the Technology Affinity blog
Earlier this week I upgraded from my first DSLR, the Nikon D60, to the new Canon EOS 550D. My first tests with it were done in Delhi in bright daylight as well as tricky indoor low-light situation and I am very happy with the upgrade.
While the Nikon D60 is a great camera to get into DSLR photography I have come to my limits with it quite quickly and was ready for the next step. For about 1.5 months I evaluated both Nikon and Canon systems, fairly early decided that I want to give the Canon system a shot now.
Then for the actual camera my requirements were:
- 15+ megapixels
- 1080p HD video recording
- Liveview
- high FPS for continuous shooting
- >3400 ISO
- user-friendly menu/settings
- ideally dedicated ISO setting button
I recently received my shiny new Google Nexus One, as well as the stand, and captured the glorious moments with it as an unboxing feature.
Now if there were two things, and there are, that are not to my liking, I’d have to say:
- Exchange support does not include Calendar!!!!!!!
- No HTC Sense UI
Now while there are ways around both issues through apps (paid-for ones), it is just not the same. For a while I pondered to sell my Google Nexus One and get the HTC Desire instead so at least I can get the HTC Sense UI. This would be intriguing if it wasn’t for one crucial difference in hardware between the Google Nexus One and the HTC Desire, the hardware-based noise reduction tech. Since I’m using the Google N1 mostly for business it is quite crucial that I get the best voice quality possible. So after long deliberation and having found a good set of pretty good replacements for some key components of the HTC Sense UI I’m finally leaning towards keeping my Google Nexus One and not pawning it off so I can get the HTC Desire instead.
HTC Sense UI replacement apps:
- Basic home theme: “GDE – The new home experience!” by MiroMind [paid for], with the “Hero Theme for GDE” by Diceman4 [free]
- Clock/Weather Widget: “Weather Widget” by Android Apps [paid-for], with the H7C skins for clock and weather [free]
I’m aware that this is by far not an exhaustive list of all HTC widgets it is still a good enough work-around, short of having to root the device and flash the HTC Desire’s ROM onto my Google Nexus One.
Other replacement features to match HTC Desire:
- “FlipSilent” by Maven Peter: this mutes your phone if you turn it face down
Great replacement for complete Exchange sync/push access:
- “Exchange for Android” by NitroDesk, Inc. aka Touchdown [paid-for]
We’re the most delighted and happy owners of a Roomba 581. Ever since we openend up the box we have several extra hours available to do meaningful things every single week.
Here are some photos we took during unboxing the happy helper.
This week two events take place in London that I will cover live via twitter. If you’d like to follow the stream of updates from the areas that I cover, please follow @geekpub on twitter. In case you hadn’t heard about geekpub yet, it’s a little thing that I started in the summer this year to organise drinks amongst like-minded folks. The initiative is in the early stages, free, and open to anyone who likes to chat about gadget, technology, games, etc. For more info please visit http://geekpub.me.uk/ . Besides organising the little meetups I’ve also decided to do all the live microblogging under the geekpub name so as to separate it from the everyday updates under @geofas. Continue reading »
I’m excited to report that a week’s worth (well about 25 hours in total) of research on work has come to fruition.
After having learned what I need to know about Amazon’s cloud computing web services EC2 & S3 I moved geofas.com over to the new architecture and it paid off. The site runs about twice as fast now which makes me very happy.
If you care to compare bring up http://blt.me.uk/ which on the previous web-host alongside http://geofas.com/ which is now running on Amazon EC2.
Later this year I’m going to post a how2 for setting up a wordpress powered blog on Amazon EC2 and move content over, a particular scenario that I believe has not been properly covered clearly in the blogosphere, so hopefully this may be of help to fellow bloggers.
Update: For cost reasons I’ve decided to go back to my original webhost since I had already paid there for 2 years of hosting.
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