Category: Tech

Aerial video with a Canon 5D , 7D helivideo.com from Eric AUSTIN on Vimeo.

I’ve always wanted an excuse like this to get the ultimate toy for myself – a RC helicopter! I imagined it would be cool if it could fly my Canon G9 overhead and take some groovy aerial video and photos. Well, this guy went for it and mount an awesome Canon 5D with it’s ability to shoot gorgeous 1080p HD video.

Like he says in the video, crashing is NOT an option!

Hmm, is your ear feeling a little too warm?
source: cnet.com

	Manufacturer and model	SAR level(digital)
1	Motorola V195s	1.6
2	Motorola Zine ZN5	1.59
2a	Motorola Rival	1.59
4	Kyocera Jax S1300	1.55
4a	Motorola VU204	1.55
6	RIM BlackBerry Curve 8330 (Sprint)	1.54
6a	RIM BlackBerry Curve 8330 (U.S. Cellular)	1.54
6b	RIM BlackBerry Curve 8330 (Verizon Wireless)	1.54
9	Motorola Crush	1.53
9a	Nokia E71x	1.53
11	Pantech Matrix	1.52
12	LG Rumor 2	1.51
12a	RIM BlackBerry Bold	1.51
14	HTC SMT5800	1.49
14a	Motorola Droid	1.49
16	Sony Ericsson W350a	1.48
17	LG Chocolate Touch	1.47
17a	Nokia 2320 GoPhone	1.47
17b	Palm Pixi Plus (Verizon Wireless)	1.47
17c	T-Mobile Dash 3G	1.47

Now that the installation of Windows 7 RC installed on my Media server is giving me the countdown to death, it’s time to upgrade with a retail copy of Windows 7 Professional. Microsoft doesn’t support upgrading the free Release Candidate version to the retail version, but there is a easy workaround posted  at Icrontic. The advantage of doing it this way instead of a ‘clean install’, is that you can keep your installed apps and settings. Another how-to is posted by Colleen of TWiT fame on her site, theV01d.com.

After pondering this for a moment,  I decided to just do a clean install. It actually goes quicker than running this hack and I only had a couple programs installed [Boxee and VLC], so re-installing apps was a breeze. I just installed over the old XP partition on my Media box and was up and running. I then deleted the RC partition to free up some space.

Interesting, Twitter and other big players in social media are switching from MySQL (now part of Oracle) to Cassandra (NoSQL), an Apache Software Foundation open source project. Read the article.

On a lark, I decided to drive up to Petaluma and visit Leo LaPorte’s TWiT Cottage where he and crew produce TWiT.tv shows. During my visit I watched the recording of Macbreak Weekly, which features Leo, Alex Lindsay and Andy Ihnatko.

I love iMovie for making quick little videos from video clips I shoot with my digital cameras. After I attempted to edit some video I shot in Disneyland, I couldn’t get the video clips which are stored in iPhoto’s Library stored on my external hard drive to appear in iMovie without making iMovie crash. I tried all kinds of fixes like deleting preference files in my Library directory etc. Seems there are serious issues with the 8.0.5 update which came out a couple weeks ago. The fix came when I just deleted iMovie and reinstalled version 8.0 from the iLife install disk. Next, I upgraded with the iMovie 8.0.3 update (Apple seems to have removed the 8.0.4 update). My videos then appeared again in iPhoto Videos under the Event Library!

It was a great time in the Black Rock Desert. Ken McGrath accompanied me on my return trip to the launch site on Saturday. Seeing this 12 foot beast blast off made the whole trip worthwhile!  It was also great to see so many other spectacular launches. I’ll post videos of them soon.

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Compare this version of the video that I uploaded to YouTube. I might just post videos this way from now on as the quality is now higher with its HQ setting than exporting my flash movie files using WordTube. What do you think?