How do I get all this gear through US Customs? I mean seriously this stuff is my life. I actually don’t own anything beyond what is on this table (and at that, only in monthly payments of $55.50 for several years), so I want to prevent customs officials dirty mitts from violating my sweet gear or confiscating stuff!
Earlier, I tweeted, “do US customs srsly check laptops and ipods for pirated shizz?” I received mixed answers from “naaaaah. it’s all cool” to “be very scared” to “delete all your ripped DVDs, CDs from your laptop and computer.” Yikes!
I am really curious this proposed Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) is currently being put into practice. If anyone has traveled to the US or from the US to Canada, in recent months, with a laptop, iPod, camera, video cam, phone, I’d love to hear what your experience was good or bad.
& thanks for your help. It will seriously decrease my mid-boiling point stress level to know I won’t get strip searched at the airport.
The new iPhone hit with a huge KAPOWWW today. The coolest thing is that they are finalllly releasing it in Canada! (& Australia =0)
Just wanted to know what you think about the new iPhone. Are you gonna buy one? If so what feature sold you on buying the iPhone. 8gB or 16gB? White or Black? Oh and are you leaving a carrier to switch over to a new iPhone carrier (Rogers in Canada)?
Aannd if you already have the first iPhone, what are you gonna do with it? Sell it? Throw it in your junk drawer? Make some awesome modern art?
PS. Snow Leopards are super neat animals, but the name itself is a bit of a mouthful to reference all the time. Wonder what teh internets will do with that… S-L3p. sn0pard…
I’m super excited to be heading to the very heart of Silicon Valley and the twitterverse Wed to go hang with the TWiP and MacBreak crew in San Fransisco and possibly bust out a podcast or two.
I unfortunately won’t be there for Stevie J’s big keynote, but i’m sure one or two people will blog/tweet/lifecast about it and watching it on my MBa will be more awesome than actually being there, cuz I’ll be wearing my Shure SCL4′s in-ears during the keynote, so it will feel like Steve is actually in my head.
Oh what’s that Steve? A new iPhone? 3G? Wow! Still not in Canada? No eh. Guess i’ll just have to snuggle up with my current phone and a huge bottle of maple syrup for a few more months and watch Thundercats :p
PS. Apparently, WWDC and “Steve Jobs Keynote” doesn’t mean much to the less techie sorts of folks. As evident by this conversation I just had with my non-tech savvy friend:
friend: So what are you up to this week?
me: Yeah i’m heading down to San Fran for a big Mac conference thing.
friend: The makeup? Oh wow!
.me: No the computers
friend: Oh you mean like Dell?
me: Yes. Exactly like Dell. *throws disgusted look* iPhone? iPods? Steve Jobs? John Mayer?
friend: Oh yeaaaah. I just got a Zune!
We aren’t all meant to illuminate our minds with knowledge and enlightenment. Some people are just better off being in the dark.
Thanks for all the comment and email l0v3 and movie/tv/book suggestions. My neck feels less like a giant yarn ball of pulsating fire, and more like a golf ball of subtle flames. In my time away from the internet, I was unfortunate enough to catch “Resident Evil: Extinction” and Mila’s clunky, lack-luster wire stunts and sweet Gaussian-blurred face. Why can’t every zombie movie be like “Shaun of the Dead”.
Then, I learned some sweet breakdancing moves from Jonah Takalua and watched my new favourite show, the Australian mockumentary series, “Summer Heights High”. It’s kinda like if Christopher Guest,Ricky Gervais,Mitchell and Webb and “a dingo ate my baby” met, went to a bottlo, and threw so many shrimps on the barbie and wrote this. Either that or Chris Lilley is serious comedic genius.
Other than that I’ve got BSG: Razor on board for tonight, along with the Aliens Quadrilogy for back to back slimy, chest-bursting awesomeness and Ridley — Cameron — Fincher — Jeunet! That’s my kind of quadrilogy. Plus, one of these films has my favourite line of dialogue ever. 10 points and a place in my heart for guessing the correct phrase!
In addition, to watching movies I got some totally swedish IKEA furniture and sorta helped put it together.
And practiced my juggling techniques, one ball at a time.
And put my lomo film in the fridge for safe keeping.
I didn’t listen to the doctor when she said, “stop using your computer for 14 hours a day, take breaks every 15 mins, and find a more ergonomic work space. You are going to severely injure yourself!”
