Month: February 2010

The incredible efficiency of the modern banking system

  1. I earn enough points from using my Chase credit card that I’m eligible for a rewards check.
  2. I’m lucky enough to log on to my bank’s website during a time that it’s not down for maintenance, and order a check.
  3. A week or so later, a paper check is dispatched from Reward Headquarters, USA, and arrives in my mailbox.
  4. A week or so later, I get around to checking my mail and place the check on my coffee table.
  5. A week or so later, I drive the check from my apartment to a Chase ATM and make a deposit.
  6. On the next business day, the money is available in my Chase checking account, which I use to pay my Chase credit card.

Fascinated by microSD

In my previous post, I showed a video that I shot while riding my bike. I think it’s pretty cool that I was able to record two hours of HD footage on a single card. In fact, I only filled up about half of the 16 gigabyte card.

Here’s what the card looks like:

To give you a little perspective on its size, let’s compare it to something. Here it is next to a 2 GB microSD card:

🙂 Okay, maybe I should compare it to something else. Here it is on a DVD:

That little card holds the same amount of data as 23 CDs, and it cost less than $50. Pretty cool.

And if you’re wondering what the original video quality looks like from the camera, here’s a segment of the original recording that hasn’t been recompressed.

Bike ride

I went for a bike ride on Sunday. This route usually takes me about two hours, but thanks to my computer, this time it took less than ten minutes:

The video was taken with my ContourHD using the handlebar mount. It’s an interesting angle, but the mount doesn’t hold the camera as tightly as I would hope so there is quite a bit of vibration between the camera and the mount, even though the mount itself doesn’t move at all relative to the bike. On an earlier weekend I tried recording with the goggle mount connected to my helmet strap, but that was a bit of a hack and I look around a lot. I have ordered the vented helmet mount though to see if I want to utilize that while biking (for reduced noise) or skiing. Here’s a picture of the camera and mount:

camera on handlebar
alternate view of camera on handlebar with rubber bands holding it on

I didn’t use the rubber bands for this video, but I’ve found that they do help to reduce vibration a bit.

Here’s the route I recorded with My Tracks:

View 2-14-2010 in a larger map

It would be really convenient if there was a standard way to record GPS data over time in a video, like how location data is stored in EXIF for photos. There’s at least one video camera coming out that records location data, so we’ll see how they implement things and what video software starts to support doing interesting things with video and location.

Now that I think about it, it’s also disappointing that location awareness isn’t built in to all still cameras yet. Here’s one way we could approach the problem:

Installing a GPS receiver in every camera may not be practical, especially since GPS doesn’t always work, such as indoors. There are other ways to get location data, but adding WiFi and cellular radios is just going to increase costs even more and may even require subscription fees. What you can do is assume that anyone who has a camera also has a phone, and that the phone has some sort of idea about where it is. You can then pair the camera with the phone (via Bluetooth or WiFi; whichever is easier/cheaper), and then with every picture the camera will ask the phone for its location and store it right within the EXIF data for the image. It may not always have a GPS fix, but location data of some accuracy would be recorded with each photo, which would save the photographer from manual location tagging later.

Dreams

Sometimes I dream about stupid things. Last night, before I went to bed, I packed up some papers so I could staple them at work. I don’t have a stapler in my apartment because I would probably fidget with it and hurt myself.

This morning, I found myself sitting at my desk wondering where the stapler was that I had seen earlier. I then realized that I didn’t actually have a stapler at my desk… last night I dreamed that I had one at work.

The problem with search engines

Sometimes when I’m about to make a really hilarious joke that I just came up with on my own, I search for it on Google just to make sure I’m being original. And then right there at the top of the results, I see that someone else has already used the joke, and this frustrates me.

I’m afraid to search and see if someone else has already complained about this.