Wheelz Online

I got a Sony Handycam just after christmas and have been shooting loads of rubbish recently. But the problem I have is that I only have software and drivers for Windows XP and i’m using Vista now. So I plug my handycam into my pc and it doesn’t recognise it… How the hell am I meant to get the video onto my pc??? And I’ve spent hours online and it seems as though Sony hasn’t made any Vista drivers for it yet. So I have a lump of plastic and metal sat in the corner of my office waiting to be able to use it for something.

Please sony get your act together soon.

*** Update ***

I’ve now gone out and bought a firewire card and my pc sees it now.  On my way to the Oscars 2008!!

Over the last couple of years, I’ve lost count of the number of keyboards I’ve bought.  I like keyboards, no I love them.  I’ve been through the range of the cheep ones when I was not very financially stable, through to ones which did things other than let you input letters into my PC.  The last keyboard I possessed was a Logitech DiNovo set.  It was nice - Bluetooth, media pad, all the sexy little add-ons.  But then Logitech outdid it completely with their new offering, the DiNovo Edge.  Upon seeing this I HAD TO HAVE IT.  I couldn’t help myself, it looks so pretty - It has a rechargable base.  It lights up orange when you touch bits of it.

So yesterday I took my trusty debit card to the shop of bought it.  It was the wrong side of £100 by nearly half again but hey, I don’t drink, I don’t smoke, I just like things like this.  I must mention at this point, that I’ve also got the top of the range Logitech Revolution MX mouse aswell.

Whats it like as a keyboard I hear you say?  Well…  Its the nicest keyboard I’ve ever typed on.  The keys aren’t spongy - you know when you’ve hit them because they make the a noise a little like the old boards with the microswitches in them.  Its got a volume touch bar which works the same way as the scroll wheel on the ipod.  Just move your finger up along the bar and a line of orange lights follows to show you the volume.  Also there is a circular touchpad on the bottom right of it.  This has autoscroll features on it and again has that little orange light around it to show when its in use.  The board itself has a kind of plexiglass look to it, very ipod looking.  I can see that itsn’t going to get fingerprints on it easily which is why Logitech also provide you with a small microfibre cloth to keep it clean and free of smudges.  On the bottom is a nice wrist rest made from aluminium with the famous logitech logo etched into it.  I LOVE IT!!!  There isn’t much more to say really, other than this has made me happy.  If there has to be a downside to it, then the only thing I can think to critisise it that they have left off the numberpad, so it could be annoying for someone who enters numbers alot.

Here in the UK, there is a tv show on Channel 5 called “The Gadget Show”.  Its pretty good and it reviews gadgets which isn’t really suprising.  But it also looks at other things techie. One of the things which this series is working on is to campaign for blanket free wifi in major towns and cities in the UK.  Upto now, the only city which has got free wifi in the city is Norwich, which isn’t exactly a happening place (sorry people of Norwich, but it isn’t).

Anyway, the gadget show are asking people to sign up to give their support to the campaign and hopefully something will come out of it so that more towns can get this useful resource rather than having to pay £5 and buy a coffee to get online in the city.  You can sign up and give your support here.

Coming hot on the heals of my M3100 phone, I now have tomtom navigator 6 for it.  This is a GPS SatNav system which runs through my phone and a GPS receiver.  I’ve been thinking about getting a satnav for a while now and was going to purchase an all-in-one box but decided to make use my phones PDA functionality.

I have to say that over the last few days I have been using it, it seems pretty acurate.  The one things which does annoy me is that because its american, roundabouts are called ‘roteries’and it can get a little confused with exits on roundabouts, but apart from that I think its pretty cool.  I would recommend this software to anyone who has a PDA/Smartphone rather than getting a seperate SatNav.    Check it out over at mobilefun

Last year I attended @media 2006 in London, UK; a geek-fest of some of the best minds in web design and many many interesting seminars ranging from Web Accessibility to CSS to Microformats.

Today i recieved an email teasing me with some names of the speakers who are attending @media 2007.  Will I be there?  You Bet.

I love my mobile phones, I change every year.  So after much research of the phone market at this time of the year, i’ve decided to jump ship from T-Mobile and moved to Orange  so I could have their SPV M3100.  This is a Windows Mobile 5.0 phone with a slide out keyboard.  There is a serious reason for getting such a geeky pone though.  I use a number of different computers in my daily business and rather than carrying around my laptop all the time, I can simply use the M3100 for working on the move and then being able to sync it with whichever PC i’m using at the time.  Well so far so good, I think its a fantastic phone but if anything happends to it I’ll let you know.

Today, I had the fortunate task of buying myself a new monitor. After months of reading reviews, comparing prices and trying to decide what I needed, I decided on the Asus PW201 widescreen monitor. It was a really nice day weather-wise today so we decided rather than ordering it online we would go up to Scan and get it from their warehouse.

This was fantastic! I was like a kid in a candy store… There was everything (well nearly everything) that I have ever wanted for my pc and the service we got in the store was second to non. I recomend them 100%. But onto the monitor

This is a widescreen 20.1″ monitor with a black bezal and stereo speakers if you don’t already own any (which I do). The cool thing about this monitor is that you can pivot it from landscape mode to portrait mode. This is great if you work on documents or webpages. Also on this monitor is a built in 1.3 megapixel webcam and also a 3 port USB 2 hub. The only downside about this monitor is that for the price I would have thought they might have had a HDMI port on it for HD pictures. But this is the only point I can pick up on with the fantastic screen. 4 out of 5

OK, so we have all been waiting for years for Windows Vista to be released, and while we all know that it is ’supposed’ to be secure and better for us, we are all thinking “Is it going to look as cool as Apple’s OSX?” From what i’ve read and seen about it I think It will be a huge visual imprtovement on what us PC folk have been used to so I’m waiting for next year somtime for its release with anticipation.

But with all the hastle of trying to ship it when they said so, you would think thats what they would concentrate on. But they have also sent out a “Vista Industrial Design Toolkit” to a ton of PC Manufacturers on how to build a ‘pretty looking’ box for vista to sit in. from an article on the subject

… contains a whole host of suggestions about how to build a PC that will fit with the look and style of Windows Vista

Now lets be honest about this, off the shelf PC’s have come a long way since the beige boxes of 10 years ago, but they are still pretty dull. But why do Microsoft think that its their responsibility to make sure that the PC’s of the future are nice looking and “want PCs to be objects of pure desire”. I think they have stumbled upon the fact that an awful lot of people are into the mac’s because they look cool compared to a PC. But lets be honest, for a techie, even a novice one at that, its not hard to change the box on your computer to something you like rather than a black case, or a silver one.

So is this another sign that Microsoft is starting to get twitchy over Apples encroaching slice of the computer market? I think so

You can read the full article on ars technica