“…the nightly news may soon consist entirely of tirades by men so angry that all they can do is sputter while punching themselves in the face, punctuated by videos of dogs blowing up after eating firecrackers, and dog-explosion experts rating the funniness of the videos…”
I think I’m going to enjoy this book.
The English language has suffered so much violence at the hands of marketers it’s too time-consuming to get irate at all of it. So when Dell decided that “yours is here” would be a good slogan, I ignored it just like a small child screws his eyes shut to make monsters go away.
Unfortunately it seems like Dell is escalating its campaign. Today, I received a flyer with this strapline:
YOURS IS SO EASY TO SHOP FOR AT DELL.
What?
It reminds me of a bloke I once trained in IT. He was a truly talented graphic designer, but he couldn’t write to save his life (not a criticism: my drawing skills never went beyond potato printing, and I’ve made the English language scream for mercy on many occasions).
Anyway. This was the copy on one of his portfolio pieces:
WHATS NEW IN CARS
FORD SIERRA THATS WHAT
To be honest, I quite liked it. And it’s a damn sight more readable than the Dell advert – an advert that no doubt cost Dell a lot of money. Or as Dell might put it, money a lot of cost Dell advert good very not.
A while back, I mentioned that taking baby steps into “proper” photography made me weep hot salty tears of frustration and rage, until a bit of informed advice and a few magazines cheered me up and translated the crap into plain English. It turns out that the world of digital photography is the simplest thing in the world compared to video.
It’s entirely academic at the moment – I’ll probably have to mug some schoolchildren at lunchtime in order to afford a pint or two tonight – but at some point in the near future I want to buy a video camera. I’ve learnt from my previous mistakes – best summarised as “don’t buy on price” – and I’ve got a pretty good idea of what I want.
It’s not complicated. I want a camera that has these features:
* High definition, because if I’m going to shell out on a camera I might as well get one that’s reasonably future-proof.
* Card storage, because I hate DVDs and like the security of being able to carry a few spare cards around.
* Mac compatibility.
And naturally, I don’t want to pay a million pounds for it. Even window shopping is suffering from the credit crunch.
So off I trot to the wonderful world of manufacturer websites and product spec sheets. And what a confusing load of crap it all is.
In no particular order, here are some of the things you need to know about:
* HD means different things depending on what you’re looking at. This camera here is HD, with 720p HD! This camera here is also HD, but it has 1080p HD! But this 720p one has better pictures than the 1080p because it has better fps and that one is better than the other ones because it is not interlaced and over here this one is the very bestest camera ever because it has magic space pixies that live inside it!
* The jargon around video cameras is even worse than with still cameras. In addition to all the f-stop stuff and JPEG profiles you’d expect, there’s CMOS and CCD and 3DDNR and BIONZ image processors and X many frames per second and face detection and AVC/H.264 and DIS and OIS and OMGWTFINEEDALIEDOWN.
* It’s not enough to go “no, Sony, your memory sticks are evil” and plump for something that uses SD cards. Different cameras have different levels of SD support, so some max out at a particular level of storage, others are utterly pointless unless you get SDHC cards. And of those, some of them don’t really work unless you go for Class 4 HD cards. Class what?
* Mac compatible doesn’t necessarily mean Mac compatible, because the combination of the highest HD resolutions and the AVCHD format used by some cameras isn’t yet supported by OS X software such as iMovie (although this may have changed by now. I’m too confused to keep looking).
Kudos to Techradar*, T3**, the Guardian*** et al for trying to explain all this stuff sensibly in reviews and product comparisons, but I can’t help thinking that this is the best option:
* Instead of buying an HD camera, take lots of still photos, print them out and wave them around really, really quickly.
* Vested interest: I write for it, albeit not about video cameras
** Vested interest: I’ve written for it, albeit not about video cameras
*** Vested interest: I’ve written for that too, albeit.. you get the idea
According to Mobile Tech Review, the new PRS-700 is better than the previous Reader:
Sony has worked a near miracle with their touch screen and touch-centric user interface. The Reader is simply a joy to use in terms of ergonomics, control and navigation. This is by far the most natural way to manage, navigate and read books we’ve seen so far. Alas, its lesser contrast doesn’t warm our bookish hearts, and for those in love with e-ink’s paper-like look, that’s a tough one to swallow. For those new to eBook readers or those who don’t mind reading from matte notebook displays, the PRS-700 has greater appeal. As always, the Reader is a great way to carry around a huge library of books and avoid the storage issues of traditional books.
