By the time you are reading this I will probably be in Europe. So Geeks.com sent in some really cool PC parts, gadgets that I tested this past week and I will be taking with me in the trip.

* Transcend TS4GSDHC6 4GB Class 6 SDHC Memory Card
A 4 GB, class 6 SDHC card. This card with its ECC and write protection support will serve my Kodak digicam. I plan to mostly grab HD video with it rather than plain pictures, and this is a card that can deliver the speed that HD video requires.

* Coolmax HD-250B-U2 2.5″ USB 2.0 Aluminum SATA HDD Enclosure
This SATA 2.5″ enclosure now hosts our 60GB drive that we removed from our Sony PS3 when we upgraded it. It supports USB 2.0 and it comes with a double USB extension cable that uses two USB ports from your computer in order to operate (this way you don’t need to use power adapters). The device also comes with a travel case and a screwdriver that let’s you secure the drive in the enclosure. Installation was a piece of cake, compatibility was great too (XP, Ubuntu and OSX all worked with it).

* 53″ Aluminum Camera Tripod w/Bubble Level (Silver)
This is a pretty nice and extremely cheap tripod. It’s has an aluminum frame, a quick-release platform, 3-way, 360-degree swivel pan-head, adjustable tilt controls & pan controls, 90-degree vertical platform, gear operated center column, a 3-section aluminum legs with brace, quick-release leg locks, a bubble level indicator and a 3 mm standard tripod mount. It’s a good, compact tripod that fits easily in a suitcase. Only thing missing is a fluid tripod head to help with video pans. Great for photography though.

* Overland 70910 Executive Portfolio Bag - Fits to 14″ 3-Pack
Whoah! 22 bucks for three laptops bags! That’s quite a deal. There are two black and one brown bag. I will be using one of them as my main carry-on bag with an IBM T23 laptop in it (the bag fits up to 14.1″ laptops), and all my phones, gadgets, papers. It’s got two big compartments on the back and four smaller ones on the front. It’s got a strong handle and an expandable section. Only thing I didn’t like is the big compartment behind the 4 small ones, which doesn’t close (some Velcro would have suffice).

As I have said many times in the past, the HV20/30 are the best consumer cameras in terms of picture quality. Various high-end AVCHD models (HF100, SR11/SR12, SD9) tried to compete this year with the HV series, but they were still lacking that bit of extra quality that you can squeeze out of the HV20/30.

Well, that’s all the past now.

Canon has just announced in Japan two new models, the HF11 and the HG11, which can record in 24mbps AVC, which is the highest bitrate that the AVCHD standard is asking for (higher bitrate is used by some prosumer camcorders, but that’s not part of the official standard).

With the HF11 and HG11 recording at full 1920×1080@24mbps MPEG4-AVC, the HV20/30 with its 1440×1080@25mbps MPEG-2 has no chance in hell to keep the reigns any longer.

Today the tape died, as far as I am concerned, with this fall of the HV20/30.

The HF11 is largely the same camera model as the HF10, but the HG11 was completely reworked compared to the HG10. It has a brand new body, better lens, better usability, 120 GB drive with ability to also record in SD card, 12x zoom instead of 10x. I would have considered the HG11 if it wasn’t for the stupidity of Canon of going down to 37mm filter thread, and not staying with HG10’s 43mm. I have a gazillion accessories for the HV20 that would have work with any 43mm camera. Step-down rings are not good in my case as large and heavy lenses and adapters would break the step-down ring and the camera’s filter thread if I was to mount them in the HG11. It sucks to be stuck in something as trivial as a filter thread.

I am trying to clean up the office so I have 4 machines to give away (I won’t bother trying to sell them): an AthlonXP 1.6 ghz, a Duron 1.3ghz, a dual Celeron 533 mhz, and a Pegasos 1. From all these machines, only the Duron works properly and the Pegasos only when used with Morphos 1.4 and not with 2.0. I installed Ubuntu on the Duron and it’s ready to go, while the Pegasos could actually land me at least $100 if I could install morphos 2.0 (the CRT monitor goes out of sync when loading the installer CD). The AthlonXP and the dual Celeron are completely dead, they don’t start at all. It still is weird to see a machine go completely dead while it was working the last time I used it (granted, about 2 years ago).

Update: Today is not my day. One of my PDAs died too (well, just the battery, still works when plugged in).

