In lieu of upgrading to one of the new Macbook pros that recently came out I opted for an upgrade of my existing notebook. I purchased a Hitachi 320GB 7200rpm drive and had it installed by Mac Fusion in Long Beach, CA. The Hitachi drives have had consistently great reviews and so far it has performed flawlessly. It’s quiet, a lot roomier than the 120GB drive that came with the notebook, and slightly faster since it’s 7200rpm vs. the original 5400rpm Fujitsu. I would highly recommend the upgrade to anyone who does a lot of multimedia work on their Macbook Pro, but you do need to find an authorized Apple service provider to install it to avoid violating your warranty. Thankfully the new MBP’s have user-upgradable drives, so going forward it will be easier to get more space.

First of all, the landscape of cheap video cameras has changed dramatically. The Flip Video Ultra is available at around $125 and has more storage in the same basic form factor. The original one appears to be widely available on eBay for under $100, and there are a bunch of inexpensive, small, flash-based camcorders in the $100 – $175 range available with similar features.

So here’s the update on my experience with the hacked CVS camcorder:

Pros

1. It worked; pretty well in fact. I actually bought a second one a couple of weeks later and hacked it too.
2. It turned out to be a fun thing to play with since I wasn’t afraid of destroying an expensive camera. The kids and I rigged up a cardboard and fishing-line harness for it and sent the camera skyward on a parafoil kite. The video could give you motion sickness in about 10 seconds but it was a really fun little project, and one we would not have done with an expensive (and heavier) camcorder.
3. The project itself was a lot of fun from a sheer DIY / geeky / hardware hacking perspective. Sometimes it’s just fun to take things apart, solder stuff together, play around with hacked firmware, etc. (if you’re into that sort of thing…)

Cons:

1. The software end of things left a lot to be desired, at least as of a few months ago. I have to hand it to the folks who made it all work – their kung fu is much stronger than mine. I wouldn’t have a clue how to decompile the firmware on one of those cameras and reverse engineer the security, encryption, etc. So kudos on making it work. However, documentation pretty much consisted of inconsistent forum posts scattered across two or three websites. Matching software versions to camera to forum-post-how-to, etc. was a much bigger pain than most people would put up with.
2. I already had the USB cable, the old Palm III cradle, the soldering gear, etc. If you didn’t, and had to purchase that stuff, you’d be halfway to buying the “real” Flip (or Aiptek, Vivitar, Canon, etc .) by the time you bought what you needed.
3. The video doesn’t easily lend itself to editing in your usual editing software. Since it was going to take a bit of research, transcoding, etc. I never even went down that path. I just grabbed stuff off the cam and whatever was there was fine.
4. I built a new PC and went to Vista. I thought this would be the death of the interface software, and while I did manage to get it working it just turned out to be more of a pain than it was worth.

So at the end of the day it was a fun project but in all honesty I haven’t even had the cameras out of the junk drawer in at least six months. However, it did make me think about shooting video in a different light, and I have ended up shooting a lot more of it in the last 12 months as a result of the project. Occassionally I’ll bring the camcorder along and shoot some “real” video, but more often than not I’ve just shot stuff using a point-and-shoot still camera. I’ve got a Canon G9 that does a surprisingly good job, and while I wouldn’t use it to shoot a feature film it’s just fine for little family movies. Plus it’s small, it’s usually with me whenever I’d want to shoot something, and it takes really great still photos (which almost no video cameras, especially the cheap ones, can claim).

So if you want a fun DIY weekend project the CVS camera hack is worth a shot, but if you’re actually wanting to get a reliable, functional video camera that you can depend on I would steer you towards spending a bit more and buying the real thing, or giving your point-and-shoot a try.

I really like Google Calendars, since it’s available online and lets you create multiple shared calendars. However, while it may be a bit old-school I prefer a desktop client to the web interface, and like to have a local copy when I’m offline. I’ve been using Thunderbird’s Lightning extension, which is OK, but I really need to be on iCal so that my blackberry will sync appointments.

I just set up the sync on my macbook pro and it seems to work great. I’ll update with another post once the blackberry is brought into the mix.

Pros:

1. It’s nice to have a machine that will run OS X, various flavors of Windows, and has a Unix core. This is particularly attractive to me as a tech consultant, although I’d hazard a guess that a very large percentage of Apple fans have never seen the command line.
2. Great build quality; things just work. Solid feel to the hardware.
3. Aesthetics are great, but you already knew that. Isn’t that why we buy Apple stuff in the first place?

