I have not booted into XP on my home system for several months. I have not yet run into anything that I can't do in Vista Ultimate 32bit OS. I don't have any crash problems or driver issues either. My computer looks great, runs great and even edits video from our new HD video camera decently (Canon HF20). My next big step is to move to Windows 7 when it is released. For some reason I still don't want to completely wipe out my XP system drive...paranoia I suppose. Everything is backed up and since I haven't even booted into XP in months, there probably is no reason to keep XP on my system.
I still run XP on my work computer and on our slow 'primary' home computer downstairs in the living room. Work computer we keep the same for cost and compatibility reasons, our slower home computer just isn't powerful enough to run Vista.
Thought you might be interested in an update.
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Geocaching
I have recently begun to enjoy Geocaching with my son. It is a fun little 'treasure hunting' game that uses GPS coordinates to locate the 'cache'. You create a free account at www.geocaching.com and search for caches near you. You read a description of the cache, read logs from previous finders and can then get an aerial map view of the location if you so desire. The description and hints usually give you the details of what to look for once you are near the GPS coordinates.
I find the satellite view from Google Maps to be the best way to pinpoint the location of the cache. Up until the most recent update to the Google Map website (as well as the Maps app on the iPhone) has been spot on every time. The new update however seems to snap the location to a street instead of the actual coordinates. The easiest way around this is to just add "loc: " to the beginning of the coordinates when you use them in Google Maps.
Incorrect coordinates will look like this:
N 47° 24.034 W 122° 14.599
Correct coordinates will look like this:
loc: N 47° 24.034 W 122° 14.599
Hopefully this will be fixed in future releases of either the Geocaching app or in the Maps app for iPhone. Until then be sure to add "loc: " to get the right placement on the map!!
I've recently purchased the Geocaching app for my iPhone. While the app is a little too expensive for my taste, it is so fast and easy to use I highly recommend it for anyone using their iPhone for Geocaching. The iPhone GPSr is not the most accurate (about 55feet at its best) but the ability to see recent logs, descriptions, hints, maps, nearby caches etc....makes it a very useful device while out and about.
My son (who is four right now) really enjoys going to "look for treasure". He's been able to trade things when we find caches large enough for toys and such. He's traded hot wheels cars and small McDonalds toys. It's a fun adventure and a way to get out and explore! This summer we are going on a trip to Yellowstone and hope to find some caches along the way.
We've purchased a few 'Travel Bugs' to drop along the way. Travel Bugs are special dog tags that have a unique serial number printed on them. When someone finds one in a cache, they are supposed to log in to the website and report that it has been picked up. They are then able to drop it off in another cache and report where it has been dropped. This will be a fun way to track your items and see where they travel. Most Travel Bugs have a goal listed, so when you pick one up you are supposed to help it go to it's goal location.
Here are a couple of ours so far:
( not yet dropped off in a cache )
http://www.geocaching.com/track/details.aspx?guid=39caccfb-f327-4840-b423-6f432b9af647
I hope people add items to the key chain as it travels. It will be fun to see what kinds of hitch hikers it can pick up.
I find the satellite view from Google Maps to be the best way to pinpoint the location of the cache. Up until the most recent update to the Google Map website (as well as the Maps app on the iPhone) has been spot on every time. The new update however seems to snap the location to a street instead of the actual coordinates. The easiest way around this is to just add "loc: " to the beginning of the coordinates when you use them in Google Maps.
Incorrect coordinates will look like this:
N 47° 24.034 W 122° 14.599
Correct coordinates will look like this:
loc: N 47° 24.034 W 122° 14.599
Hopefully this will be fixed in future releases of either the Geocaching app or in the Maps app for iPhone. Until then be sure to add "loc: " to get the right placement on the map!!
I've recently purchased the Geocaching app for my iPhone. While the app is a little too expensive for my taste, it is so fast and easy to use I highly recommend it for anyone using their iPhone for Geocaching. The iPhone GPSr is not the most accurate (about 55feet at its best) but the ability to see recent logs, descriptions, hints, maps, nearby caches etc....makes it a very useful device while out and about.
