So as my regular readers know, I recently ***purchased a new camera|http://prwdot.org/archives/002432.html***. This camera is considerably larger and less-portable than my previous camera. It certainly won’t fit in any pocket of any article of clothing that I own, and I wouldn’t want to attempt to carry it everywhere. I’ve been looking for a nice, big, not-quite-professional-grade camera like this for a while, and I’m loving it.

My previous camera, the Canon Powershot A70, was portable, but not really all that portable. Though it could fit in a pocket, it was not terribly comfortable to carry, and it was also relatively heavy, what with four AA batteries. So I never really considered it a ‘portable’ camera. In any case, I just sold it to ***Corey|http://corey.prwdot.org/***, so it’s out of the picture (no pun intended).

So what I’m looking for now is a small, inexpensive (less than $100) camera that can do at least 640×480 resolution… the type of thing I can keep in a pocket and take everywhere, to take photos on those occasions where I don’t have the Big Kahuna tagging along. My current phone, the ***Sanyo SCP-8100|http://www.phonescoop.com/phones/phone.php?p=293***, has a camera built in… but the quality and size of the photos leave quite a bit to be desired. They are usually muddy, out of focus, grainy, and their resolution is a lot lower than my 640×480 minimum. There are some other camera phones out there with better quality, but I don’t know about pricing.

Any suggestions?

Tonight I attended the ***Berkman Thursday Meeting|http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/thursdays*** at Harvard Law School’s ***Berkman Center|http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/home/***. I had heard about the meeting a while ago through the ***Boston Blogger Meetup|http://blog.meetup.com/3/*** group, and had wanted to attend… and tonight I finally got around to it. I invited ***Kellan|http://laughingmeme.org/*** to come, thus killing two birds with one stone – attending a Berkman meeting, and meeting Kellan (which I’d been hoping to do since he mentioned he was going to be in Boston).
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My ***NewEgg|http://www.newegg.com/*** shipment arrived today. Included were the ***HEISEI 6-in-1 USB flash reader/writer|http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=20-180-212&depa=0*** ($14.49), and the ***KingMax 512 MB SecureDigital card|http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=20-155-257&depa=0*** ($39.91). Both arrived in excellent condition, and work just as advertised. Well done, NewEgg. The flash reader is pretty tiny – I ***have|http://gallery.prwdot.org/grab_bag/P1000301*** ***some|http://gallery.prwdot.org/grab_bag/P1000305*** ***photos|http://gallery.prwdot.org/grab_bag/P1000308*** if anyone’s interested. (the SD card in the shots is, obviously, not the 512 meg card – I was using that to take the photos…)

I’ve recently been doing some ‘under the hood’ tweaking to prwdot.org, to make things run smoother, easier, faster, etc. If you are interested in technical stuff, and the mere mention of ‘code samples’ makes your ears perk up, then you might enjoy reading on to see what I’ve done and to offer comments, suggestions, or questions…
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For the past few years, I’ve used Turbo Tax to do our annual federal and state income taxes. It’s pretty easy to use and I have not had any trouble with it. This year, I got a mailing that offered Turbo Tax at a discount, along with a few chintzy free software packages and free shipping thrown in, so I figured I would take them up on the offer. Couldn’t hurt to have it delivered directly to my house to avoid having to make a trip just to buy the software. Or could it? Well, it seems that I made a mistake when I placed my order.

ppp||ppp

Apparently I ordered “Turbo Cracks” when I meant to order “Turbo Tax”. Thanks Intuit, this is going to be very helpful for getting my taxes done. Really brilliant idea to send your CD-ROMs in a soft-sided envelope with no protection whatsoever. I could blame the USPS for damaging it in transit, but instead I’ll blame you for not using sturdier, more protective packaging. Now the question is, do I forgive you, and just go out and purchase a copy of Turbo Tax locally, or do I spite you and purchase ***Tax Cut|http://www.hrblock.com/taxes/products/product.jsp?productId=34*** instead. It looks to be a better deal anyway, so maybe that’s what I’ll do. Bah.

The primary reason that comment spammers post spam comments is to increase their ranking in search engines. Here’s how it works:
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***Griffin Technology|http://www.griffintechnology.com/*** is going to be ***releasing some new products|http://www.ipodlounge.com/ipodnews_comments.php?id=6045_0_7_0_M*** at ***MWSF|http://www.macworldexpo.com/live/20/events/20SFO05A*** this week. People seem to be most interested in the AirClick, the new wireless remote for the iPod. There’s also a USB dongle which will allow you to use the AirClick remote to control your Mac. While I think it’s a pretty cool idea, those general concepts have been done before. Admittedly, the new twist is that it’s RF control, rather than IR, so you don’t need line-of-sight to aim the remote. But the general concept of remote control for your iPod and/or Mac is nothing new.

No, the new product that most interests me is the SmartDeck. This spiffy device looks just like a regular car casette adapter, but instead of simply routing the sound from the iPod to the car stereo, it also allows the iPod to interface with the casette deck’s mechanical controls. In other words, when you hit the pause button on your car’s casette deck, it stops the casette from rotating, and sends a signal down the wire to your iPod telling it to pause. When you hit fast forward, your iPod will fast forward. So on and so forth. This is extremely cool for people like me and Becky who have older cars with casette decks and no interface with which to hook up more advanced control solutions. Pricing hasn’t been announced, but my hope is that it will be priced affordably. As nice as the iPod’s controls are, they just aren’t made to be easily handled while driving. It would be much easier to stop, skip, and play on the iPod by using the casette deck controls.

Griffin, if you’re reading this, I would be more than willing to write a review of this new product… just send me one to test out (and keep). Thanks.

I think Kellan is ***on to something|http://laughingmeme.org/archives/002693.html***. Where can I sign up for the support group?

I think that I’ve solidified my position on some of the social/tagging sites that are trendy these days.

First, ***flickr|http://www.flickr.com/***. I think flickr has some cool technology for people who want to share photos. I like their tagging system, whereby you can assign multiple categories to the photos you upload, and then view your collection (or other peoples’ collections) grouped by tag. The idea of a running photo stream is cool, and their tagging combined with their RSS feeds provide neat ways to integrate your photos into a website. But for me, it’s just not necessary. We already have a huge ***gallery|http://gallery.prwdot.org/***. Though it doesn’t have tags, it is pretty well categorized and organized (if I do say so myself), and it’s easily searchable. Google has our gallery well indexed, and the gallery has its own search engine. Plus, it has its own RSS feed – just look for the ubiquitous orange button at the bottom of any gallery page. So flickr… if we didn’t already have a great, established photo gallery, and I was looking to get started with sharing photos on the web… I might have some use for you…

The other tagging tool that I’ve been trying out is ***del.icio.us|http://del.icio.us/***. Using a ***bookmarklet|http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bookmarklet*** or a Firefox extension, I can grab the URL of whatever page I’m looking at, write up a brief description of the page, and then provide a few tags to denote the categories that the page fits in to. This adds the page to my running list of links, groups it into various categories by tag, and aggregates it with links other people have posted from the same categories. del.icio.us also tracks how many people have posted a given link, so if you visit my ***del.icio.us|http://del.icio.us/prwood*** page, you can see which of the links I’ve posted have also been posted by others. Pretty sweet. Using one of the multitude of RSS feeds that are available, I’ve integrated my del.icio.us feed into my ***clipblog|http://prwdot.org/?p=clipblog***. I still use ***Bloglines|http://www.bloglines.com/*** to actually manage my blogroll and read new blog entries and news, but del.icio.us will now be the place that I stash all of the interesting links that I read. I’m still learning more about how to make better use of it.

w00t.