With over 9,000 photos on Flickr alone, I think it’s safe to say that I like to take a lot of pictures. Like just about everyone these days, I have a digital point-and-shoot camera for documenting parties, nights out with friends, road trips, fun in the snow, and the list goes on. I also have a couple video cameras and a DSLR. I’ve heard about the Xshot! camera extender and saw one in action, but didn’t have my own… until now, thanks to a kind gift from an BC Blogger, Heather.
What Does It Do?
Those who have never seen an XShot usually have one of two reactions when they finally encounter someone using one. One reaction is to ask what it is, but more often than not people just comment on how cool it is. For those wondering what it does, the answer is easy. It extends the reach of your own arm by way of a telescoping pole that has an attachment at one end to connect your camera and a rubber grip at the other end to hold it. The result is a better shot in self-photos, making photos with the length of your arm in them a thing of the past.
How To Use An XShot
It’s too easy, really. Just screw the tripod mount into the adapter (found on the bottom of most cameras) and adjust the tilt to your liking (usually 90 to 110 degrees is good). Next, set the timer on your camera, extend, and smile. Now you know how to use it, but what about all the different ways you can make use of an XShot? There’s the obvious self-photo, but here’s a few more ideas:
- Photos with a friend
- Artsy photos from all angles
- Photos well above the crowd like at a concert
- Photos in hard to reach places (inside a wall, under the couch)
- Self-shot videos
- Unique perspective shots like from outside a moving car
You can see these last two in the following video:
Conclusions
Obviously, I love my Xshot! and Heather rocks for sending it to me. I’ve used it several times already and I’m sure it will get used a ton more at upcoming events. For about $30, it’s cheap enough to make up its purchase price before long and it’s compact enough for travel. It’s a great little accessory for anyone with a camera and if I hadn’t gotten one in the mail, I had already planned to buy one. You should too.
As you may know, I had my own little security problem at my house when a guy was repeatedly urinating on my storage building in the wee hours of the morning (no pun intended). Luckily, I was slated to review a very flexible and professional security camera system and caught the guy on video before catching him in person. The video and photo are in that post above, but today I learned of something just as interesting that happened at CES.
In the incident I referenced above, my late night visitor had no way of knowing I was recording him because I hid the camera very well and it was dark and late. In this story, the star of the video, Willy Wu, walks up to a booth, picks up the contacts book full of information from potential clients looking for further contact from the company, leafs through it, and casually walks away with it. At any other booth, he may have gotten away easily in a show as enormous as CES. Unfortunately for Wu, the booth he took the book from was that of Swann Security, a global leader in security monitoring solutions. Now that’s just dumb.
According to the article, Swann staff caught up with the guy at CES pretty quickly and he handed over the book without hesitation, but then ran off. Eventually, they’ll catch back up with him, but the important thing here is that he didn’t get away with all that client data.
This is a Sponsored Post written by me on behalf of 123 Media Max. All opinions are 100% mine.
I love watching movies. I have a ton of DVDs and I’m pretty careful about how I treat them. Still, I’ve backed some of my movies up in the past with other software, so I am not unfamiliar with how it’s done. I was given the opportunity, today, to review some software that not only copies DVDs, but is also a Blu-Ray Copy Breakthrough. I don’t have a Blue-Ray player (although I should by now), but I wanted to give it a try anyway, so I did.
Why Should I Back Up My Movies?
Like CDs, DVDs are prone to getting scratched up. All it takes is for you to have a movie night and leave one out while swapping movies because the case wasn’t immediately available. The probability of scratched DVDs and Blue-Ray movies increases exponentially with each child you have in the house. At $15, $20, or more per DVD and Blue-Ray disc, it’s a good idea to back them up.
Copy and Burn Blue-Ray and DVD Movies
The core functionality of 123 Media Max is copying movies, so right after installing, I threw in my Napoleon Dynamite DVD and fired up the software. After choosing to copy a DVD straight, it prompted me for the media I wanted to copy, including my DVD in the list. The selection box was a little small, but I chose my DVD and it told me that my DVD may have copyright protection on it and asked if I wanted to look for a plugin that would get past it. I opted to look and seconds later, I was downloading Boooya to get around the copy encryption. After another quick install, I was copying.
