New toy

So I bought myself a new toy for Christmas, and have been playing around with it a bit to see what it can do. It’s a Flip Video Ultra, which seems to be all the rage for shooting quick, easily uploadable, simple video. It’s not like my little Panasonic digital vidcam, but it’s great for recording things in the moment, like this clip I shot on my first day back from vacation: About the size of a small cell phone or ipod, it’s so easy to use my 77 year old aunt could do it: press the red button to record, again to stop recording. Zoom and volume buttons occupy the ring around the red button; “play” and “delete” buttons reside to the left and right of the red one. That’s it. Simple.The other cool thing about it is the built in USB arm that swings out at the push of a button, and  the built-in software that means you don’t have to load any extra programs into your computer. Once you’ve saved the video, you can edit with other software, but for simplicity and ease of use, the onboard software works to just get the video out there.I’ll post more on this as I get better acquainted with it, but for now, it gets my two thumbs up. 

Geeks rock!

So I was fiddling around with my cell phone and Mac the other day, trying to figure out how to use my cell to get online. Y’know, connecting with bluetooth and capitalizing on the unlimited data plan I have to surf the ‘net. A handy thing to be able to do, when you’re as addicted to geekery as I am, always travel with my computer, can’t always find a coffee house with wifi. Or at least not one with free wifi. Call me spoiled, I just can’t bring myself to pay for it when so many places offer it free. Just in my neighborhood alone, there are at least six free hotspots within walking distance, so when someplace like Starbucks wants me to drop ten bucks for a day’s worth of surfing (I think they still do that – haven’t tried it for awhile), it makes sense to me to find another way. Hence the cell phone-Mac-bluetooth thing.So last night, I got online (using my own Clearwire signal) and began my search for instructions as to how to properly configure my networks settings to accomplish this task. After about an hour or so of searching, reading, setting, testing, tweaking and the like, I hit on the magic combination of numbers, and voila! I got online! I’d read warnings about how painfully slow it could be, surfing the web this way, but to be honest, it wasn’t bad. At times pages loaded slowly, but others were pretty quick to appear. I’m very excited about this, as I have a trip to the coast coming up, and it will be really nice to have access whenever and wherever I want it. I’ll post an update afterward to tell how it went.