I was actually playing with the current model yesterday, and while it’s a lovely wee gadget it’s still not the right reader for me. What I want is the Reader’s form factor with the iPhone’s wireless and two apps: NetNewsWire and Instapaper. That’d work.
As Engadget says:
with no wireless of any sort you’re stuck filling this one via USB, SD, or MS Duo. In other words there’s still no perfect choice in the world of the e-ink reader — but it is awfully hard to ignore the Reader’s sleek exterior when compared to the Kindle’s distinctively sci-fi doorstop look.
This week, I am mostly liking Fascination by Alphabeat.
The rest of the album isn’t much cop, but there’s more joy in this one song than most bands cram into a career. Hurrah for pop!
I bought a video camera just before Baby Bigmouth turned up – a Panasonic VDR-D250. I wasn’t greatly bothered about specs, so I quickly checked that it was Mac compatible before buying it.
It turns out that it *was* Mac compatible, sort of, on the day I bought it. A few weeks later Leopard came out, and my camera was no longer Mac-compatible.
Unlike many cameras (including most other Panasonics), my camera is only Mac compatible via Panasonic’s bundled software, which doesn’t work with Leopard and which hasn’t been updated since before Leopard shipped. That means it’s only able to communicate with OS X if you finalise the discs (in the case of DVD-RWs) and get it to act like an external DVD player, and even then iMovie chokes on the files. If you’re using DVD-R things are worse still, because OS X doesn’t like the .vro file format unless you shell out extra cash on the Quicktime MPEG Component – a prerequisite not just for QuickTime, but for other OS X video programs such as MPEG Streamclip.
Luckily for me I’ve got a copy of Toast, the all-singing, all-dancing OS X video software, and that can convert pretty much anything to pretty much anything. Otherwise I’d be scunnered.
I’m serious about not buying Panasonic, though. This is a camera that only came out in late Spring 2006, and which cost around £500 at launch. If a firm can’t be arsed ensuring that fairly pricey hardware stays current for 18 months, it doesn’t deserve your money.
Another year, another three-week period of fireworks frightening the dog and making baby bigmouth’s bedtime an ordeal. Not to mention the depressing headlines: this week’s local paper tells of fireworks being chucked through a hearing-impaired pensioner’s letterbox. What fun!
Personally I don’t see any reason why fireworks should be available to anyone without a licence when every town has its own, properly run spectacular, but I appreciate that banning punters from buying explosives probably violates their human right to be a selfish bastard. So I have a solution: any adult can buy fireworks provided they pass a simple test.
Here’s the test:
Shopkeeper: hello! Would you like to buy some fireworks?
Customer: yes please!
Customer! You have failed the test!
It turns out that the answer to music piracy is simple: a logo!
Various download sites have unveiled a new “MP3: 100% Compatible” logo that – according to them – won’t just emphasise the cross-platform nature of MP3s, but will also help in the fight against piracy.
I love The Inquirer’s take on it:
You can now be safe in the knowledge that any MP3 files you download fron the INQ are safe and legal. Honest. Look we’ve got a logo and everything.
These download sites have a little more in mind than educating on MP3 compatibility – the trade body behind this initiative highlighted how this would identify legal download sites to consumers. Of course anyone brazen enough to offer millions of pounds worth of other people’s copyrighted music and movies would be in really big trouble if they were daring enough to copy and paste a logo onto a website (like we just did for example).
A superb (and very sad) bit of journalism from Rolling Stone.
His life was a map that ends at the wrong destination. Wallace was an A student through high school, he played football, he played tennis, he wrote a philosophy thesis and a novel before he graduated from Amherst, he went to writing school, published the novel, made a city of squalling, bruising, kneecapping editors and writers fall moony-eyed in love with him. He published a thousand-page novel, received the only award you get in the nation for being a genius, wrote essays providing the best feel anywhere of what it means to be alive in the contemporary world, accepted a special chair at California’s Pomona College to teach writing, married, published another book and, last month, hanged himself at age 46.
Pub-goers in Aberdeen are facing a drugs test before entering bars as part of a crackdown by Grampian Police.
Officers in the force will be the first in Scotland to use an Itemiser – a device which can detect traces of drugs from hand swabs in a matter of seconds.
The test is voluntary, but customers will be refused entry if they do not take part.
[Via Fark]
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