My son (who is four right now) really enjoys going to "look for treasure". He's been able to trade things when we find caches large enough for toys and such. He's traded hot wheels cars and small McDonalds toys. It's a fun adventure and a way to get out and explore! This summer we are going on a trip to Yellowstone and hope to find some caches along the way.
We've purchased a few 'Travel Bugs' to drop along the way. Travel Bugs are special dog tags that have a unique serial number printed on them. When someone finds one in a cache, they are supposed to log in to the website and report that it has been picked up. They are then able to drop it off in another cache and report where it has been dropped. This will be a fun way to track your items and see where they travel. Most Travel Bugs have a goal listed, so when you pick one up you are supposed to help it go to it's goal location.
Here are a couple of ours so far:
( not yet dropped off in a cache )
http://www.geocaching.com/track/details.aspx?guid=39caccfb-f327-4840-b423-6f432b9af647
I hope people add items to the key chain as it travels. It will be fun to see what kinds of hitch hikers it can pick up.
Monday, June 22, 2009
Canon HF20
After our very old Sony camcorder died on the day of our sons last-day-of-Pre-School program I have been on the search for a replacement video camera. Our Sony MiniDV camera (TRV-17) lasted us many years and I was quite sure it wouldn't be worth having it repaired. There are so many different kinds of cameras, formats, models, brands....it was a bit overwhelming. After doing a quick look online at BestBuy to get an idea of price ranges I decided to research only Canon cameras. They seemed to be more in my price range and had more of the features I wanted.
We ended up getting the Canon HF20 High Definition camcorder. It records to 32GB of internal flash memory and is expandable via an SD card slot. It records to a very good looking but very compressed HD format called AVCHD. For anyone looking to buy a camera that records this format, BE SURE to download sample clips and make sure your computer can play them. It is a very processor intensive format and requires a lot of power just to play the files. Our Intel Core2Duo @ 2.66GHz running Vista Ultimate 32bit has no trouble playing and editing, but our AMD TurionX2 @ 1.8GHz laptop running Vista Home 32bit and our Intel Celeron @ 2.6GHz desktop running XP can't play the files well at all.
I had wrestled for a long time trying to decide whether we should get a file based recording system versus a tape based recording system like HDV. HDV records to a MiniDV tape and all video capture is therefore realtime via FireWire 400. AVCHD is just a file transfer over USB2.0 for video capture. So if you record 30 minutes of video on a HDV tape and want to edit it, you need to capture all 30 minutes in real time before you can start editing. With AVCHD, you transfer the files and can start editing within about 5 minutes.....HUGE time saver. This was a big selling point for me bacause the reason I hardly ever edited the video I shot previously was because it took so long to put in on the computer to begin with.
While you save a lot of time getting the video on your computer using AVCHD, you do sacrifice some time at the end of the edit when you export a file. Again it is a very processor intensive format so the computer must decode, then re-encode the video to make a new file to save on your computer. On my Intel Core2Duo @ 2.66GHz, it is about a 5:1 ratio for export. For every 1 minute of edited video, it takes aobut 5 minutes to export. Luckily it is something you can set and forget, let it run overnight or while you're eating dinner.
Very happy with the camera so far. Here are some things I really like about the Canon HF20:
File based video transfer
Expandable memory
Takes HD still photos while shooting video
Built in video light and flash
Small, small small small!! Can fit into a big jacket pocket easily.
At the middle recording mode (of 5 settings) can hold about 6 hours of video on internal memory
Plenty of manual settings (Aperture, Exposure, Focus etc...)
Here are some not so cool things:
90 minute battery life with stock battery (seems short to me)
You must plug camera into the wall power to transfer files from internal memory
Need a pretty beefy computer to play back files
Long export time for edited videos
Obviously if the bad things I listed were deal breakers I would return the camera....but realistically all the pros heavily outweight the cons in my mind. Quality of the video is quite good. Low light could be better I suppose, but to get the low light quality you'd need to spend a LOT more money on a camera with 3 chips....way out of my price range. The HF20 got really good reviews on cnet.com and also on Amazon.com (my two favorite places to get info on electronics). Besides, CNET says it is on par with other cameras in its class.