I didn’t listen one bit, and now i have a neck spasm the size of the polar caps before humans polluted the earth and made icebergs melt into the ocean… like way before Leonardo died in the icy waters of doom after the Titanic totally snapped in two.
I guess I seriously need to find some other ways of amusing myself for the next couple of days while I heal. What am I gonna do?? I’m already bored.
What can I do without a computer or internet? Any suggestions? Movie/tv show recommendations are most welcome. I would say “books” but let’s face it, unless it says, “Harry Potter” or “XYZ gear manual” on the cover, I won’t read it.
Uhh I shouldn’t even be typing this. cramp. ouch. Stop! Step away from the MB air. Away! Expecto Patronum!
I just got my gadget geeky hands all over the Canon G9 (12.1 Megapixel, Canon DIGIC III Image Processor, Optical Image Stabilizer) a few days ago, and I must say, I am really impressed.
I really wanted a high quality point and shoot that I could use capturing the behind the scenes action on photo/video shoots and for grabbing quick video for my blog videos.
Although my media company owns 2 Canon HV20s, I almost always use a 2-year-old simple point and shoot, the Canon PowerShot A510, to capture most of my videos. Even though it’s from back in the days when it was cutting edge to sport a 3.2 Megapixel camera, it’s just lower maintenance, smaller, and less fragile than the HV20 and seems to scare and anger less people than the HV20 with the intimidating Rode Video Microphone. Plus, despite it’s age, the PS A510 has a great lens and can capture good 640×480 video. Also, it just quicker to just upload to upload and deal with the footage sans TB HDs.
(aside: I always bring my Gorillapod tripod (pictured above) with me wherever I go. It’s a really handy little tripod. It can bend around things and grip them. Much more flexible and lighter to carry than a standard tripod.)
And now I’m getting all gooey with the Canon G9. I may even have “love feelings” towards G9′s video quality. It shoots really sharp and clear 640 x 480px video at 30fps which is more than adequate for web content. It also shoots HD: 1024 x 768px at 15fps. The auto exposure works very quickly when moving from contrasting light conditions and it’s cool that you can zoom during video recording. It’s not optical and it does look fairly pixelated, but it’s still great that you are able to zoom.
This is getting super technical and nerdy. I promise my next post will be super fun for those who could care less about pixels, though you must admit, pixels are pretty neat. You are looking at some pretty neat ones right now. Respekt.
Does any one else love the Canon G9? What point and shoot camera are you using? And if you use your camera to capture video, give me your impressions or link me to one of your videos. Fanks!
PS. w00t! I just convinced my mum to buy the G9. First the iMac and now the G9… we are moving slowly, but surely in the right direction. Now, i just have to get her to ditch her 15 year old, very round screen TV!
Ok. So I went to Vidfest and was super inspired by Dooce, the sassiest female blogger ever and MightyGirl’s Maggie Mason.
Then, I went to the Vancouver Apple Store launch and waited in line for 2 hours and cried because i didn’t get a free t-shirt until they gave me one out of pity and embarrassment. And then upon returning home, I realized the t-shirt was sooo big I could fit my entire body inside it.
Then I accidentally URLed my blog on a few iMacs in the store. Oops. And I realized that there wasn’t anything in the store to see that I hadn’t seen when I went to the London Apple Store.
Of course, I took all sorts of video and photos at these awesome events, but I’ve had so little time to set up my MB Air and my MB slowed down to G4 stylez last night because I packed it so full of media goodness that it had no room to breathe. It was gasping and overheating and complaining a lot, so I’ve decided to take a good chunk of today and spend it on sorting my heaps of GBs, reformatting my MB, reinstalling Leopard on my MB, and digging into the MB air.
iJustine/eJustine reminded me about some software that I always forget about when my machine is acting up called Disk Inventory X. It’s super at showing you what stuff is taking up so much room on your computer and why it’s moving slower than a dehydrated donkey. I also used this opportunity to add more cartoony arrows and text in Skitch cuz it’s sooo fun!
Yikes! I take a lot of photos. almost 30GB in 4 months. I’m glad i found those old iMovie HD files though. Saved me a bunch of room!
Oh yeah! I got a Lomo last week! I’m ready to get so lomosexual.
