Null Bit Me

How do you do?

How do you look like?

Will I keep you?

UPDATE [31/Jul/2007]:

THIS  POST  IS  OBSOLETE  NOW

A couple of days back, a (lazy) friend asked me to suggest him some digital cameras that he should consider while buying. And he won’t give me any specifications because he has no idea what to look out in a camera

Anyways, I just spent about 2-3 hours evaluating a few cameras and sent him a long mail. I thought all that research could be useful to other people too. So I am reproducing the mail (with relevant edits) below. I hope it is useful to some people.

Disclaimer: I am NO expert in cameras. But then most cameras are not bought by experts! So what follows is a very naive review of some shortlisted cameras using information that I found on the Internet.

First of all, I shortlisted some cameras which had the following features (that I would consider mandatory for buying a digital camera). But before that I had to narrow down brands. I decided to choose the following brands which are (I think) easy to get in India:

1. Canon
2. Kodak
3. Nikon
4. Olympus

Then I made the following conditions manadatory before I shortlisted any digital cameras:

1. It should be a 6 MP (megapixel) camera or more.
2. It should have video capabilities with 640 x 480 @ 30 fps.
3. It should have a good optical zoom. I love 10x optical zoom cameras
4. The price of the camera should preferably be within INR 20,000
5. The LCD should preferably be 2.5″

Using the excellent search features provided by Digital Photography Review, I shortlisted the following cameras:

1. Canon A710 IS
2. Kodak EasyShare V610
3. Kodak EasyShare Z612
4. Nikon Coolpix S4
5. Nikon Coolpix S10
6. Olympus SP-510 UZ

After going through all the brochures/specifications etc. from the official sites, I have ranked the cameras as follows. PLEASE note that the ranking is in decreasing order of preference (i.e. I have rated the first camera listed as the best). In addition, I have listed down the salient features of each camera in a *decreasing* order of goodness.

So here goes the rankings (clap clap ):

1. Canon A710 IS
   - Image Stabilization
   - 7.1 MP
   - Focus: Macro: 0.39 in.-1.8 ft./1-55cm (WIDE) [This was the best among the reviewed cameras]
   - Shutter Speed: 15-1/2000 sec. (settable in Tv and M) [This was the best among the reviewed cameras]
   - Aperture: f/2.8-4.8
   - 6x optical zoom [This was a tiny disappointment. I would have loved a 10x-12x optical zoom here]
   - 640 x 480 @ 30fps (or 320 x 240 @ 60fps)
   - Memory: SD/MMC
   - ISO: Auto, ISO 80/100/200/400/800
   - AA batteries (also AA-sized rechargable Ni-MH battery)
   - 2.5″ LCD (115K pixels)
   - Flash: Normal: 55cm-3.5m (W), 55cm-2.5m (T) Macro: 30-55cm (W-M)
   - Look at photos taken by this camera
2. Olympus SP-510 UZ
   - 7.1 MP
   - 10x optical zoom
   - Focus: Super Macro Mode: 1.18” – infinity (3cm – infinity) [You can take photos really close to the object]
   - Digital image stabilization [Note however that this is not real image stabilization]
   - ISO (AUTO, 50, 100, 200, 400, 800, 1600 2500*, 4000* (* approx. 3 Megapixels))
   - Aperture: f2.8 – f3.7 (adjustable in 1/3 EV step)
   - Flash: Wide: 14.8 ft. (4.5m), Tele: 11.2 ft. (3.4m)
   - AA batteries (4) (630 images per charge)
   - Take pictures in low light conditions with Bright Capture Technology
   - 2.5″ LCD (115K pixels)
   - Shutter Speed: 15 – 1/1000 seconds, Bulb
   - Memory: xD-Picture Card™ (16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512MB, 1GB or 2GB) [This is not very good since these memory cards are used in extremely few devices and hence cannot be reused or borrowed from or lent to friends]
   - Look at photos taken by this camera
3. Kodak EasyShare Z612
   - 640 x 480 video @ 30fps with stereo sound in MPEG-4 upto 80 mins. [This is real good. I wish more cameras had MPEG-4 videos. You use up only about 1/10th of the memory compared to the normal videos in other cameras! If videos are very important to you, choose this camera.]
   - Image stabilization
   - 12x optical zoom
   - 6.1 MP
   - Aperture: f/2.8-f/4.8
   - Memory: SD/MMC
   - High resolution viewfinder (230K). 100% field of view.
   - Flash: wide: 2.0–15.4 ft (0.6–4.7 m) at ISO 140 ; tele: 3.9–8.9 ft (1.2–2.7 m) at ISO 140
   - Proprietary Li-Ion Rechargable Battery.
   - Shutter Speed: 16 to 1/1000 seconds (adjustable in 1/3 EV step)
   - macro wide: 4.7 in.–2 ft (12–60 cm) [This is bad. Close-up photographs at short distances will not be good.]
   - Look at photos taken by this camera
4. Nikon Coolpix S10
   - Image stabilization (with Image Sensor Shift and vibration reduction)
   - 2.5″ LCD (230K pixels)
   - Focus: macro: upto 1.6″
   - unique swivel design [This is unique to Nikon. I like it.]
   - 6 MP
   - 10x optical zoom
   - Memory: SD
   - Aperture: f/3.5
   - ISO: upto 800
   - Proprietary Li-Ion battery (300 images per charge)
   - Look at photos taken by this camera
5. Kodak EasyShare V610
   - Extremely small and thin
   - 2.8″ LCD
   - Embedded BLUETOOTH
   - 640 x 480 video @ 30fps with stereo sound in MPEG-4 upto 80 mins.
   - 10x optical zoom
   - 6.1 MP
   - Memory: SD/MMC
   - Shutter Speed: 8–1/1200 sec.
   - Focus: macro wide: 2.0 in.–2.3 ft (0.05–0.7 m)
   - Flash: 2.0–11.2 ft (0.6–3.4 m) at wide, ISO 280 ; 2.0–10.8 ft (0.6–3.3 m) at tele, ISO 400
   - Aperture: f/3.9–f/7.1 at wide, f/4.8–f/8.0 at tele [This is the ONLY reason why I rate this camera so low down. I think night photography will be awful with this camera.]
   - Look at photos taken by this camera
6. Nikon Coolpix S4
   - unique swivel design
   - 6 MP
   - 10x optical zoom
   - Memory: SD
   - AA batteries (2) (290 images per charge from alkaline batteries)
   - Aperture: f/3.5
   - Focus: macro upto 2.5″
   - 2.5″ LCD (110K pixels)
   - Look at photos taken by this camera

