After three weeks, over 17,000 photos and hours of video, the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics are done. It feels strange to see the city slowly transform itself back to the pre-Olympic state (with some Paralympic exceptions).
Once I get back from SXSW mid-March, I’ll jump into the Paralympics as much as I can using my True North Media House badge. I’m also still waiting to hear from Nikon about my D90 that got a little too exposed to the elements during my adventures. I’m hoping it can simply dry out and work again but we’ll see in about a week.
For now, here’s a highlight video I made using various video and photographic content I created during the games:
I came across this cool little photo frame today at Future Shop (who call it a
Memorex 1.5″ Trio Digital Photo Frame). There are a ton of digital frames on the market now but this one stood out as a little different since it has three different screens that your photos show on (35mm film canister for size reference):
Unlike many other frames I’ve seen, it can be run off USB or a battery with 15 hours of battery life or simply plug the USB cable into the included wall plug and run it off AC. You can also rotate it vertically and your photos automagically rotate.
I haven’t been able to make it work under OSX yet but it worked fine under XP via VMWare. It comes with an autorunning app for managing the photos on the frame and even lets you edit them to fit the 128×128 screens that look pretty decent. It has 20mb of memory or about 50 photos at that size.
It’s small, it’s cheap at $29.99 and a cool addition for on your desk or wherever.
I picked up this little guy (aka the Toaster) recently after seeing Peter’s success with it.
It’s a network connected storage device. What does that mean? It means that you can put two SATA hard drives inside it, plug it into your network and access those drives anywhere on your local network.
Until recently, I had two 500gb SATA drives inside my PowerMac G5 tower that I was using as a file server. Unfortunately, the videocard (among other things) seems to be dying and a replacement is pretty expensive. I can’t even remote into the box anymore. Actually the replacement seems to be about the price of the DNS-323 (around $150 Cdn which doesn’t include any drives) so it seemed like a sensible way to upgrade. You can setup the drives to work as one giant drive or in a number of other Raid configurations. I’m currently only using one drive in there until I get a chance to clean off the other 500gb drive I have. I haven’t read any limitations on drive size but I’m sure they exist.
The main (big) selling point for me is the fact that it has a built in bit torrent client with a web based interface that you can interact with from any device on your network. This completely replaces the PowerMac for me – at least how I was using that machine as primarily a file server and bit torrent client box.
Unfortunately, the downsides I’ve come across so far include crappy Safari support so I have to use Firefox to initiate torrents. Also, the firmware likes to forget some settings when you reboot the device. Fortunately, the firmware seems to be actively updated and the settings bug is an acknowledged issue that will be addressed soon. The initial setup also required a PC to configure. I did this via VMWare but had to tweak my network settings so that the bridged connection could actually see the DNS-323.
Once it was all setup though, it worked like a charm. It just pops up as a network server on all my Macs and fully accessible. I’m not currently using it as my Time Machine backup system but I could easily set it up to do it.
The device also has a USB port but that’s reserved to function as a wireless printer port only so you can’t plug the toaster into your computer and access files via USB.
I haven’t set it up yet, but it also can run as an iTunes server which might be handy for those with multiple computers and one giant library.
Overall, I’m very happy with the DNS-323. It does what it says it will do and after a little setup, can literally be left alone like a toaster. Check out the manual, driver and firmware details on the D-Link support site.
I’ve only barely had time to play with the D90 video mode – let alone even get familiar with all the controls and options but here’s a couple videos taken with in HD mode (720p, 24fps, 1280×720) – nothing remotely fantastic, just what I’ve had time to do so far:
I’m still playing with the different video upload providers…if you have any favorites, that support HD, drop them in the comments. The Vimeo uploads look a bit washed out upon conversion for the web….the Flickr upload looks great (and was alot faster to upload compared to Vimeo) but isn’t in HD.
I’ll reserve judgement on the video mode until I’ve had more time with the camera and with better conditions to shoot under…but so far, this is pretty damn cool…but lots to learn/figure out still.
Head over to Michael Gist’s site for information about a new bill that could be introduced as soon as tomorrow that will have huge impacts on peer to peer file sharing in Canada. The main bullet point is that file sharers would be fined $500 PER copyrighted file they shared.
I have a hard time believing something like this, at least in it’s current state, would get passed in Canada without any controversy.