EA said that the iPhone is more powerful than the DS, and now Sega is saying that it’s just as powerful as the Dreamcast. It makes perfect business sense to me for Apple to create an addon controller that attaches to the port and adds buttons on both sides of the device, and what not. Then release an API for it too, and let people design or port games to it. Honestly, why not?

My friend Dominique arrived with a present (thanks!) for me tonight: the Sony DVP-FX820 portable DVD player. Which of course I will be using as an external video monitor for my HV20 camcorder through its video-in port, rather than as a DVD player.

The screen is vibrant and high-res enough that even through the lowly RCA cable it delivers a very good image quality. This device is a must have for amateur but serious filmmakers, especially if there is a 35mm adapter in the mix, because not only the large 8″ screen helps with focusing, but also because you can rotate it effortlessly (don’t forget that most 35mm adapters record with the image upside down).

However, the most interesting point for me was something else. It was the fact that the Sony monitor has a wider display zone than the HV20’s LCD screen (less overscan). Many times I fell into the trap: I would frame a shot that looks great on screen, but when I see it on my PC’s LCD, there are crap objects outside the safe zone that were not visible in the camera’s LCD, and that ruin my framing! Having a safe zone on the LCD of the camera might have been a useful thing back in the day, but today’s videos that end up only online, or on TVs that have a “dot by dot” mode (like mine), doesn’t make sense to design camera LCDs with these limitations anymore. So I was happy to see that this Sony player can see “more” of the actual shot and helps you frame more accurately (especially horizontally).

You will need a “Triple Phono Plug Coupler” (aka a female-to-female 3-way RCA adapter) to connect your camera to this device. The only other problem this setup has is that it’s bulky, as you will have to dangle along a full DVD drive all the time, so you might need something like this. Battery life is pretty good for what it is (reportedly over 5 hours), and the device comes with a car charger.

More discussion and info about it over at HV20.com.

I received from Computer Geeks the other day some interesting gadgets and tools that I would like to share with you.

* Fore Care 1315 Advanced Wrist Blood Pressure Monitor

A month ago I visited the doctor and she said that I have high blood pressure! So I thought that this gadget might be a cool idea to try out. This is a very comfortable and easy to carry blood pressure monitor that fits around your wrist. It’s easy to use: you click the power button, you place your left hand on your right shoulder, the battery powered device inflates automatically and you then wait for a few seconds to read the results. Dead simple! Thankfully, in my case the high blood pressure problem didn’t happen to be major. But I will continue monitoring it and even chart it, as the device is able to store 58 measurements! In the meantime, I surely need to start exercising…

* A-Data 16GB Turbo Class 6 SDHC Memory Card

Who could have thought a few years ago that you could get 16 GB flash storage for less than $70. Especially at the size of an SD memory card! This is both a great value and a great buy. The specific card is fast, and it works flawlessly with video recording, which I verified with my Kodak HD camera. AVCHD camera users will be able to use it too. This model can record at 50mbps, and most consumer SD-based camcorders usually don’t need more than 25 mbps.

* 2.5″ USB 2.0 Multimedia IDE HDD Player w/Remote

I had an old laptop drive around, which I tried with this product. Installation was very easy, just four screws needed to remove to insert the drive. From that point on, it could function both as a USB 2.0 external hard drive, or as a TV media player! The enclosure has an RCA AV output, a 15-pin VGA and USB 2.0 ports, aCX (coaxial) - digital audio output and a DC jack. The player can playback MPEG4-ASP (XViD, that is), Mpeg2 VOB files, mpeg1, mp3 and JPG files. It can work both in NTSC and PAL. The experience of using it as a media player does not match something like the AppleTV of course, but for $30 bucks you get a basic TV player and you get to use that old laptop drive that would otherwise be sitting in your closet useless. That’s not a bad deal.

Over a year ago I wrote a review at OSNews for the IBM T23 Thinkpad. Back then, Ubuntu had severe bugs with this (ultra popular in its time) laptop model. But as I have promised that laptop to my little brother, I cleanly upgraded to Ubuntu 8.04 last night. The default Ubuntu installation is now better than ever, as I had to change very few things to make it more usable (e.g. font sizes always irked me as to how big they are by default).

