I’ve given up on Flock. It was too slow and bogged down by all the social network extras.
I prefer it’s Flickr uploader to any others I’ve seen, and I like 99% of the way it handled RSS aggregation and blogging itself. The web clipboard was cool too, but I didn’t make the effort to use it enough to benefit from it enough. It was smart about Del.icio.us integration too – something I can’t say about the Firefox plugin I’m using now.
Ultimately, I was watching Firefox 3 betas and RCs and jumped across on the release day. It’s quicker and a touch more stable, deals with embedded video without leaking memory and thrashing my dualcore… but I do miss Flock.
Give it a go if you haven’t, just to see what they’re trying to achieve.

Canon Australia – EOS 1000D Body
Until now the obsolete camera took that position, so my 400D’s price is sliding downward while the 450D is now the ‘new entry level’ camera. The specs on the 1000D make it look like a repackaged 400D while the features and body are clearly taken from the 450/40D evolution with similar button layout, larger live view LCD and SD card.
The 1000D appears to define another tier to Canon’s lineup, whereas until this point the older entry level was more of a forgotten little brother.
1Ds mkiii 21.1Mp super pro
1D mkiii 10.1Mp serious pro (somewhat similar to the 400D as ‘the obsoleted’ camera)

5D mkiii 12.8Mp metal body pro

40D 10.1Mp Plastic body serious amateur (late ‘07, didn’t benefit from the 450’s new sensor)

450D 12.2Mp plastic amateur (new April ‘08)

400D 10.1Mp plastic amateur entry level (likely discontinued by Aug ‘08)
1000D 10.1Mp plastic amateur entry level (due August ‘08)

That the 1000D is named so, formally splits it off. Now the tiers are the ‘One’, the ‘Five’, the ‘Tens’, ‘Hundreds’ and ‘Thousands’.

Just deleted my account. It’s all gone (for the second time).
Jaiku and Twitter, Pownce and now Plurk… didn’t we take a step forward by decentralizing our messaging systems with Jabber? Nothing’s scaling, Twitter least of all, and spam has borked email for the most part. Then again, I don’t particularly like how current thinking to replace email seem to be some sort of controlled identity and/or authentication based. I can understand why these alternatives could work, but I don’t trust that the simpletons (average lusers and those seeking to dumb down the internet to get all the ‘moms & dads’ online) not so simplify ‘identity’ as a 1-to-1 match between an online presence and a ‘real world’ identity.
My greatest concern is how quickly it could be mandated that we attach our tax file numbers to our ISP accounts and email addresses which in turn act as OpenID or some other Single Sign On token.
And all this worry just because I don’t have enough friends on Twitter to hit critical mass and make it worthwhile!

Had a little play last week with the Canon G9. It feels like a compact 40D to me, with the similar scroll wheel and screen size. The lens bezel is removable, exposing a thread to attach lenses, somewhat like an SLR.

This is the flagship non-SLR by Canon and is substantially larger than I had expected. It is too big for anything but the largest coat pocket but not too large to be unwieldy. 12.1Mp, the huge screen, face recognition for auto focussing, a standard hot shoe (for ‘real’ flashes) and the somewhat retro case included in the box were the icing on the cake and had me wondering if I’d have been just as happy (and had a LOT more money in my pocket) if I’d bought this camera instead of the Canon 400D.

The Canon G9 is a remarkable camera and I might take more photos more often if I had only this camera, rather than a dSLR and my waterproof Olympus 790. But then, I’d be too scared to take the G9 to the beach, or pier fishing and would I have walked around in the cold and dark so many times with a tripod and a mindset to create more than just snapshots? Probably not but it’s still an amazing camera and I wish I owned one.

Yubikey by Yubico – an authentication device.

I first heard of the Yubikey a few weeks ago on the Security Now podcast with Leo Laporte and Steve Gibson. It’s a really slim USB device but without the usual metal box end; just enough plastic and metal contacts to wedge itself into your computer.
I bought 3 (one for a friend) and they only took a few days to arrive. Now I’ve got them, I’ll push the OpenID research/experimentation/playing-around further up the to-do list.

Just installed MediaWiki over at InTheShack.com and I’ve started building the content.
It was going to be a magazine-style site for some friends to house their content and build some traffic for each other in return for free hosting and email by me. Now I’ve decided to get back to learning, rather than administering (more on that later), so that website is going to be a personal reference site for all the things I learn for the projects I am interested in and skills I develop.
The goal is to demonstrate what I’ve learned over time and have a bunch of projects that can easily be packaged into presentations or projects to improve the skills and understanding of newcomers to Amateur Radio and electronics hobbies, and eventually others in related fields.
Let me know if you would like to help out.

I picked up the repeater update for this month and have processed most of the files I usually maintain. The VX-5 Commander software isn’t behaving like I remember it, the Import from CSV is grayed out.
Also, I’ve added a static page to this site where I’ll keep my latest memory files. VK3LOL and I have spoken in some detail about a more intelligent workflow for maintaining all these memory files and I’ll be exploring the options for the ‘base file’ (from which all other files will be generated) in the coming weeks. Do I maintain a database? SQLite? or a text/CSV and do acrobatics in Excel/OpenOffice to produce the different column requirements of the software that accepts a CSV input. That still leaves me with hand updating the Icom 208 and any others that don’t have non-manufacturer software or other options for inputting CSV or converting from other formats.
I have grand plans, which I’ll cover at a later date. I’ll stay quite for the moment so not to dob myself in for a job I’m not able to take on.

The Passively Multiplayer Online Game, PMOG
I read a bit about this ‘PMOG’ thing a few weeks ago on BoingBoing and just saw it’s now in open release so I’m having a go. I surf 400+ pages per day so I’m keen to see how much I’ll have to alter my surfing habits to do well with this game. Too much and I’m sure I’ll give it away, I can’t see it meaning all that much to me.
Let me know if you join, my username is Nubs, on account of the worn down fingers. While I might give this idea a fair tilt, it has taken me away from Flock by wanting me to install the extension in Firefox (running v3 beta, btw). I didn’t check to see if it installs in Flock, but I’m not entirely disappointed it’s given me a small reason to play with Firefox more as Flock has always devastated my CPU & RAM when running flash video and locks up a fair bit. I guess I’ll ‘return home’ to Firefox and take another look at Flock when they move to Firefox 3 as a base.

I put this one together using the photos from the EMDRC March CoffeeShop presentation by Roger. That would easily have been one of the most interesting presentations in my time at the club (no offense intended to any of our other speakers). Whether it was the simplicity of the mast or that it perfectly solves a problem without over-engineering, the whole idea took-off in the imagination of the audience and sprang into a club project.

I’ll be retaking the photos tomorrow, but all the labels should remain untouched.

plasq.com – Comic Life

I don’t know where I came across this program first, either the Make.com or a mac-centric RSS feed. Anyway, I thought this style of desktop publishing was pretty cool. I quickly made a few photo-layouts (rather than comic strips) and had a lot of fun with it so I bought the Deluxe package about a year ago (just a couple months before I bought a new Macbook which had the Standard package installed *shakes fist*).
Yesterday, I fired it up for the first time in a while when I began putting together a flyer for a club project. There was a newer version available and I found sometime recently they released a Windows version, so there’s no excuse for anybody not downloading the 30-day trial and giving it a go.
Have some fun, check out the plasq.com gallery, or ‘Comic Life’ on Flickr.

PS: I don’t know these people , just one I found on Flickr that shows one of the treatments you can do on the photos you insert.