The Insomniac Coder

310: 5 O'clock (Photo credit: pvera ) Background : I have owned multiple copies of the first three generations of the Amazon Kindle , and the first generation of the $79 Kindle with offers. I have also owned three copies of the first generation Kindle Fire for about a year. The good : Almost everything that was changed in the Kindle Fire was an improvement. The screen is much better, the battery life is much better, and the device is faster. The OS changed a tiny little bit, which is of no concern to users that haven't experienced the first generation. The speakers are a lot better. The wireless wakes up much faster. If you put the device down it will go to sleep on its own unless you are playing video or audio. Pick it up and it wakes up again. The charging port is now on the side, which sucks if you want to prop it up in landscape mode with the official case. You can flip it of course, but then you lose the benefit of using the case as a prop stand. The ads are not ...

These are mostly random shots set in one of the automatic modes while I learn how the camera behaves: This is the first time I get any obvious distortion in the panorama modes, note the back window of the Jeep .  This is shot using the blur background mode.  Most of the following were shot from a moving car, through dirty glass: Shot in HDR+ mode.  Overall the camera behaves almost exactly like the DSC-TX9, except the lens is much nicer, and the vibration reduction is more effective. It is really hard to take a bad shot with this camera. Colors are usually warm, except on video. I uploaded a sample in AVCHD 1080/60p here .

I am sure that the late Bobby Baccalieri would had loved this: Related articles Knuffingen Airport, World's Largest Miniature Airport, Goes On Display In Hamburg (PHOTOS, VIDEO) (huffingtonpost.com) Model Airport of the Day (geeks.thedailywh.at) World's largest (model) airport opens in Hamburg (Daily Mail) (seattlepi.com)

I saw this on Reddit listed as "ridiculous Japanese candy " which is a disservice, the video is fascinating. Children all over the world love to play with food, and they all love candy. I am sure that if anyone would come up with such a kit for the states, but with things like candy hot dogs , pizza, etc. it would be a huge hit.

This came out yesterday, and got slashdotted this morning:   Here's what I don't understand: Why are people wasting time and resources reinventing the wheel ? Has any of these people looked around and noticed how now every major camera maker in the world has embraced HD video , to the point that it is possible to buy dedicated HD camcorders for around $200? Or how about HD video cameras with vibration control for under $400? Wouldn't this effort be better spent in decent video editing applications that are FOSS ? <HD editing rant> One constant with all of the HD cameras I have tried over the past two years (Kodak Zi6, Sony DSC W and TX series) is that HD editing sucks when you are constrained to whatever software ships with the camera or can be downloaded for free. And yea, I am including iMovie because it is STUPID how (I can attest to this until at least my switch to Windows 7 last year) that iMovie hides (used to?) the export choices that produce 720p o...

This is one of them days when I REALLY HATE MY CELL PHONE CAMERA. The camera in the Blackberry Curve is about as shitty as the cameras that shipped in the first two generations of the iPhone. It is simply terrible for anything that goes beyond scanning barcodes. What's sad is that when I got my new camera I made sure that I got a microSD card for it, so I could eject it from the camera, unplug it out of the miniSD adapter, plug it into the phone and blog from the road in all the glory that the Sony DSC-TX7 can provide. Instead, out of laziness (I had the camera with me, I never leave home without it) I tried to shoot with the cell phone, with the expected crappy results. To add yet more insult to injury, I had done bulk imports into blogger and I triggered their captcha failsafe. If you post too often, it starts giving you captchas to make sure that you are a real person and not a spam bot. The problem is this won't work if you are trying to blog through email, only if you ...

  This made me miss film a tiny little bit. The problem is that it also reminded me of how god damn expensive it was to shoot all that film, then either develop it (smelly, tedious, but rewarding) or having it sent out to process and print ($$$). Then I started remembering how much I sucked at using a light meter correctly, which was the most painful when shooting slides, which had a hell of a lot less room for error than print film. I shot a lot of blue snow, and flat shadows back in my film day. For some reason B&W film never gave me much grief. Tri-X and Plus-X always made me look like a hero, I really loved shooting these two films.  What killed my film addiction? A Sony digital camera that cost an arm and a leg, and had a huge, gorgeous chunk of glass as its lens. I tested one at my job, and liked it so much that I bought one for myself. That camera, the DSC-S70, let me take pictures I could have never figured out with my Nikon D60 35mm SLR.  It's been 1...

Image via Wikipedia I am trying to find something with a 7" or so screen for PJ . It has to play digital video , plain DVD won't cut it. It has to be sturdy and hopefully it should cost less than an iPod Touch, wireless connectivity is optional. The iPod Touch is the perfect device, but PJ is not the perfect candidate for it, it needs to be bigger so it is easier to find when he misplaces it, and it has to be sturdy enough to survive accidental drops. Level of complexity of the UI is a non-issue, PJ has been navigating his Xbox 36 through 2 generations of the dashboard, plus OSX and iOS1-4. A 7" iPad would certainly fit the profile, even if it would cost more than an iPod touch since it would definitely be bigger, and PJ has been using iPhones since they came out, so to him it would be nothing more than a huge iPhone.  Anyone has obvious choices that I haven't figured out yet? Related articles by Zemanta More shots of the next-gen iPod Touch front LCD and bez...