Now we can’t forget memory prices which will have to be bought. The memory prices being quoted at JJMehta today are as follows:

SD Card: 512MB – Rs. 995 ; 1GB – Rs. 1750 ; 2GB – Rs. 2750
xD Card: 512MB – Rs. 1500 ; 1GB – Rs. 2250

Well, that is it. Please do remember that I am no expert in digital cameras

After having played with Riya for about 4-5 hours, one thing stands out like mad. I just have to … have to keep my pictures private. I cannot keep them public. It is unsafe. And all my friends who appear on my pics did not like being made famous by me After I “trained” Riya to recognize a few faces, anyone could just type my friend’s name in the search box and find his pictures. Privacy goes to super hell!! So I’ve had to go to each pic and mark the ones with my friends as private … oh so painful

Technology wise it’s awesome. But it’s a thousand times worse than Google. Remember, a picture is worth a thousand words? Google’s amazing search capabilities destroys my anonymity on the web unless I am paranoid and extremely careful with my name. Riya can do much worse. Imagine a college friend uploading pics of mine in college… me with the beer bottles and the vodka… me in my underwear … me kissing a girl (ok.. that never happened.. but it could have ). That is ok. I couldn’t care about people who don’t know me seeing those pics. Now imagine me trying to get married. Prospective father-in-laws/wife’s googling for me or “riyaing” for me!!! Yikes… there goes my chances …

Apart from that, I hate the fact that they won’t let browsers other than IE6 and Firefox. I know it is in beta… but i prefer showing a warning instead of blocking out other browsers altogether. You know… some functionality might just work, such as search the public photos.. and maybe that is all I want to do.
Riya has a long way to go, even though the technology is amazing… and they really need to tighten up privacy and make it more usable. Ugh.. I’d hate to have to browse each pic to mark them private. And if there was a simpler way, they should have highlighted it someplace very prominent. Privacy is going to be crucial for this webservice to be successful.