In software I tried in the past, I had to run a tray application (all the time) before I even thought about backing up a DVD. Then I would run a second application to do all the work. I like that this uses a plugin that loads only when needed. After about 20 minutes, the DVD data was copied and I swapped the DVD for a blank DVD to write to.
After about 40-50 minutes total, I had installed both the application and the plugin, copied the DVD, and burned it to a blank disc. This was also faster than software I had tried previously and easier, too. I tried my new backup and before I knew it, that goofy 80’s kid was distracting me from my review.
Additional Features
123 Media Max has, so far, proven to be better than the software I tried in the past, but here’s where it slaps that other software around and makes it cry uncle (well, almost). After you’re done backing up all your movies, you can get more out of the purchase price by converting videos from one format to another and even downloading and converting videos from the Internet. In about two minutes, I told 123 Media Max I wanted to find video online, searched (within the program) for the Tron trailer, found it on MetaCafe, and downloaded and converted it to an AVI on my drive. The only problem I had was that it didn’t find videos on YouTube that I know exist. Hopefully that will be fixed in another version, but it’s pretty cool even without YouTube. Although I haven’t tried it, 123 Media Max also boasts the ability to convert from DVR and TIVO files as well, which I think is a great feature for anyone with one of these devices.
Conclusions
This software should copy your Blue-Ray movies while maintaining the great quality. In my tests, it performed great and did more than expected. If you don’t want to worry about losing your Blue-Ray or DVD collection, or find that they often get scratched up, 123 Media Max is a good investment for your collection at just under $70.
As 2009 is nearing its end I’ve been looking back and thinking about all the cool stuff I’ve come across in the last year. The stuff that sticks out the most is the tech videos showing new concepts and products or just cool new ways to use existing technology. I’ve put together ten of my favorites, but they are, by no means the ten best videos out there. If I missed anything, please feel free to share in the comments.
TED – Sixth Sense Technology
This is a great video showing real examples of new technology that puts information in front of you as you need it. Very cool stuff!
PlayStation 3 – High-Resolution Image Enlargement Technology
I was fascinated about this technology when I saw it used in The Rosetta Project months ago, and I’m still excited by it.
TED : Wireless Electricity
We’ve been getting closer and closer to the day when we can just come home and throw our cell phone on the table and it’ll just start charging without the need for all those cables.
Liquidware Illuminato X Machina
I love to see stuff like this where the machines become more aware of their state and are then able to interact appropriately with other machines near by.
‘Tron: Legacy’ Trailer HD (vfx test footage)
If you’re old enough to remember it, Tron was a great geeky movie well ahead of its time and the remake has techies like me anxious. Check out some visual FX test footage.
Augmented Reality Business Card
Since this video (and a little before it), a lot has happened with Augmented Reality and we’re even seeing it pop up in iPhone and Android apps now. Still, this is a great example of its use.
TweenBots
This was an interesting social experiment in which little robots were set free in New York and people helped them find their way.
TED: David Merrill Demos Siftables
First Flight of the Terrafugia Transition (flying car)
The blogosphere was abuzz when this video hit the web. It’s a car that converts into a plane to fly and then back into a car again.
ArcAttack performs the Dr. Who Theme on Twin Tesla Coils
I’m not a big Dr. Who geek, but I loved this anyway.
I love to take photos. I have 8,447 photos on Flickr, and that’s just the ones I’ve taken in the last few years. The problem I have is when it comes time to upload them. It takes a while, so I always have to stay up late the night I took the photos and upload them or it ends up getting put off for weeks. I’m pretty good about keeping my cables and card readers where I can find them, but we’ve had several occasions with missing data cables for other cameras in the house and at the office, too. I hate having a camera full of photos trapped on a card when I can’t find the transfer cable, especially when people keep bugging me for them. It’s not just me, either. There are photos that my friend Lindze took on Halloween that I’m still waiting to see.