However, IMHO the machines don’t live up to the unbelievable amount of hype surrounding them, largely for the following reasons:

1. While many non-technical Apple fans may be surprised at this, the core of these machines are identical to their PC brethren. Intel core-duo processors, Nvidia graphics, commodity RAM and hard drives, etc. In other words, nothing special. Dell Latitudes and Lenovo Thinkpads are just as powerful.
2. Upgrade-ability isn’t really there for the pro series. You can add more RAM pretty easily (which I did – I can’t imagine paying Apple $400 for a 2GB RAM upgrade) but upgrading the hard drive voids the warranty, involves completely disassembling the computer, and doesn’t appear to be something that Apple is anxious to do for you. I’ve got a 120GB drive in this machine that I’d like to upgrade, but it looks like I’ll be waiting for the warranty to run out and then doing it myself. The macbooks have user-upgradeable hard drives; why in the world wouldn’t they offer this to the people who spent $$$ to buy the pro series? So what if there’s an extra bay on the bottom of the damn machine?
3. It’s nice to have Apple stores if you’re a consumer, but there’s nothing like the next-business-day onsite support that ALL the other major manufacturers offer. Dell will show up at your office with parts and a certified tech to fix your machine. No such luck with Apple. Proceed directly to the “Genius Bar”…
4. This was really surprising: I can’ find any good free image editing programs for the Mac. There is nothing like Paint.net, and the GIMP doesn’t run natively on OS X even though it’s Unix / BSD. Huh??? I thought this was THE platform for image editing – I guess you’re just expected to shell out another $600 for Photoshop immediately after buying a Mac. Photoshop Elements is only $100 but has received very mixed reviews. Hard to believe your options on the PC are so much better…this was a real shocker.
5. Office 2008 is OK, but inferior to Office 2007. Perhaps the black turtleneck crowd eschews M$FT products, but it’s an absolute requirement for anyone who wants to do real actual work in a corporate environment. I realize this is Microsoft’s issue, not Apple’s, but either way it impacts users who need to work with others in a corporate environment. You can run VMWare Fusion (which I do) or Parallels, etc. to get Windows + software running, but at that point you’re just over-paying for a Windows laptop. Save some $$ and buy a Dell.
6. From my initial research it appears that you can’t natively sync blackberries with the Mac. Huh!? Unless I’m crazy it doesn’t appear that there is a good way to sync what’s possibly the world’s most popular smart phone with Leopard. iPhones are great but I’d like to have some alternatives.
7. Some of the “little things” you just expect to see on a PC aren’t there. E.g: no hard-drive activity light; Mac fans say “you don’t need one” – I beg to differ. No ethernet connectivity light – why is this?? Perhaps it offends Steve Jobs’ sense of aesthetics? Only 2 USB ports, one of which is rumored to cause issues with things like headsets and external drives. The list goes on…

At the end of the day I do like the new Macbook Pro and will continue to stick with the platform, but it’s hard for me to understand the amount of hype / fan-boy behavior around the product.

In other, non-Apple news, Dell is supposed to launch their new Latitude E-Series next month. I’ll be waiting in line to get one as soon as they ship.

I’m the proud owner of a new MacBook Pro. I went for the more portable 15″ version and so far it has been great. Leopard’s underpinnings are very familiar to anyone who is coming from a Linux or Unix background and as usual the Apple build quality is exceptional. Although I have to say I’m now eyeballing a RAM upgrade and a new larger/faster hard drive to speed things up a bit, esp. when running Windows apps under VMWare Fusion. Tip: if you’re in the market, check Apple’s refurbished deals. That’s what I ended up doing with this machine and I got a great deal on it.

“Yahoo Inc.’s board plans to reject Microsoft Corp.’s unsolicited $44.6 billion offer to acquire the Web giant, a person familiar with the situation says.

After a series of meetings over the past week, Yahoo’s board determined that the $31 per share offer “massively undervalues” Yahoo, the person said. It also doesn’t account for the risks Yahoo would be taking by entering into an agreement that might be overturned by regulators. The board plans to send a letter to Microsoft…”

“Dell Inc. has decided to stop selling most consumer systems powered by Advanced Micro Devices Inc. chips through Dell’s popular Web site.

The big computer company says it still plans to keep selling the AMD-based machines in retail stores and over the phone. But Dell’s decision is nevertheless seen as a negative for AMD, which took years to convince Dell to modify its longtime strategy of using only chips from Intel Corp.”

You can read the article on the Wall Street Journal website.

Ouch!!

UPDATE: I posted an update that you might want to check out. The update was written a year after this original post and has some thoughts on the project after using the camera.

I got a CVS one-time-use video camera for my birthday a couple of weeks ago. They make for a fun hardware hacking project as there are a lot of sites on the internet with instructions for hacking them. Once you’ve completed the hack you get a re-usable, semi-disposable video camera for $30. There are a bunch of other great additional hacks you can do once you’ve unlocked the camera, like making it waterproof, etc.

It’s a fun project, but you’ll need to be comfortable soldering things together, working with open source utilities, etc. If you’ve got some free time and a penchant for that sort of thing you should give it a shot.