My old tripod were a pain in the @ss. The slightest wind made the camera rock like it was on a boat in heavy weather. The need for something a little more stable was there.
The original idea was to get a tripod which weighed about half a kilo. Could hold a weight of 10 kilos, and had the most comfortable ball bearing head available. And (not to forget) wouldn't cost more than 100 euros..... Well, that wasn't about to happen :-( .
So I bought a
Manfrotto 718B tripod (99 euros). It's small, weighs about 1.5 kilos and can hold about 2.5 kilos of gear (which is about the combined weight of my Nikon D200 and Sigma 80-400 OS lens).
So my old tripods [
1,
2] are for sale as of this moment. You may start your bidding. If you're interested, you should ignore the first paragraph ;-) . There's absolutely nothing wrong with the tripods.....
UPDATE: The tripods have been sold (sort of), so please stop bothering me :-)
Apple released the iPhone last Friday in the US. I didn't report on this, because a) I can't get my hands on it atm, b) there was a lot of media coverage this weekend, c) I had better things to do.
They sold over half a million phones this weekend. That's great, BUT....
There are some elementary things missing on the phone. Things I couldn't live with. Most of them are mentioned
here.
As you might have noticed, I have a Nokia E61i at this moment. This phone was meant to be kinda temporary, since the iPhone won't be available in Europe just yet. But if Apple won't resolve most of those 'issues' there won't be an iPhone for me.
How lame is it that you can't use Bluetooth the way it's meant for transferring files, 'abusing' it for a modem, so you can hook it up to your laptop and surf the Internet. At this moment, every other (Windows Mobile or Symbian based) phone on the market with has more functionality than the current iPhone. The only drawback on the current phones is that they're not made by Apple.
So I'll stick to my Nokia until they fixed those elementary functions.
Tried to use my new Nokia E61i for surfing the Internet with my laptop (Windows XP), but this just wouldn't work. Errors were plenty, but no bit made it to the Internet for some reason. Strange, because my older 6230 (or whatever model it was) worked perfectly.
After cursing a couple of times, I needed to make sure that this wasn't a defect in the phone, so I tried it with my Mac Book Pro (which is for sale by the way ;-) ). Obviously, this worked straight away. Just used the same settings / profile from my older phone....
Windows never keeps to amaze me (in a negative way that is).
Apple started shipping
new Mac Book Pro's. These new little gems are based on the new Intel Santa Rosa chipset. This means, more power, and less power consumption. They also refitted the laptops with LED backlit screens to reduce power consumption.
Other features include;
- 2GB RAM (4GB max instead of 3GB)
- 802.11n WiFi
- Larger and faster hard disks (>120GB)
Boy, this makes me wanna upgrade.. Anyone fancy a first generation Mac Book Pro for a couple of bucks?
A new version of iTunes has been made available (7.2) to the public. The new iTunes support the new iTunes Music Store with DRM free music files.
Some sites found out that the DRM-free music does contain your iTunes account info (username and full name). Probably to make sure that you won't share you purchased music on P2P networks...
More good news from Apple is the upcoming update on the Apple TV. The Apple TV will be made available with a bigger hard drive (160GB instead of 40GB). And a upcoming software updates allows the user to watch YouTube videos om the Apple TV.
Now we only need native DivX/XviD support on the Apple TV.....
AppleInsider found a filed
patent by Apple that reveiles a possible future new iPod design.
And again, I can't wait
Recently, the dutch
Tweakers website started with dissecting USB flashdrives. Their goal is to see if the so-called secure USB flashdrives are as secure as the manufacturer says they are.
They reviewed the SecuStick, and a BioStick. The first protects the data with a password. The latter (two different versions were tested) uses biometrics (fingerprints) to secure your precious data (in combination with AES encryption).
The full reports can be read
here, (SecuStick) and
here (BioStick). The dutch review can be read on the tweakers.net website (
here, and
here) along with interessting comments on the article.
Conclusion of the articles: Some of these so-called secure USB flashdrives are not as secure as you might think. Oke, the data is 'secure' for the casual user. If real secrets (your private pron collection :-) ) are being stored on those USB flashdrives, you might want to consider using TrueCrypt (with a strong password, and keyfiles) to store your 'valuable' data.
The Apple TV box is available at this moment. This devices allows you to stream music, and movies from iTunes on your TV. Downside is that you also need iTunes to host these files, since the Apple TV can only sync with iTunes. This also introduces a limitation. It's not possible to watch videos in a format like DivX, or XviD. iTunes doesn't support those (and therefor, the Apple TV won't support them either.
It is possible to hack the Apple TV and add DivX/XviD support (and lot's of other nifty features like installing a hacked version of OSX). To achieve this, you need to open the Apple TV (byebye warranty).
The other possibility is to get a Mac Mini, and strip it down mainly for media center purposes. Downside with the Mac Mini is that it's a bit more expensive.
Currently I use my MacBook Pro as a media center (whenever I need it). But this is kind of a hassle with power, audio and DVI connectors. So I need a (relatively cheap non Windows based) dedicated setup for watching content on my TV. *SIGH*
100Mbps is soooooo
1993, and fully insufficient in copying lot's of Linux images :wink: over my internal network. So, today I upgraded to Gigabit. Even with the purchased el-cheapo hardware (Intel Pro NIC's, and a 3COM 10/100/1000 switch) the speed increase is noticeable (70-80Mbps versus 300-350Mbps).
Too bad that my DSL connection doesn't go that fast :-(
It's been a couple of days since the release of the
Apple TV. Directly after its release it became clear that the device runs on a minimal version of OSX. It didn't take long for enthusiasts to open the Apple TV box, and add extra functionality (like
SSH, DivX, XviD, etc). Even adding a much
bigger harddrive is quite possible.
These 'hacks' can be found on
AppleTVHacks.net.
Today, a new hack surfaced. It seems that Apple implemented some sort of limitation on running a full blown version of OSX... Well, that limitation didn't last very long. There's a
short tutorial about running OSX on the Apple TV (including support for keyboard and mouse). This makes the Apple TV the cheapest Apple PC available (299 euros).
You do need additional hardware to make this work (like special screwdrivers, an Intel Mac, some extra peripherals, etc.)
