I finally uploaded and tagged my grad photos in my Flickr account. What this means is that all my photos from the past three years are now online and neatly organized. Want to just see pictures of me? Or of Jer, Andrew, Jen or Frannie? Or what about photos of the orca statues, stuffed animals or at playgrounds? Photo albums are good, but tags makes photo sharing more fun.
Archive for the 'Tech' Category
Last week, I bought a Nikon Coolpix 4800 through eBay. Boo Amazon for not having electronics in their Canadian store. I won the bid at USD $175, but after shipping costs, I ended up paying CAD $250. I’d still say it’s a good price though, because London Drugs sells it for $420. It’s a refurb, but I haven’t experienced any problems with it so far. The body has some minor scuff marks, but they aren’t very apparent unless you look really closely. I’m really liking the 8.3x optical zoom, although it doesn’t work well on objects within a few feet of the camera.
Next stop - Futureshop, for a sweet 1GB SD memory card.
I’m taking Computer Science 221 this semester, in which I’m required to code in C++, a language I’ve had no experience with before. Unfortunately, the first lab deals with recursion, at which I’m hopeless. I understand recursion when I’m looking at solutions to problems, but it takes me forever to actually write a recursive function on my own. While I began working on the lab, I just drew out the general flow of the problem, since I’m so terrible at recursion. Just now, I hacked together a bit of corresponding code to test out my ideas.
Being an extremely crafty Computer Science student, I didn’t buy the required C++ textbook, so I had to look up a few C++ tutorials online to figure out how to make my program compile. I’m so edgy that I didn’t even bother writing a “Hello World!” program. Anyways, after working out my compile-time errors, I ran my program.
And it worked.
Flawlessly.
I checked it over and over, but it just works. I was seriously expecting to put much more time into this, since I’ve had little experience with C++ and recursion, but it looks like I’m nearly done. I have an edge case to deal with, but I’ll work on it later.
Podcasting is all the rage now. It’s been around for at least a year, but it’s started to pick up more momentum recently, especially with the release of iTunes 4.9, with built-in podcasting support. Normally, I pick up on these kinds of technology trends pretty quickly and get into them before it hits mainstream, but I’m woefully behind this time. Most bloggers either have their own podcast or subscribe to them. You know you’re really far behind when Arnold Schwarzenegger gets there before you.
So, like a good blogger, I started listening to some podcasts. I even wasted a few minutes listening to the Governator talk about safety in the sun and heat-related illnesses. I’ve listened to a few prominent podcasts, including Adam Curry’s, and a few really bargain basement ones too. Because pretty much anybody with a microphone and some Web space can start up a podcast, there are lot that are really, really bad. Most have poor sound quality and provide little interesting content, making me to unsubscribe as quickly as I subscribed.
In the end, the only podcast that I really like is Stupid Church People. They’re a duo of former pastors who now speak out against the problems in the modern church and in modern Christianity. I love it because they don’t pretend to be pious Christians who live every moment by the book. Christians and non-Christians alike have acclaimed their podcast because it’s just so good. They’re not perfect and I don’t always agree with what them, but they’re definitely funny, interesting and engaging.
I wish that there were more interesting podcasts out there. Generally, I just don’t find them too interesting. I think that the whole thing has been a bit overhyped, since there really isn’t that much quality content available. It won’t take over radio, just the same way that blogs won’t take over newspapers, but the good podcasts out there will certainly grow in their respective niches. But for now, I’ll just stick to Stupid Church People.
Lately, I’ve been researching photo management sites, to see what might be the most viable option for me. Right now, I’ve just set up a gallery on my home server, which I’m really not supposed to be doing. It’s also a bit slow.
However, a lot of the free sites out there are pretty terrible - poor interfaces, ad-ridden pages, difficult upload methods. The diamond in the rough, though, is Flickr. Simple, intuitive, efficient, easy and free. And no obtrusive ads! There’s even an iPhoto plugin available, which allows me to upload photos from my iPhoto gallery straight to my Flickr account. It’s dead simple. The only downside is that you’re only allowed to upload 10MB/month with a free account. A paid account is just $2/month, allowing you to upload 2GB/month (wow!), which I am seriously considering. That, or I could shrink down my photos to lower resolution.
I was also considering to just download the Gallery script and use that on my server, but the downside is that I have to use my own web space to host photos. Ideally, I’d like a place where I don’t have to worry about how much free space I have, though if I have enough space, it becomes a moot point. So, I’ve also been considering switching my hosting to Dreamhost, where I would pay just as much as I do now, but get 2.4GB of space, which is definitely enough for me.
But now, I’ve got a third option: 23. It’s very similar to Flickr, with tagging, easier uploading, sharing, etc. The only difference is that it’s in beta right now and free beta accounts are allowed to upload 1GB/month. Once it’s out of beta, new accounts are only allowed to upload 15MB/month. Also, unlike Flickr, they don’t have any restriction on free accounts only being able to show the latest 200 photos uploaded. It’s definitely looking promising, so far. One downside is the lack of photo program plugins. If I could just set my iPhoto to upload everything to my 23 account, I’d be very happy.
