Techno

Cool Tech Toys, and stuff for the boyz and the girlz!

When buying digital cameras, don’t skimp on the price!

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I’ve been the owner of three different models of digital camera over the years. My first camera was a disaster: the pictures were fuzzy and low quality. In fact, the only way to get decent pictures was to resize them to a very small size. In fact, the photographs are actually quite reminiscent of photographs taken by an older cell phone camera!

If you’re looking to enlarge your photos for your LCD TV or other multimedia, you would be sorely disappointed by the quality. Perhaps it’s best that I forgot which brand that camera was… And this is based on my own personal experience…

Sample 1: OEM Unbranded Model

The *unnamed* camera produced pictures that were at best barely acceptable even in broad daylight. Anything else resulted in grainy images that were seriously blurred. Take a look. The picture looks okay when reduced to a small size, but as soon as you enlarge it, you see ALL the problems. It cost nearly US$100 to buy at the time, and was a total waste of money. I regretted buying it and it is still sitting in a drawer somewhere.

sample

(Taken inside at a school demo lesson with Tommy).

Sample 2: Kodak Camera C360

My second camera was a Kodak Camera C360 which took great pictures for my budget, and was perfect for blogging. The other positive factor was that I could just use ‘AA’ batteries (if the rechargeable died) in an emergency. Very handy to drop into 7-Eleven and buy some at a pinch. But it still didn’t give great shots for high definition purposes. This camera was purchased for a trip to the UK in 2005, and was a very successful choice.

The Kodak Camera produced much better resolution photographs with its 5mp capabilities, though there was some softness and chromatic aberration in some areas. But it produced great color images that were attractive. And it was a highly versatile little camera. Unfortunately, I also bought a new Kodak when I replaced it, but the replacement was just not as good.

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Taken in 2005 at Ullapool in Scotland.

After losing my Kodak, I quickly purchased my third and most recent camera, the Panasonic Lumix DMC series FX-30 model which has several really neat features including a 28mm lens. This makes a wider angle and far more landscape style – which is great for the scenery of Taiwan.

Sample 3: The Panasonic LUMIX DMC-FX30

This camera is much better than either of the first two, with its 7.2mp, multiple shot modes, and high resolution modes. I’ve been very happy with this camera choice for its ability to take great landscape shots as well as decent portraits. These photographs are perhaps the best for enlarging for digital TVs or enjoying at full screen size on your laptop computer. It doesn’t deal with haze well or night time shots… but otherwise it’s much better.

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Taken in 2008 at Hyde Park in early Autumn.

In fact, when I was in the UK, I was able to purchase a small laptop that I used to show my digi-photos to family and friends, in full size, of course. It was perfect way to set the screensaver or presentation mode, and let the photographs play in the background. I never figured out how to connect it to the TV, though. But as a portable solution, it was perfect.

I didn’t read any reviews of the cameras I bought… it’s probably not worth reading them for me, as I find it difficult to get the exact models here in Taiwan. Also, the models turn over so fast! So I finally decided to go with brand names I trusted. Also, I avoided buying the most ‘economical’ models after the first one. It just wasn’t worth the additional disappointment. I reluctantly bought a model with no replaceable batteries, but that hasn’t been much of a problem. But I’m not a professional photographer by any means! I only wish I was!

Need Video for your Blog: Turn your camera videos into FLVs for your blog, easily and quickly.

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I’ve been doing video for a while, and always found it a pain to transcode videos. Why? I don’t have a Flip camera but I just use the movie mode available for the smaller cameras (my Lumix for example). Unfortunately, I’m not an Apple FanBoy, which makes dealing with those QT movies a really pain in the butt. I tried different solutions for transcoding those and had limited success.

Transcoding Hamlet!

But for a recent project, I need to transcode some FLVs of Hamlet lectures like this. This was a project for the Taiwan Science Council and the website was the result of a project application.

hamletintaiwan

I didn’t have any time editing the videos, though that would’ve been ideal. I only had a little time to transcode and upload the videos. The results are surprisingly effective. And that was all thanks to a program called MediaCoder:

MediaCoder is a free universal batch media transcoder, which nicely integrates most popular audio/video codecs and tools into an all-in-one solution. With a flexible and extendable architecture, new codecs and tools are added in constantly as well as supports for new devices. MediaCoder intends to be the swiss army knife for media transcoding in all time and at this moment, it already has millions of users from 170+ countries all over the planet.

I found that for the first time I was able to transcode video easily from Quick Time to FLV without an intermediate step. Previously I had to create an AVI format and then use Super to create an FLV file. After that, uploading was time consuming but effective! Voila!

make an FLV

Simply drag the file to the transcoding area, then hit Extensions and “Other Devices” and Flash Video Maker. I set the quality as high as I dare which turned 1 hour of MPEG4 video into an FLV of about 150MBs. I also kept the audio as high quality as I could, given that it was a lecture, audio quality was more important than video quality. Other choices: 25fps, Hi-Quality, with 300Kbps bitrate and original resolution. Audio was default settings. The results are effective if a little grainy.

