Windows on a Thinkpad at work, and I will still have a Linux server and workstation at home too. So I’m going to be nicely multiplatform

Lots to comment on as a new Mac user, so watch out for more from me over the coming days.