This Holga Lomo has a hot shoe so I bought this awesome Colorsplash flash kit that came with a little rotating wheel that you can put coloured gels in to get extra snazzy tint in your shots.
Photonic is an awesome flickr desktop client for Mac OSX. Just drag and drop photos, add titles, description, tags, add to albums and groups, and upload. I talked about it more in depth here. Works really well and it looks like it actually belongs on a Mac. Ahem twhirl.
Skitch is a desktop app that works hand-in-hand with Skitch.com to allow you grab screenshots or take photos from your iPhoto library, add sweet text or arrows, and with 1-click, upload and share them.
I’d seen Skitch on people’s twitter feeds for a while but I thought it was just another flickr wannabe, but oh was I wrong! This app combines three of my favourite things: Capturing screenshots of silly skype chats, drawing funny things on said screenshot, and sharing with my iFriends.
Before I would do everything in Illustrator or PS, and it would be laborious and very un-fun. But Skitch is heaps of fun, basically like having a revamped 2.0 MacPaint Now all I need is the Moose.
If you are a PC User you should check out Jing. It’s like Skitch, only it doesn’t look as good. I guess they didn’t want to scare PCers with cool design stuff. On the flip side, it does let you screen capture video, as well as photos which is pretty sweet. Mac users can use it too. I’ll give it a go and tell you what I think.
VLC is a cross-platform media player. This awesome app plays everything – every video format you throw at it VLC (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, avi, mov, mp3) it plays. Never download another obscure Codec or QT plug-in again! It also seems to play videos with video errors or audio issues that other players will completely reject and allow you to correct audio sync problems in preferences.
Visual Hub is a universal video converter for Mac made by Techspansion. It offers wikkid fast conversion from nearly every video format to iPod, PSP, DV, DVD, AVI, MP4, WMV, MPEG and Flash. If you work with video, that previous sentence probably make your eyes enlarge a bit and maybe bust out a little nerdy grin. VisualHub solves the most frustrating part of video production: Converting. Especially if you are working with clients who have no idea about compression, frame rate, or video in general:
Yeah, can you make it big. Big?
Yeah, big enough for my screen. But don’t you want to put this up on your website? I’m pretty sure you don’t want to go bigger than 640×480.
Yeah. Can you make it that big? And make it look HD. But we didn’t shoot it in HD.
Well can you make it look like HD with some kind of ‘bells and whistles’? *stabs stylus in left eye.
I use VisualHub on a daily basis. I’ll even use it to burn simple DVDs over Popcorn when I’m in a rush because the presets are so quick and easy to use. Also, if audio is more your game, you should check out Techspansion’s new audio converter, AudialHub.
iShowU is an awesome screen capture app that allows you to grab video and audio with great presets i.e., . I recently used it to create a short demo of a new firefox plug-in, PriceAdvance.
PodWorks is an app that allows you to move songs from your iPod back to your Mac. Don’t you hate the unidirectionality of the iPod? I sure do. This app solves that screaming face you make when you can’t do something you want to do something on your Mac and can’t. Take back your iPod!
What are you opinions on these apps? Is there a multimedia application that you love? Let me know if I’ve missed anything.
the event for the top creative minds working in digital media attracting visionaries from games, web 2,0, interactive dsign, animation and mobile apps.
Vidfest runs from May 21-24th. For a full schedule and program info hit up the Vidfest 2008 site. This will be an amazing networking opportunity if you’re in the new media scene or you like watching others network whilst you judge and ridicule them. Both entertain depending on your “priorities”.
Hope to see all my geeky Vancouver peeps there and some new peeps that are super awesome. If you don’t recognize me, I’ll be the socially inept loser in the corner video chatting on my MacBook Air. Dude, It’s like a window to my soul.
This month’s theme is Canadian Things! Things like: Hockey, maple syrup, Mounties, mountains, moose, beavers, snow plows, ice, and famous Canadian people, like Avril Lavigne. Feel free to exploit any Canadian stereotype you like. I welcome your ridicule.
Corporate Fun times at the Coca-Cola PavilionMusic credit: “How You Like Me Know” The Heavy. Coca-Cola is Corporate Olympic Sponsorship at its very best. Free Coke, free interactive games, free picture of you with the Olympic torch and the shiniest, happiest PR people ever. Although, come to think about it they did seem a bit disgruntled when I asked if I [...]
