Tech Tok

Nikon D200 - click for larger picture

D200 is a 5 frame per second (in raw mode yet!) 10 megapixel digital SLR taking Nikon mount lenses. When I was on a high building in Paris, 6 megapixels with telephoto yielded pretty good street-scapes. Twice the resolution should be something else. It’s somewhere around $2k Canadian, but is currently back-ordered in NYC. This will probably put downward pressure on the D50 on boxing day. Save a few pennies for the sales!

Okay, so what I thought the new LG was, is in fact available. The Avel LinkPlayer2 is one such player.

However, I cannot say for sure what it will do when confronted with an avi file that is not a standard HD resolution, such as the many 960 pixel wide avi’s posted under the moniker “HR” on torrent sites.

Just received a shipment from amazon.co.uk with a Girls Aloud DVD in it. Sorry not available in Canada or the U.S., only in PAL and region 2. Their cover of the “Pointer Sisters” “Jump” is quite excellent.

Also got a book called “Is it just me or is everything shit? (Nov. 2005)” full of wonderfully British observations complete with a fine examination of Sofia’ Coppola’s Lost in Translation… er, and Macs, and DVD-user-restrictions, etc… Sorry not in the US or Canada, eh.. amazon.ca can get it for you in 1 to 4 months.

I think there was a moral to the story, then again maybe not. Just more content for your region-free player and filler to make the order from abroad worthwhile. Enjoy!

I just quickly tried “Jake 2″, which is a port of the Quake 2 engine over to Java, and I have to say I was very impressed! I opted for the “webstart” version, which downloaded everything and ended up creating a native “.app” file on my Mac, which is cool.

Toyota is building 2007 Camry Hybrid gas/electric vehicles in Georgetown Kentucky. Talking head launch video They plan to build 45,000 per year.

Multiverse is a company that seems to have implemented what I was trying to do with GmOne. You can sign up to be a developer and download an SDK of some sort. I’ve signed up to see what they have.

The idea is that you can set up your own 3D world, and people can use a general MultiVerse client to visit your world (and others). Sort of similar to There and Second Life (and maybe a bit like World of Warcraft!).

Someone here at work recommended a package called mt-daapd for serving music on a Linux box to be accessed via iTunes.

He highly recommended it, and it sounded really cool. Here is a list of features, cribbed from the FAQ:

• Supports the Roku SoundBridge (query/browse/index support)
• Supports periodic rescans of the database
• Can advertise shoutcast streams
• Supports password-protected shares
• Is web-configurable and managable
• Support dynamic playlists, like iTunes “Smart playlists”
• Probably other things I’ve forgotten

All is not perfect, however. Currently, there are several drawbacks to it:

• database is indexed by inode, so all music must be on one filesystem
• browse by artist is slow on Roku, times out (with large databases ~10K songs)
• Probably other things I’ve forgotten

Google Transit showed up in Google Labs recently. It only works for Portland, Oregon, but it is supposed to help you find your way around a city via public transit. Man, I could really use that for San Fransisco!

Unfortunately, the UI is a somewhat opaque. To me it just seems to be Google Maps. Can anyone else get it to do something transit-oriented?