I have been looking for a camera to replace my aging Canon S300. I want to get into shooting some video for a podcast and I also need a still camera with good macro performance. Canon has the TX1 available now and it would seem like the perfect choice on paper but there are problems. The TX1 is a first gen product, the battery life is half that of the G7, the zoom range doesn’t go as wide as the G7 and its currently more expensive. The HD movies and big optical zoom were tempting but ultimately I don’t see those features being advantageous for web video. Most zoom shots look amateurish and HD burns a lot of bandwidth.

The G7 has a very respectable movie mode. It shoots Motion JPEG AVI video at 640×480 @ 30fps. It can shoot continuously at that rate for 30 minutes. Thats long enough to cover most things that I want to film. The files it produces are big, 4GB at that rate but thats actually a plus for web video. Having a high fidelity progressive scan source to compress will result in a really high quality podcast. Mini DV camcorders shoot interlaced video and to get progressive output you need to spend upwards of 1K. Also the G7 has a poorly named ‘safety zoom’ feature which is actually quite cool. The digital zoom can actually be used at lower resolutions without any quality loss. This means the 4x digital zoom should actually be quite useful in movie mode. Edit: Well it’s not that cool because it doesn’t work in for Movies.
The older canon cameras have a 1GB limit on videos while the newer models with the Digic III processor have raised that limit to 4GB. 1GB gets you about 8 minutes of footage at high quality. I really felt this would get annoying. Having to constantly go and restart the movie mode to keep the film rolling so to speak. I didn’t want to be limited in that way even if the video gets cut down in post production. So I ruled out quite a few very good cameras because of the short movies. With an 8GB card on board the new cameras can shoot for an hour with only a single interruption. Thats great for on location work. In my workshop I’ll have it plugged into the mains so I can shoot pretty much continuously.

You can also tether the camera to a PC and Canon’s software will allow you to capture still shots directly to the PC. It can be set up to shoot at an interval to produce time lapse sequences. I’m defiantly going to be playing with that feature!
The G7 got criticized by reviewers for its lack of RAW support and the high price tag. If I didn’t value the video capabilities of the camera quite so highly I would have to agree. If you just want a solid still camera get the A640 instead and save some cash. For my needs though, I’m getting two cameras in one. In the future I may get a dedicated video camera and at that point I’ll still have a great, compact still camera in the G7.

I cant claim that my decision was entirely driven by reviews and spec sheets. I really like the look of the camera. Its hefty and really solidly built. It reminds me of the old film camera my father has with all the external dials. I just kept coming back to it and drooling.

A strange interaction bug on my work machine between Firebug, Visual Studio and Netvibes causes Firefox to run as slow as a dog. Remove any one factor from the equation and things return to normal AFTER a reboot. So I’ve seen it and I don’t know the actual underlying cause or solution. At home I don’t have Visual Studio running and its just fine. The bug only kicks in after visual Studio is launched.
The Apple iTunes COM SDK has disappeared from apples site. What gives Apple? We want it back with access to the new features!

I have been testing Google Apps for your domain service for a couple of months now. Recently there has been a lot of downtime. This coincides with the announcement that Google will be charging $50 for the service per year and paying users will get 99.9% uptime. In my case the only part of the service I care for is the e-mail gateway. Using GMail as a way to access my e-mail at work and to filter my spam has been very effective. $50 isn’t bad for that service. Of course my annual hosting fee at Dreamhost is only about double that.

Spektrum users (and probably all 2.4Ghz users) should be careful to orient their antennas towards the heaves lest they loose control of their model. A few people (yours truly included) are having glitching and lockouts related to pointing the tip of the antenna at the model. Its a good example of “Don’t Do That Then”, keep the tip of the antenna pointed away from the model and all is well. Much chastened by these events the author now has his ‘up’ all the time.

Lastly and probably of deepest importance. Internet radio as we know it is probably going to come to an end. As I write this I’m listening to the soothing sounds of “Groove Salad” on Soma FM. The same music station that brought you that Télépopmusik song from the Mitsubishi commercial. Yes, Groove Salad listeners were pretty tired of it by the time it got to the main stream. Now the RIAA wants to get its Payola on with internet radio. Net broadcasters will have to pay new per listener fees that even terrestrial broadcasters won’t pay. NPR isn’t happy and neither am I. With tunes going on sale sans DRM at the iTunes Music store, the logic behind this ruling no longer holds any water. Write your congress critter so we can save the music.

I got four flights in with the Inspire Mini this afternoon. It was windy, with the wind blowing across the runway, nasty conditions to go flying in with a park flyer. I did really well, all four flights went smooth and I even had some really nice landings. There were a bunch of mishaps, someone ground looped on takeoff and smashed their new airplane, several people nosed in on landing breaking props and landing gear. It was kinda brutal to watch all these crashes and mishaps and then have a perfectly fine day of flying myself. I guess I’m just getting better. I finally seem to be getting actual practice when I go flying instead of breaking things.

I’m redesigning this skin for WordPress, thats why the blog looks different. I started with K2 which is a really nice skin with configurable options and a bunch of cool stuff. I wrote up tasks for all the changes I intend to make and when I get spare time I’ll do one. Tonight it was making the layout wider, but it really needs to expand from some minimum size and not be fixed width this time. I’m going for a simpler look with RSS and search featured more heavily. Well, one little bit at a time.

Sketchup 6 Pro Trial cannot be installed side by side with the free version. When you run the pro installer it finds the free version, even if its installed in a different directory, and performs an ‘upgrade’. I assume it does this by querying the registry, looking for an existing install. I tried a couple of other attacks like running the ‘repair’ option from the free version after the pro install, no dice.

So if your a hobbyist and want to continue to be able to export PDF and other files by using the Sketchup Pro trial you have to be a bit more creative. You could get a friend in college to register a copy for you, the educational license is only $50 per year. You could run Sketchup Pro in a virtual machine to keep it from detecting the free version, VMWare is free.

I wish there was a pricing option for hobbyists and others interested in producing non commercial and Creative Commons works. A price similar to the academic license would at least attract people that don’t do CAD for a living. $50 annually for anyone and just stipulate that it cannot be used for commercial purposes. Sketchup is a program I would gladly pay money for. The Sketchup team makes a great product and they deserve support. But I’m not going to give up almost $500 (50% of my annual hobby budget) just so I can export my drawings to PDF.