Taking the opportunity to test out some photo tools: Mbedr, an embedded flickr service, and Phlook.com, a local start-up for photo hosting etc. So I took a picture of all the gear I’m using now (they’re not all mine, most of them are review units, office laptop etc…)
Photo hosted on Phlook.com
So I decided to start this thing where I find and show off some really old (so old that it’s cool) gear lying around my house, and awe in wonder of how the people of the past survived with these things…
And to start off, I’m gonna show off some hard drives.
So what’s some of the old gear you can find at your home?
Ok, I’m totally on a roll now. Getting quite annoyed (thank God not agitated or pissed, just annoyed…) after discovering a big truth regarding HD video and Final Cut Express.
So as most of you know, I bought a new HD camera to film videos for Tech65. Today, I decided to give a hand at editting my first HD (720p) movie, so I imported the files from the camera into a folder on my iMac before importing it into a new Final Cut Express project after discovering before hand that “Log and Transfer” (quicktime link) doesn’t work with this camera. I was happy that I could just edit as usual with the HD files in the project, before discovering the following:
It looks quite normal doesn’t it? Just to explain what you’re looking at, the left window is the clip I would like to add into my sequence, while the right window is a preview of my sequence now. I edit by setting a start point and an end point (called in and out points) in the left window and drag it into the right so that it drops into my sequence.
I wanted to do this ages ago when DK first showed off his geek bag, but I didn’t have a camera. Now that I have my own camera, I’ve decided to test it out by responding to DK’s post, except, in video form!
Presenting Daniel’s Geek bag!
Oh, by the way, I just filmed the video in the TV-SHQ mode, transferred it to my iMac and just uploaded it to YouTube immediately. I thought youtube had that High Quality mode, but nope. So this video doesn’t do the quality justice. It’s really clear on my computer!
I finally made up my mind to get the Sanyo Xacti HD1000 instead of the HD1010 camera, and after several days, I finally got the package. Strangely it took Warehouse123.com 4 days to verify the credit card. Apparently that’s a rare case, because most people seem to be getting theirs a lot faster than me. Once it was verified, the whole package arrived in less than a day from the moment I got my invoice.
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I was actually losing sleep again, so I turned on my Mac to pass time when I remembered that there was a verse in the bible about God giving us sleep. Seeing Hei Man online, I asked her, an with some searching, found out it’s from Psalms 127:
1 Unless the LORD builds the house,
They labor in vain who build it;
Unless the LORD guards the city,
The watchman stays awake in vain.
2 It is vain for you to rise up early,
To sit up late,
To eat the bread of sorrows;
For so He gives His beloved sleep.3 Behold, children are a heritage from the LORD,
The fruit of the womb is a reward.
4 Like arrows in the hand of a warrior,
So are the children of one
Hey guys, just in case you guys stumble upon my blog, or if I wanna show off some cool theme, please note that this blog isn’t active yet. I’m still considering if I should fork out anout US$7 to activate a feature (fsock open) on my host that will let me finally be able to activate the spam filter as well as import my previous blog over to this new one.
In the mean time, my old blog is found here.
Daniel Tsou
This is an interesting idea. A novel written completely on Twitter. The 140 Novel is a novel being by 3 people writing a single sentence each time (That’s where the name 140 comes from, the character limit on twitter) in a single twitter account. The 3 guys are CNET’s Tom Merritt, Molly Wood and their producer Jason Howell, as well as Leo Laporte from TWiT.tv. It’s something they came up with when Leo was a guest at Tom and Molly’s Buzz Out Loud podcast epsiode 646.
It’s a pretty interesting idea. It reminded me of how when I was a kid I used to play this game called the 4 words game where we try to make a story by coming up with 4 words each. Except this time it’s 140 characters.
Do go check it out. It’s starting to become a science fiction. I think I’ll definetly be following the novel and see how it develops.
This entry was done on a Nokia E61. You have no idea how tiring it is to make hyperlinks off the top of you head…
I took a day off today from work, so I decided to finally get down and redesign Tech65.org one more time. There were problems in the previous design in our sandbox (that’s what we call the place where we play with code without affecting the actual site) that could only be fixed by completely redesigning the site. Anyway, I felt the fonts were too big.
So back to the drawing boards it was. It wasn’t so difficult this time since I already had an existing theme in mind as well as the raw photoshop file to make changes easily. Also, to save me from all that mess that was going on in the code, I decided to do this from scratch (kind of. All my designs are based on the Kubrick theme’s code) rather than editing previous versions. It was surprisingly faster than the last time I did something like this. The coding part was a lot easier too, since I was doing this from scratch. I’m quite happy with what I’ve done.
As usual, you can check it out over at our sandbox. Your feedback is greatly appreciated! 
Oh, and as a special treat, here’s a look at the history (just 1 year) of Tech65 design changing with the times.