Technorati Tags: riyasux

Some ideas are just fabulous. And not always because they have a lot of thought put into them, and have a huge database backing it up with extremely complicated tables. Just found out about Can I Crash? from Kiruba’s blog. And it is an amazingly simple and wonderful idea! Keeping it a wiki also just made it so simple… no one needs to manually update lists of bloggers etc. The workload is distributed across many people. I love it.
In case you’re too lazy to check out the site, please don’t be However, if you’re adamant… this is a place where you can invite travelling fellow bloggers to stay at your place. And look for accomodation if and when you’re travelling. I hope it’ll work. I’ve read multiple bloggers posting about having other bloggers stay at their place. And this is how you can simply find friendly people willing to put up with you
There’s not much yet on the site, at least for India. But I hope the templates are improved. I’d like bloggers to have their own pages where they list the bloggers who have stayed with them as well as the bloggers with whom they have stayed themselves. Now that could act as a friendly or a nuisance index for each blogger You let a lot of people stay with you and your friendly index goes up. You go stay with other people, and your nuisance index goes up!!
This site will get my details as soon as I become a little more friendly and a little less worried about anonymity
Good work Henriette and Thomas?.

Ok… another test post!
Scoble keep giving out interesting links… so this time it is Performancing for Firefox. This happens to be the FOURTH blog editor that I’ve tried. This is crazy . But I guess it just shows how fickle-minded I am. And that blog editing softwares still have some way to go before I can settle down with someone.
Performancing is really nice. I don’t even have to move out of Firefox. It splits the browser into two panes (reminds me of ‘Ctrl-x 2′ in Emacs) and I am browsing in the upper pane and blogging in the lower one. I find it so easy to link to the various stuff that I like doing now. And, I don’t have to keep switching windows using the Alt-Tab keys.
Yep… I really like this. I can keep saving my drafts as Notes. Which is good, because my Firefox has been crashing quite often of late. I can set the categories. Blogging is almost anonymous. There’s just one [Publish To: Null Bit Me] button at the bottom which can give away my blog to people around me. Yep… I am paranoid. I hate people peeking. And this was one of the feedback mails that I sent to WordPress.com because I really wanted to blog without my blog name showing in big bold letters on the screen. The best thing that I liked about Zoundry i.e. the ability to store my previously used URL’s in my blog has been bettered now. Because I have ALL my links in the Firefox history!
This is seriously cool… Performancing is definetely Performance Enhancing!
And I love it
And now for the biggest test…. to publish, and see how it looks like on the actual site….

[UPDATE: Two problems noted.
a) The formatting like bold and italics disappeared after publishing.
b) The hyperlinks all open in the same window and I cannot control it. I like my links to open in a new window.]

Just found http://www.gchart.com from digg. It is seriously cool. This is so much better than the complicated or image heavy sites to find out the time in some other place on the world.

And a simple URL to remember too

This is a test post.

Just had to try out Zoundry that Scoble just linked to in one of his recent posts.

This is similar to w.bloggar, except that I notice that it integrates Technorati and other tags.

And somehow it worked much easily compared to w.bloggar.

More importantly, it worked! Whatever features I’ve tried has worked

Cool… it seems to have what I’ve always wanted! Creating links is so damn much easier

Technorati : zoundry

Now, that is the tagline of FutureFeature, a site i found just now after I started checking out the Referers page on WordPress.com.

Its a really cool site, unlike immedi.at which I immediately rejected.

This website allows people to make requests for all sorts of web services, blogs etc., stuff that they’s want to change or improve. The interface is cool (although very common nowadays). And you get to see all feature requests for the various services and have your feature requests to be displayed to the entire world! This is so much better than having all feedback to stay with one guy which’ll never see the light of day

Problems with a service like this? One word perhaps: S P A M. Yes. this is one place where spam would reduce the usability of the site immediately.

And, I’d prefer to make suggestions to this place ONLY if it has been endorsed by the big guys.

Which will never happen

But a nice, cool service that made me curse myself not having thought of before.

But of course, I’d never actually have done anything about this idea!

I checked out Odeo today after reading that they had a new update.

Yes, that is the message that I get when I try to change my username on Odeo

Check out the screenshot below:

I love it when I can find glitches

Why? I must be crazy. I happen to be perfectly happy with Bloglines. Other services have come and gone… Pluck, Rojo, Google Reader… but nothing convinced me to move away from Bloglines. Bloglines is simple and does the job. No hunting too much for ways to add feeds etc. Or maybe I’ve gotten so used to it… I find it difficult to move to anything else.