Anyways, all the severe bugs I had found with 7.04 are now fixed: including two suspend bugs, ethernet and USB bugs, and four S3 Savage ones. The laptop works perfectly by default (except the Lucent Winmodem). Overall speed is good too. Within an hour I had setup and configured 5 user accounts for myself, JBQ, my brother, his wife and a guest one.

The trouble started when I needed to make my old Prism54 WG511 PCMCIA card to work with the laptop. Apparently Ubuntu has both the drivers and firmware for this old ISL3890 chipset, but it didn’t work. Following advice from UbuntuForums, I had to blacklist the default 4 related drivers, download the Windows firmware and use Ndiswrapper instead. It then worked, but it was a pain.

The Lucent winmodem worked for the first time on this laptop too (my bro uses mostly dial-up). It works after you download the “-full” version of the “martian” driver: compile and install as per instructions the driver and then do a “modprobe martian_dev” and then a “martian_modem --daemon --mode 0666“. I then put these two commands on the /etc/rc.local file to force the modem to get started on each reboot. If someone upgrades the kernel the driver will have to get recompiled, which is why I made my brother a normal user and not an admin. Unless Ubuntu adds the martian driver to their -restricted kernel modules package, no one should touch the Ubuntu update manager…

Dell released tonight their new Studio laptop line. They are very nice looking laptops: they go up to full HD 1920×1200 at 15″ or 17″, they have an HDMI out to watch movies on the HDTV, and there is a choice for a Blu-Ray player. I swear, I would go for one, but not without the following three features that I also need:
- Keyboard backlight. On my current laptop I hit the stumbling block all the time: I mostly use the laptop when JBQ is sleeping and the lights are off or down. So I really need the backlight like the one on the Macbook Pros.
- DVD burning ability with their Blu-Ray player drive option. The current one reads CD/DVD/BD, but doesn’t burn CD/DVD. I do video, so I need the ability to burn DVDs.
- An SDHC reader slot (not plain SD). I need that to use with my Kodak HD digicam.

Give me these three hardware features (possibly for another $70) and I would buy one of these babies with closed eyes. I am afraid though that while these features will eventually come, by that time the firewire port would be redundant and it would be excluded — and I need firewire for my DV/HDV cameras.

I was checking some prices tonight and 1080p TVs are much more affordable now. Don’t make the mistake to get a 720p/1080i TV, make sure it’s a full 1080p one.

I would wholeheartedly recommend this 30,000:1 contrast ratio Panasonic 42″ 1080p plasma panel for $1400, and if you still don’t have the money for it, get a Vizio 42″ LCD 1,000:1 contrast ratio 1080p panel for $800. This plasma Panasonic kicks the Vizio’s LCD ass in terms of quality, but on its turn, the Vizio would kick the ass of most 720p TVs anyway, so always strive for that 1080p panel.

I mean, really. Do you have to wonder why traditionally big companies are going the way of the dodo? It’s because their god damn R&D departments getting the go-ahead for products that make no market sense — not for that price range anyway.

Here’s the latest one from HP: the HP MediaSmart Connect. It’s a streamer device for media. It also supports an optional hard drive. It costs $349. Read the link for more tech specs info.

Ok, now let me ask you. Why in the love of God, would ANYONE, buy THAT product over a Sony PS3. The Sony PS3 costs $399, it can pretty much do everything that this HP device can, but it also comes with a 40 GB (and easily upgradeable) hard drive, you can play games with it, have Internet access through it if desired, and most importantly, you can playback Blu-Ray movies too. Additionally, the PS3 can playback m2t & m2ts/mts HD files directly from a consumer HD camcorder, and it even supports AVCHD HD video written on plain DVD disks (poor man’s home Blu-Ray disks).

And don’t get me started about the marketing games of the HP press release. They talk about HDMI and how you can connect the device to an HDTV, but they say NOTHING about being able to decode full 1080p video rather than just upconverting (the PS3 can). Also, they don’t mention anything about being able to playback h.264 video (they only mention MPEG4, but MPEG4 doesn’t always mean AVC h.264). No h.264 mentioning, no dice.

So honestly, there are zero reasons for someone to buy this fugly HP thing. Whoever bends and buys it without doing some research first, is as high as HP itself for bringing it to the market in the first place. This is epic failure.

Sure I’d buy this device. But not for a dollar over $150 (if it has 1080p decoding support), or just $100 if it only decodes 480p video (and then just upconverts to HD). But at the current price it must be a joke.