A good solution for this is an Eye-Fi card. This cleverly named device is a combination of an SD card and a Wi-Fi card. It actually uploads your photos as you take them (if you have it set up with a Wi-Fi connection in the area) or can upload all your photos when you walk in the house.
Getting Set Up
First thing’s first. Will your camera take an Eye-Fi card? They have a compatibility list, but you really just need to make sure your camera is SDHC capable. My DSLR (like most) does not take an SD card at all, and my wife’s Casio Exilim Z60 (the Frankencamera) has a dead battery, so I borrowed a friend’s Casio Exilim Z75.
To get going, I plugged in the USB card reader that came with my 4GB Eye-Fi Share Video. This was were I found my only gripe during the process. The reader is wide , so it blocks my second USB port. While inconvenient, this only needs to be in for a few minutes. With the reader plugged in, I slid the card into the reader and the typical Windows dialog opened up, asking what I wanted to do with this media. What was not so typical is that the first option was to use the software included on the card. New devices are a lot more fun when I don’t have to put in a CD, find drivers, or struggle in any other way to get going. The software installed and began with me creating an account on the Eye-Fi web site and setting up my wireless connection. My new account also required some configuration of photo and video sharing services. I set up my Flickr and Facebook accounts and then removed my card and put it in the camera.
The whole setup took about 10 minutes to get my account, wireless connection, and two services set up and the software installed on my computer.
Shooting and Sharing
There are two key ways the Eye-Fi can be used to make things easier for you. The first and probably easiest is to set it up once as described above, and just let it do all the work when you bring your camera home. This should happen even if you use it the second way, too. When the camera is on, it looks for that wireless connection you configured and automatically connects and starts uploading any new photos and video while retaining a copy, organized by date, on your computer. Here’s an example video showing how that works:
The second way the Eye-Fi can streamline your multimedia life is by uploading as you go. This is probably going to be less used by some people, but I think it’s even cooler. Let’s say you head to an industry event like Blog World. When you first arrive, you configure the Eye-Fi to use the event’s provided Wi-Fi connectivity. Throughout the event, you snap photos and shoot video, but instead of waiting until you get back the your hotel room to share, everything gets uploaded instantly to your selected account. This would work great on Christmas morning, too. Relatives who can’t fly in can experience everything with photos uploading as the presents are opened.
Whatever you do, you have the option of logging into your account to see photos and videos coming in and manage everything as it happens.
It also takes your privacy into account, which was a plus for me. When you set up a photo or video sharing service in your account, it asks you about privacy levels. During my testing, I had it uploading photos as I took them, but they were flagged as private in Flickr, so I was the only one who could see them until I reviewed and made them public. The user experience and small details were definitely not overlooked.
Win Your Own Eye-Fi
If you’ve read everything above and are thinking “I want one of those in time for Christmas”, you’re in luck, because they’re giving away 12 of them. Perhaps it’s for the 12 days of Christmas, but whatever you celebrate this time of year, you might get one of these things for free by just commenting on this post or sending out a tweet containing the hashtag “#eye-fi” with a link back to this blog post. Complete contest rules are here: http://izea.com/contest-rules-regulations/eyefi-contest-official-rules/.
Conclusions
In short, I love this device. It does what it says, but it does it elegantly and the setup is about as short and sweet as it can be. If you have an SDHC capable camera, this should be on your wish list for Christmas. That said, I noted two things that I’d love to see happen with the Eye-Fi. Mainly, I’d love to see this built into a Compact Flash card for my DSLR. My DSLR supports Wi-Fi, but not sharing to Flickr, etc. and it’s nowhere near as easy to get set up. I’d also like to see the ability to upload to up to three sharing sites concurrently. It would be great to be able to have my photos up on Flickr and Facebook instantly, for example. Over all, this is a great time-saving device, a unique gift idea, and decently priced.
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Xshot! camera extender and saw one in action, but didn’t have my own… until now, thanks to a kind gift from an BC Blogger, Heather.