I edit video on Adobe Premiere CS4 and have had very good results. The camera did come with some editing software that says it's able to put your edited video back on the camera....I have not yet tried it. Since the camera has HDMI out, HD/SD Component out, and composite out, there are plenty of ways to watch your video from the camera without the need to edit it. We don't have and HD TV in our house, so putting video back on the camera doesn't make sense for us. So really at this point we have no way of even watching our HD home videos, but I figure one day we will and it will be nice to have some HD footage of the kids growing up. I've posted a few videos already on Facebook, they look quite good I'd say.
THe price of hard drives is coming down so quickly, that finding a reasonably priced hard drive to store all this priceless footage will be easy. Almost every week I get some sort of email advertising name brand 1TB hard drives for less than $100. Copy the footage to one of these in an external enclosure, pop it in the fire safe for worry free long term storage.
We ended up getting the Canon HF20 High Definition camcorder. It records to 32GB of internal flash memory and is expandable via an SD card slot. It records to a very good looking but very compressed HD format called AVCHD. For anyone looking to buy a camera that records this format, BE SURE to download sample clips and make sure your computer can play them. It is a very processor intensive format and requires a lot of power just to play the files. Our Intel Core2Duo @ 2.66GHz running Vista Ultimate 32bit has no trouble playing and editing, but our AMD TurionX2 @ 1.8GHz laptop running Vista Home 32bit and our Intel Celeron @ 2.6GHz desktop running XP can't play the files well at all.
I had wrestled for a long time trying to decide whether we should get a file based recording system versus a tape based recording system like HDV. HDV records to a MiniDV tape and all video capture is therefore realtime via FireWire 400. AVCHD is just a file transfer over USB2.0 for video capture. So if you record 30 minutes of video on a HDV tape and want to edit it, you need to capture all 30 minutes in real time before you can start editing. With AVCHD, you transfer the files and can start editing within about 5 minutes.....HUGE time saver. This was a big selling point for me bacause the reason I hardly ever edited the video I shot previously was because it took so long to put in on the computer to begin with.
While you save a lot of time getting the video on your computer using AVCHD, you do sacrifice some time at the end of the edit when you export a file. Again it is a very processor intensive format so the computer must decode, then re-encode the video to make a new file to save on your computer. On my Intel Core2Duo @ 2.66GHz, it is about a 5:1 ratio for export. For every 1 minute of edited video, it takes aobut 5 minutes to export. Luckily it is something you can set and forget, let it run overnight or while you're eating dinner.
Very happy with the camera so far. Here are some things I really like about the Canon HF20:
File based video transfer
Expandable memory
Takes HD still photos while shooting video
Built in video light and flash
Small, small small small!! Can fit into a big jacket pocket easily.
At the middle recording mode (of 5 settings) can hold about 6 hours of video on internal memory
Plenty of manual settings (Aperture, Exposure, Focus etc...)
Here are some not so cool things:
90 minute battery life with stock battery (seems short to me)
You must plug camera into the wall power to transfer files from internal memory
Need a pretty beefy computer to play back files
Long export time for edited videos
Obviously if the bad things I listed were deal breakers I would return the camera....but realistically all the pros heavily outweight the cons in my mind. Quality of the video is quite good. Low light could be better I suppose, but to get the low light quality you'd need to spend a LOT more money on a camera with 3 chips....way out of my price range. The HF20 got really good reviews on cnet.com and also on Amazon.com (my two favorite places to get info on electronics). Besides, CNET says it is on par with other cameras in its class.
I edit video on Adobe Premiere CS4 and have had very good results. The camera did come with some editing software that says it's able to put your edited video back on the camera....I have not yet tried it. Since the camera has HDMI out, HD/SD Component out, and composite out, there are plenty of ways to watch your video from the camera without the need to edit it. We don't have and HD TV in our house, so putting video back on the camera doesn't make sense for us. So really at this point we have no way of even watching our HD home videos, but I figure one day we will and it will be nice to have some HD footage of the kids growing up. I've posted a few videos already on Facebook, they look quite good I'd say.
THe price of hard drives is coming down so quickly, that finding a reasonably priced hard drive to store all this priceless footage will be easy. Almost every week I get some sort of email advertising name brand 1TB hard drives for less than $100. Copy the footage to one of these in an external enclosure, pop it in the fire safe for worry free long term storage.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)