David’s Musings

Blackberry Bold

20 11 2008

One week in, and I absolutely love my Blackberry Bold from AT&T. With many delays, it was a long time coming, but worth the wait.

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This is my eighth Blackberry which seems a bit greedy, and it’s only been six months since I bought the Curve, which is a little strange I admit, but, hey, I’m a glutton for new gadgets and technology.

The feel and usability of the Bold is fantastic. There have been many reviews already done, so I don’t want to replicate. You notice the speed and stability more than anything. There is more internal memory to let your applications run smoothly and load quickly. The screen is fantastic and you can watch video in glorious detail. I slapped in a 8GB card and have some films and television to watch when I’m on the move. The keypad is quiet, solid and responsive.

The improved Blackberry Browser tied with the crystal sharp screen gives a great web-experience. With 3G you can watch streaming clips from YouTube. If you take photos and video, it is now very speedy to take these off onto your PC or iMac via USB compared with previous Blackberry models.

AT&T and Blackberry put some good thought into the UI and the look and feel. The themes are crisp and fresh. I seem to have Wifi and Bluetooth switched on at all times. Even by doing that, the battery lasts a good 1.5 days with pretty heavy use. I have to say even though the device is 3G, I don’t notice it making a huge difference with normal Blackberry use. Emails come through the same as the previous models. When you browse, you don’t notice a huge difference either. However, if you download attachments, pictures or applications - that’s when you do notice it making a huge difference.

The camera is the same as my old Curve, 2MP, so no real change there. But again, because of the processing speed of the Bold, the videos I record are crisp and not jumpy

I’ve found two bugs in the software: On one occasion, the red light stayed on constantly and I had to reboot - and the other was that the colours of the writing of the keys in the calculator app sometimes act strangly when pressed. Apart from that, everything else is fine.

The only thing I don’t like too much is the specially commisioned music themes for the Bold by Stewart Copeland. They sound like a two-legged cat walking over my daughters Schoenhut (you might have to Google that!)

Blackberry Bold specifications:

Size - Length: 114mm, Width: 66mm, Thickness: 14mm
Weight (with battery) - 133g (same as the 88xx series. I can attest to it!)
Memory - 1GB on-board (storage) and 128 MB Flash (applications)
Battery - 1500mAhr lithium cell
Est. Battery Life - Standby: 13 days, Talk Time: 5 hours
Network Support - UMTS: 2100 / 1900 / 850MHz, GSM: 1900 / 1800 / 900 / 850 MHz, GPRS, EDGE and HDSPA networks
Wi-Fi - 803.11a/b/g enabled
Display - HVGA, 480 x 320 pixels, Transmissive TFT LCD, supports over 65k colors
Media Player, Video Support - DivX 4, Div X 5 & 6 are partially supported, XviD is partially supported, H.263, H.264 and WMV3
Media Player, Audio Support - .3gp, MP3, WMA9 (.wma/.asf), WMA9 Pro/WMA 10, MIDI, AMR-NB, Professional AAC/AAC+/eAAC+
Media Player, Audio - BlackBerry Media Sync allows you to transfer your desktop iTunes music to your BlackBerry
Camera - 2.0MP, 5 x digital zoom (with flash)
GPS - internal GPS with extended ephemeris
Bluetooth - Bluetooth v2.0, all the normal stuff and Bluetooth Stereo Audio via A2DP and AVCRP
USB Port - Enables charging and high-speed data synchronizations via USB
Browser - HTML browsing, view movies/clips from websites built for mobile streaming, RSS feed support
Cost with USA AT&T from $299.99 for 2 year contract or upgrade with rebate - the no commitment price $549.99 (as at 20 Nov 08)

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Categories : Applications, Blackberry, Business, Communication, GPS, Photography, Shopping, Web

Canon Vixia HF100

25 08 2008

I was lucky enough to get my hands on the new Canon Vixia HF100 HD camcorder this week, and I haven’t been disappointed. The camcorder has won many awards this year, and rightly so.

I’ve been using it non-stop and getting great results. I’ve had the Sony DCR-PC9E MiniDV Handycam since 2001, it served the family well, but a change was needed. Moving from tape to memory card is a delight.