But I still went ahead and created a login for NewsGator. Even though I have known about its existence for a long long time. It never caught my fancy until now. And it was all because of Scoble. The guy is impressive. And he mentioned in a post that he uses NewsGator. Well… I just had to now try it out to see what the big deal was. If Scoble uses something, maybe there is something to it

Well, I tried out the Free Web edition. For sometime. Still not good enough to sweep me off my feet and away from my dear Bloglines

But I wonder is how many people did subscribe to NewsGator today after Scoble’s post… I wish I had insider data. Did they experience a sudden spurt in new logins? Because I can’t be the only one who wanted to try what Scoble uses

I am not sure why I should go subscribe to this service that I discovered yesterday. It seems to be able to send me IM’s as soon as something happens i.e. something changes in my RSS feeds. Now I thought I already had it… I subscribe to Google Alerts, which are quite fast. And I seriously wonder how immedi.at would claim to be faster. And then as soon as Google emails me, I get to know through my GMail notifier/GTalk icon in the system tray! Also, the email stays there even if I don’t get time to read it then.

Again, if we’re talking about blogs in general, I don’t suppose how it is better in any way than my favourite blog reader, Bloglines. I get to read all updates when I want to. Plus, I can mark them unread, and clip them etc. etc.
In the battle of the push (eg. email) and the pull (eg. feeds), I think “pull” has won conclusively. So why are we going back to “push” (and in this case an extreme version of “push” since you don’t get the alert if your messenger is not on) again?
On top of that, I tried using the service with a couple of WordPress.com blogs and the TechCrunch site that offer feeds. And the service failed. So I’ve not managed to investigate it thoroughly, but I don’t expect any exciting surprizes when I get around to trying it again.

.

There’s not much to say anyways

The last one was better, I’d say. Better direction and screenplay… though I’d never claim to know the nuances of film-making.

They changed the directors again

Why… the last one was so much better. Why did they have to experiment with the fourth book? This was perhaps the best book of the entire Harry Potter series. Damn.
I’m sorry, but I’ll give it the thumbs down.

You have to watch it… since no one else is going to film the same thing. But seriously, don’t get your expectations too high. The book was far much better.

Got the link for Forty Faces from Scoble in his non-GYM mode

It is a cool idea, and yes I agree with him that it won’t scale at all. But lets have the pics of the “Top Posts” instead of the “Latest Posts”, just like it shows me on my WordPress.com dashboard. That will be ok. But we’ll always have Scoble’s pic there

One thing I noticed is that most bloggers post multiple posts almost at the same time. This is so evident when there are multiple pics of the same person all together at Forty Faces. It seems to happen to me too. When there is no juice, there is nothing. But once you get going, you just keep going. You seem to fuel yourself as you go, just like a car battery

But I wish “laszlomail” was easier to pronounce I will never be able to give it out to anyone easily, unless of course Laszlomail makes it big and are very popular.

But otherwise, it is fast on my office LAN connection. Much faster than Yahoo! Mail, and about as fast as GMail. The interface looks good. Though I wish I could skin my page. And the “Demo” word alongside “Laszlo mail” looks worrysome Most people won’t like it I guess, it being Flash-based, which could be a problem on slower connections. Me, I usually block all Flash objects during browsing, so I know.

You get only 10MB disk space. It is actually a lot for me since I’m more into IM/Skype as compared to email.

One good thing about new services is that there is a chance that you will get a username that you want. (I got what I wanted ) After that you have to pray that they make it big! By the way, has anyone recently got his desired username on Yahoo!?

Coming to think about it, I wish there was a way or protocol to inform everyone about my email address change. Just like when your telephone number changes, a central authority tells you what the new number is. So when I delete my email address, I register at some online site and put up the information of my old and new email addresses. So when mails to my old account bounce back, the email client automatically looks up my new email address from the server and resends the mail at my new address. The sender could also be sent a automatic mail informing about the email address change. And then he/she could update their records. Hmm… nice idea. Now I wonder what are the holes in it…

BTW, I got the link from Scoble, whom I’ve finally started reading more or less regularly. I usually hate reading people who write too much because I can’t keep up but maybe him commenting on this blog helped