Adding Video to a Post

You can download one of the best plugins for adding Flash Video to your blog. It’s called Flash Video Player Plugin for WordPress and can be found at http://www.mac-dev.net/blog/index.php where you can download the latest version. Installation is easy: upload and activate.

To add a video to your post, you simply upload the file via FTP, then create a post and add the code as follows:

That’s it. Pretty easy, I think. I had some problems getting video to work on my other blog, but it was because of a plugin incompatibility! Once the offending plugin was turned off, it worked beautifully.

So if you have videos on your camera in unusable QT formats, download MediaCoder, transcode the files, and upload the FLVs to your blog. As an example, I’ve included my wife playing Jenga… and she loses, big time!

Enjoy!

Comment spam can be used to attack your PC – Bloggers Beware

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I was checking updates in my email this afternoon when I opened the following email. It’s a typical “Please moderate…” request that WordPress generates if you have enabled that function. It’s one that I typically enable. But today I noted that this was a possible attack vector, and a danger for bloggers everywhere…

security attack vector

What happened?

I decided after receiving so many of these wretched emails in my mailbox, that I would visit the URL to see what would happen. Boy! Did I get a surprise. After clicking on the link, the URL resolved then redirected to a porn site, which then tried to load a whole bunch of images on a page that I hadn’t entered. Then in a few seconds, it froze my browser and I tried to manually recover the browser, but the whole system froze. So I exited the system by hitting the power button, and rebooting. Usually this approach is a little extreme, but I had no other choice. By that time, the system was emitting a beep sound.

On reboot, I ran several scans of my pc through anti-virus and anti-hacking tools to check that the PC hadn’t been compromised. I will likely have to monitor the PC for several days to make sure that it hasn’t got recurring problems; and I’ll likely run other checks to make sure nothing was inserted into my computer. But really, if I hadn’t learned before, I am completely shocked that I exposed myself to a whole new attack vector.

How would an attack work?

Quite simply: the virus writer would upload a virus or malware (or whatever) to their server; set up a website that allows the malware to be downloaded on a vulnerable PC; create anonymous looking links in such emails or even better misdirecting links from other sites they own; and spam the links across hundreds or thousands of blogs.

So…

  1. Create the program or virus – malware.exe;
  2. Upload that to the site where it is hosted and hidden in a webpage;
  3. (Create redirecting links on a more ‘neutral’ site: http://georgiesoros.co.uk/temp/page… that redirect to the page with malware);
  4. Spam the redirecting links in emails, newsgroups, comments, logs, and wherever else they can get them;
  5. Then wait for unwitting victims (like myself) to hit a link and get caught in the trap.

For the blogger, it’s a double whammy!

WordPress will either publish or queue the spam if it isn’t caught; if it is queued, notification emails are posted to blog owners causing them to open the email and possibly click or download the virus on their PC. If it isn’t emailed or published, it will sit in the comments section, and await the unwary blog owner clicking on the links there.

Once clicked, the page or browser will take over your PC with whatever needs to be loaded, and boom! Your pc is compromised.

Stop the spam, blogger! Stop the spam!

It’s always nice to know when you receive a comment, but you may need to take steps to protect yourself:

1. For older posts, use the Comments Plugin and close comments on really old posts. Just close them.You won’t regret it. Ever since I closed the comments on my old blog, I have had a much more peaceful life. More active blogs turn off comments and trackbacks after 1 month. You can automate this process, too. It’s called “Extended Comment Options“.

2. To avoid the double whammy, turn off the notification features when it says “Email me whenever…”. Just simply turn it off. That way, you won’t know that you got a comment, but you can live without that. If you check your blog most days, then this shouldn’t be a big deal; just remember to check your comments.

3. Consider using an anti-spam plugin to prevent such spam. I had been using Spam Karma II to prevent such spam. It worked pretty well but I tweaked my settings a lot, and it helped. Spam was really reduced that way; but I did lose one or two legitimate comments which were never recovered. Development on SKII seems to have faltered for the moment, but do check it out. I stopped using it when I switched to WPMU, and noted that I dealt with less spam anyway. I’m still not sure why spam dropped.

4. Keep your system uptodate as well as your AV and spyware software, too. Be prepared to run several such programs if you suspect you’ve been compromised, and do use some of the online systems as well. I’ve been known to run three AV programs at times when I suspect I’ve been hit, including TrendMicro’s HouseCall.

5. And don’t use older browsers, esp. if you are still using IE6.0, and you haven’t patched your system. Some of the exploits are well known now. Download a modern browser and use that instead.

So, take care with those comments, comment spam and trackbacks, they can lead the new blogger, and even more experienced blogger, into the dangerous world of ID theft, PC repairshops, and heightened Tech-related frustration!