To take the flash memory out of the camera, download and edit on the PC in full HD has to be seen to be believed. The camera is well spec’d with:

30p progressive
AVCHD
HDMI sockets
Full HD 1080 (1920×1080 recording)
Dolby Digital
Cinema mode - 24p

I’ve created a very quick clip in the cool Cinema 24 mode, downloaded it to my iMac and edited it in iMovie and then uploaded it to Vimeo.com (which I highly recommend - if you haven’t got an account yet, get one!)

Here’s an embedded test clip. For full HD, you need to visit the Vimeo.com site.

First trial of my new Canon Vixia HF100 - in HD from David Burden on Vimeo.

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Categories : Photography, Software, TV, Video HD, Web

001/365

6 06 2008

Looking through Flickr sometime ago, I stumbled across the group 365days. This is a group which people post a picture of any part of their body in a creative way, each day, for a whole year.

I see it as a challenge to post something daily and also be creative. I’ve been in awe of people doing this, especially my friend Paul.

The rules for the group are: “A self portrait is a photo of yourself taken by you - it is not a photo of you taken by someone else and it is not a photo of something you hold near and dear to your heart. Please don’t try to interpret ’self portrait’ into something drastically different than what it is. You are only allowed to submit one photo for each day. Only one. Feel free to do whatever you want to do within your own 365 Days set, but only send one to the pool.”

My first attempt was this:

001/365 - Tired eyes

This is my first photo for 365days. I aim to take a picture of some part of me for a whole year. This picture was taken on my Blackberry so it’s not a great quality, but I have been travelling all over the UK since mid May and am extremely tired. I looked in the mirror today and saw tired, red, eyes. Wish me luck on my 365 project…

My 365 day set is here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/dburden/sets/72157604705931719/

Or you can setup a RSS feed to follow my progress by clicking here.

Every single 365 contribution, can be seen here:
http://www.flickr.com/groups/365days/pool/

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Categories : Mobile, Personal, Photography

Wordpress 2.2 and Random images

19 09 2007

Today I’ve updated my Wordpress backend to 2.2 and it all looks good so far. I’ve also installed a script to generate a random image in my blog header. It was time for a freshen up! All the images were taken by me and feature abstract shots.

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Categories : Applications, Personal, Photography, Web

Playstation 3 as a Media Centre

23 07 2007

The latest firmware update of the PS3 brings a huge advantage in that it allows you to wirelessly hook-up your console with your Windows machine and stream media from it. I can now sit in my lounge and connect to my PC and view my 1000s of photographs and view video. It’s very cool.

You do not need Windows Media Centre to run it, just the latest version of Windows Media Player - infact as long as you have a DLNA enabled device/PC you should be good to go. This is how I got it going:

On my Windows XP machine, I made sure I had the latest version of Windows Media Player. You can download it here
Library > Media Sharing - then click Share My Media
On your PS3, ensure that you have Media Sharing enabled under your Settings
Your should then be able to see “Search for Media Servers” on your Pictures, Video and Music options which you should click to search for your PC
The rest should be easy and you should be able to connect to your PC and view everything in your Shared Videos and Shared Music folders

There are a few quirks right now, such as the delay in getting the video to start, some pictures do not appear, there seems to be a maximum amount of pictures that can be displayed in a folder - apart from that, it’s very useable.

I wonder if the new PS3 update 1.9 due out anytime soon will address these issues?

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Categories : Applications, Film, Photography, Playstation, TV

Skiing - or lack thereof - in Heavenly

16 03 2007

We’ve just got back from a two day trip to Heavenly Valley for some skiing, but things didn’t really work out too well. With both children ill, we spent most of our time in our hotel room wishing we could magic our way home (which was 250 miles away)

However, I had a half-decent time with a short trip to Harvey’s and Harrah’s and I managed to get around four hours of skiing in. Heavenly is such a great resort but it’s really getting near the end of season. The weather has been so warm and there’s been no fresh snow - so it was a bit icy and slushy by lunchtime.

We were right on the border of California and Nevada so you’re constantly walking from state to state which is a little weird. One minute you’re in the clean air of California and you cross the road at the State Line and all you can smell is cigarette smoke and hear the chink-chink of slots.

At the top of the California Trail, there is always a great view of both California and Nevada. To your left you can see the blue water and white snow in Tahoe CA, on to your right the desert and dust of Nevada. I took this picture with my Blackberry Pearl, the resolution isn’t great.

