One of three posters for the recent Star Wars movie that I took photos of while in Korea. The Megabox movie theatre was part of the COEX underground mall (they claim that this is the largest underground mall in Asia, and it is huge so I can well believe it). This is the same mall that I found the Apple Experience Center in last time I was in Seoul.
Having given up waiting for the camera connector to appear in an Apple store, I just bit the bullet and ordered it online. Since it was free shipping I’m not really sure why I didn’t do it earlier, but there you go.
Tonight I actually got around to trying it out. I was going to upload some photos I took while on my recent business trip to Seoul and Tokyo that have been sitting on my S100 since I got back last weekend. Then it struck me that I could test the iPod Camera Connector and also how easy it would be to get the photos from the iPod into iPhoto. I was also wondering whether it would cope with the S100 since it is old enough that it has a proprietary protocol. Of course, iPhoto handles it so I thought that there was a pretty good chance it would work, and sure enough it did.
Connecting the little adapter to the iPod caused it to immediately switch to the import screen. Connect the camera, turn it on and the iPod’s display tells me how many photos are available for import. Starting the import resulted in thumbnails of each image appearing on the screen as it sucked them off the camera. That simple.
Next step was connecting the iPod to the PowerBook. As always, iTunes jumped into action and did its thing, but it did not do anything about the new photos. Starting iPhoto took me directly to the import screen, with an iPod icon and the number of shots available for import displayed. Click the import button, and the photos were transferred, quickly.
Of course, I really bought it to take the photos off my 20D while travelling on vacations when I don’t have a laptop with me, so the next test will be from the 20D. First impressions though are that this little gem does exactly what it said it would, and will be the perfect solution to storing my photos while on vacations without the PowerBook. It would have been nice if it was bundled with the iPod Photo in the first place, but at $30 it remains affordable for anybody who is likely to need this capability (isn’t that most iPod Photo users?).
This is the last of the things in the series of Computex photos I found that caught my eye. The folks over at Gizmodo also saw it, but have no further information on it. That said, it probably doesn’t need any further explanation, does it?
Update: The folks over at The Unofficial Apple Weblog have a link to a photo of a mac mini being used as a toilet paper dispenser which is pretty cool (check out the previous one in the flickr stream for the version with the Intel logo on the paper too).
Another clear copy from the Computex trade show in Taiwan, this is AOpen’s mini PC. While it clearly looks very much like an Apple Mac Mini, the company claims it is not competing with the Mac Mini. The specs are very similar to what one might expect from a Intel based Mac Mini, and it is claimed that the device was created at Intel’s request. Could this be a prototype for the new Intel-based Mac Mini? There is an intriguing quote from IDC analyst Roger Kay towards the end of the press release (which came out before the big Apple-Intel announcement at WWDC):
“I don’t think the two – Mac mini and whatever Intel puts out – are really in the same market; that is, of course, unless Apple starts running OS X on x86 hardware.”
Now we know that Apple will be using Intel chips, could this be the prototype for a Pentium M based Mac Mini? Or maybe it was a proof-of-concept that Apple asked Intel for to prove that a Pentium M system that small could be made? It is not quite the same layout on that rear panel, but it has most of the same ports, including a Firewire port.
In a collection of photos from this year’s Computex show in Taiwan, there were a number of clear attempts to copy the design of Apple’s products. The photo on the right shows one iPod mini copy; you can see another in image 20 – the IX-440 Audio Jukebox of the collection.
There were also some Shuffle copy-cats: Image 11 is one example, but perhaps the most blatent is image 25, LuxPro’s SuperTangent. The folks over at Engadget have a link to an iPodLounge review that pretty much declares this a waste of money.
Looking in my site statistics, which I do occasionally, I discovered that a couple of people over at myspace.com are using images from my site without any credit. So, now those two images have copyright overlays. I’m not bothered by people using the images from my site on their personal sites, but please give me, or my site, a credit for the image.
Finally the trackback spam became too annoying forcing me to update to WordPress 1.5 (I had been putting that off as I hate any kind of upgrades to things like that). In doing so, I gained the new ‘default’ theme which I kind of liked, but not quite, so I tweaked it! Let me know what you think.
Then I installed the Spam Karma 2.0 plugin. We’ll see over the next few days how that works against the spammers. They have over the last week or so switched to being all trackbacks. When they were mostly regular comment spam, Kitten’s Spaminator was doing a good job of keeping them at bay. Unfortunately, it didn’t check trackback spam. Spam Karma does, so hopefully that will keep them out.
I picked up the iPod Photo primarily to use with the camera adapter but I have only just ordered this from the Apple Store online having given up on finding it any of the local Apple stores or other stores where iPods are sold. I managed to get a 40GB model at a clearance price, which was a bargain in many ways. At just a few dollars more than the new 30GB model, it is 33% larger, but most importantly came with all the cables, the cradle and the power adapter. I also managed to get it personalised by MacMall.
Since I’ve not had the camera connector, I’ve been using it as a music player and also, recently, to listen to podcasts. I also have thumbnails of my full photo library installed on it (almost 14,000 photos now). That’s not without its problems though. Unless you have photo albums set up for everything, the library is the only way to access the photos and scrolling through 14,000 photos to find the one you want is not fast. It is a shame that the “roll” information that iPhoto uses cannot be available in the iPod’s interface too.
All of that said, I am very happy with the purchase. It is a little larger (and heavier) than some of the alternatives, but, assuming that the camera connector works well, it is a lot cheaper than the device I was looking at for in-the-field photo storage (mainly to offload the camera while on a trip without having to carry a laptop with me): the Archos PMA400.
One of two heads, this one lies on his side looking up out of one eye.
Along the edge of the Embarcadero walkway are these plumbing fixtures… I can only assume that they are an essential part of the bay’s plumbing 🙂