I’ve thought long and hard about the test I was running with ads on this site. I’ve decided to remove the ads as I’ve learned everything I can about the ad-serving solution I was testing. I hope you enjoy.
Also, the banner image now links back to the homepage- an oversight on my part.
Ditch the tape, Furrygoat (Steve) points to the Sony HDR-SR1 camcorder that records in High-Definition, 1080i quality on a built-in 30GB hard drive (which loosely translates to around 2 hours of recording in highest quality). This should work out of the box with Windows (Vista) Movie Maker which has support for HDV editing (yes, my Mac does that too thanks). Though I understand the new camera uses the MPEG-4/AVC/H.264 codec so you may still have to do some conversion. It also takes adequate 4 megapixel stills, and has dolby digital 5.1 recording. you can even snap 2.3 megapixel stills while you’re recording video. Sony still seems slave to their own proprietary Memory Stick format, but otherwise, this sounds like a winner. As Furry says, “Must. Resist. Temptation.” At $1300, I’ll be resisting unfortunately for a while. I do wonder though- should I put it on my christmas list and hope that my wife reads my blog, amping up the whole “our son will never get any younger” argument for purchase?
More details and a preliminary review can be found at camcorderinfo.com.
For those like me who thought this season’s Battlestar Galactica has been a bit weak (the whole planet thing), it looks like they’ve just righted the ship. An amazing episode last night that had me in awe at moments. Hats off to the production team.
Run, don’t walk to get the final release of IE7 for Windows XP. If just for the security features – anti-phishing and whatnot. congrats to the IE team. You can see a video w/ Dean and team at
http://on10.net
. Yes, it comes across as a PSA (sorry guys) but it’s got lots of goodies about add-ins for IE7.
Things have been incredibly busy at work lately- so much so that I haven’t had any time to post here. I’l try to get better about that.
In other news, friends over in the eHome team are celebrating. Is it Vista related? Almost 
. They’re celebrating a major milestone – 20 million Windows XP Media Center PCs have now been sold. Some might recall that just last April, the stat was at 10 million. Talk about a ramp rate. By comparison TiVo has just over 2 million stand-alone units out there (which I also own and enjoy).
Speaking of Vista, I’ve started getting questions on when the right time is to buy a PC for Vista. My father is still hobbling along on the Windows XP PC he bought 5 years ago right after the launch of XP (and he’s never reinstalled). The hard drive is starting to go, but we’re using chewing gum to keep it going. My neighbor’s PC also just died and he’s hobbling along on an old PC of mine right now. Buying a new “Vista-ready” PC is pretty easy when you see the logo, and I expect there will be some pretty amazing deals this holiday season.
Which brings me back to Media Center. Friends over in eHome-land told me that they worked will all the Media Center PC manufacturers to make sure any MCE PC sold this holiday season will be Vista Premium-ready. So if you have to buy, look for the Vista logo, or just get an MCE PC.
One last comment on Vista for home users- I’ve noticed that if you connect a Vista desktop to a UPS, the PC will run in “Balanced” mode, just like a laptop. At first I thought this was a bad idea, but then I realized that for the overwhemling majority, this is fine- and a more energy friendly way to do things.
I’ll write more this weekend- thoughts on using a TiVo Series3, and taking Flight Simulator X (Final release) for a whirl.
Sean Alexander is Senior Director of Xbox LIVE Co-founder of three startups, certified BBQ judge and part-time tech tinkerer.