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Categories : Personal, Photography, Things to do, Travel

11.5 Photos a day

27 02 2007

Today I passed a milestone of taking my 7,000th photograph with my Nikon D70. The way I work it out is that since July 2 2005, when I bought it, that averages me out at about 11.5 photos a day. Not bad going I guess.

Cameras come and go, but my D70 still absolutely rocks and takes cracking photographs. For Christmas last year I got the Nikon SB-800 Speedflash too - it just makes a fantastic camera even better.

What was my 7,000th photo? It was my elder girl dressing up to go out in the rain with Daddy.

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Categories : Film, Personal, Photography

Vegas

27 01 2007

Ouch, my head hurts and my soul is weak. Whomever suggested we fly to Vegas for the night, forget the hotel and fly home at 9am this morning will be shot. In the meantime here are some photos and I’ll write more later.

Landing at Vegas

Inside the Luxor

New York, New York

Steve, me and Charlie

Looking down “The Strip”

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Categories : Personal, Photography, Things to do, Travel

Blackberry Pearl 8100

19 01 2007

Always a sucker to buy the latest and greatest gadget without much personal justification, I’ve bought the new Blackberry Pearl 8100. There is a consolation that I have it on a 30 day trial from T-Mobile, so if I don’t get on with it very well, I can always revert to my trusted 8700g later on in February.

So far, so good though. I really like this phone. I went with the 8100 as I wanted to get a camera so I could blog via email with images and I also wanted something smaller and thinner - more phone like I guess.

The phone is performing well, I set it up pretty quickly with personal and enterprise mail and the speed of the phone seems just fine. The software included with the Pearl lets you backup your important stuff from your old Blackberry to transfer to the new.

The biggest adjustment is moving away from a full QWERTY keyboard to the Blackberry Suretype, predictive typing where you have two letters per key. I’ve found already that if you try and concentrate and deliberately try to press the correct keys, you can misspell and make errors. If you don’t think about it too much and pretend there is a full QWERTY keyboard there and type as you would normally, then things seem to work well. Make sense? No?!

It has Blackberry Maps, but I’ve already superseded that by downloading Google Maps for Mobile, which is much better.

Pet hates so far, (which I hope I’ll just get used to over time):

the shortcut keys have changed. I miss the “C” to compose new mail, “M” to go to messages, “K” to lock the keyboard etc
as our IT department has strict password policies, I have to have a complicated password to unlock my device, and doing that via the predictive texting is cumbersome
the screen is obviously less wide than the traditional Blackberry, but I’m getting used to it. The browser has an interesting preview function where you can see a mini representation of a web page and scroll around in that and zoom into the piece you want to see in greater detail
The Pearl doesn’t come with a holster, which I miss

Positives include:

the camera - even though the lens is only a 1.3 megapixel the images produced seem to be of a good quality. You can then attach these images to a MMS or an email and send to your friends! The built in flash and digital zoom (5x) works incredibly well. If you want to send photos via email, your Blackberry Enterprise Server has to be v4.1 SP2 or higher
self taught predictive text - I’ve seen some dumb predictive text in my time, but the Blackberry not only learns from you to compile extra words, but it also looks at web pages you visit, contacts you have and emails sent to you to look for words not in the standard dictionary - clever
voice activated dialing (VAD) works really well
the Pearl control button - this makes things very easy to navigate, however I still find my thumb moving down to the right side of the phone looking for a track wheel!
room for a microSD card - the strange thing is that this is buried below the battery, so it’s not like this can be removed/replaced easily
Multi-media player seems OK, but I haven’t tried that much yet

This page will be a work-in-progress as I find out more.

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Categories : Business, Communication, Mobile, Music, Photography

Alviso, CA

17 01 2007

I love my photography and it was a great surprise to return home to find Sara (my beautiful wife) had taken one of my favourite photos of late and framed it in a large 32″ x 34″ frame.

On Christmas Day last year, the family Burden headed out for a long walk around Alviso while the food cooked back at home. Alviso is a mysterious place that seems untouched by the masses of buildings and technology contained in the rest�of Silicon Valley. It really is a relaxing place. On Christmas Day, the water was so still, not even a ripple - and the sky was clear. I took the following picture and it now proudly hangs at home.

If you’re interested, the picture was taken on a Nikon D70, ISO 200, SS 1/250, f/8.0, 18-70@56mm, flash fired