I’ve partnered with Mippin to provide a mobile version of Conveniently Misplaced. This is better than the iPhone version that was on here as it provides a full mobile browsing experience for full articles, not just a preview with the article names.

Check it out at

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I just ran a speed test on my internet connection, here’s what I gotNot too bad I suppose.  They have the averages on there, the highest average download for a region is the United States at 4738 kb/s. But what upsets me is the upload speed, the highest for that is in Europe at 1051 kb/s and in the United States it’s 893 kb/s.  C’mon WOW, let’s kick this up a little bit. 

I like to check my hits to see where my visitors come from for numerous reasons and I came across this.

All I have to say is this: Dude, why are you hanging out at the Department of Student Affairs at 12:41am? Don’t they lock that place up at some point?

In fall of 2005, Apple held a special event to announce a new program: Front Row. A multimedia interface for your Mac that allowed you to access pictures, movies, and video via a remote. Not a lot of people cared, myself included.  Now that things have all come full circle, I can see that Front Row wasn’t as much an effort to making an entertainment center out of your Mac as it was trying to perfect the software for their set-top box, the AppleTV. Which is cool, but still something that I never think that I will ever buy until it does more stuff that I want it to do. I’ve dismissed Front Row up until recently as not being able to find any realistic use for it.

Well, I found one.

I no longer have a need to buy a stereo for my bedroom. Sometimes I’m just lying around, going to bed, etc and want to listen to some music, but even with buying a stereo my music would be limited to an iPod input (and my iPod stays in my car now 99% of the time) or CDs or even worse, radio (I’m not paying for XM, screw that). Either way, I’d have to get up to change it.

So now, I’ve discovered that I can put my Macbook on my dresser, and with the Apple remote, fire up front row and have everything in my music library in 1 place where I don’t have to get up and change the music when I want to.

The only thing that’s bugging me is I don’t know if it can repeat songs/albums or not. Which is a bit frustrating. But I’m working on it. Either way, I’m very happy with this program. Good job, Apple.

Even though I don’t use Internet Explorer, I keep up with all the updates. So I downloaded it last week, and it was nothing to write home about, but the rendering does seem faster. Here’s what I’m running:

So after playing with it for about 30 minutes after downloading it, I left it alone and haven’t touched it since. Today, I go to run Microsoft Update, and I get this:

Apparently, in Microsoftland, if it’s beta, it isn’t real. So apparently, Internet Explorer 8 beta doesn’t count as Internet Explorer. So if you want your OS updates, stick with IE7.

You would think by now that Microsoft would have just made MS update it’s own standalone application, like Apple does with their software update. Ooh well.

It has been almost 4 years since the demise of TechTV, the place where all the computer geeks in the world came together to drink, dance, and be merry. But since Comcast purchased the network and purged it into it’s awful G4TV network, most of us stopped watching, almost the entire TechTV cast was fired, and they all dispersed into world. So, what are they up to?

Leo Laporte

Who He Was
Back in my young and noobish days, The Screen Savers and Call for Help were some of the biggest sources of finding out good solid information from people who knew what they were talking about. Leo created and co-hosted The Screen Savers and also hosted Call for Help. He was a great example of how you can be a total computer geek without having to resport to the glasses with the scotch tape on them and that twitchy nerdiness. Leo was just another guy…who happened to know how to program and troubleshoot and could explain things in layman’s terms good enough for most anybody.

Who He Is
Leo left in 2004 after a dispute with the owners of the network on stock ownership. He has gone on to further his life in media, with a syndicated radio show The Tech Guy that airs on Premiere Radio Networks. He’s also still writing tons of books and is involved with numerous “netcasts” including his own netcast network TWIT: This Week in Tech. Most of the people he works with on TWIT are former TechTV people as well, his shows include Security Now, MacBreak Weekly, The Daily Giz Wiz and Windows Weekly. All can be downloaded through iTunes. He has also been involved in numerous other TV, radio, and internet podcasts.

He currently lives over at http://www.leoville.com

Patrick Norton

Who He Was
Patrick Co-Hosted and edited The Screen Savers, where you could occasionally see him wearing a kilt. Always a pretty righteous dude, he fit in well with Leo on the show.

Who He Is
After the TechTV employee purge, Patrick was given the option to stay on with G4TV network, but he would have to move to LA. He said screw that, at the time he had planned on doing some freelance writing and then figuring out what he wanted to do. He got involved with DL.tv and become a co-host on there until 2007 where he decided it was time to prepare for fatherhood. He was also involved with a podcast called What’s New Now with Jim Louderback. He now works’ at Revision3 as a managing editor and host of Systm and Tekzilla. He is also a regular on Leo’s TWIT netcasts and you may see a column of his popping up in any PC magazine at any time.

Kevin Rose

Who He Was
Kevin was originally a production assistant (AKA nobody) on The Screen Savers. After he got some air time they started giving him a fairly common segment where he would share random, little known things about computing. It was mostly hit or miss kinda stuff, sometimes it was awesome, sometimes it sucked. Kevin’s segments weren’t usually something that we looked forward to. Kevin was one of the few to stick with G4 after the merger and moved down to LA with them where they put him on as the host of The Screen Savers. I don’t know how well he did because, like many others, I refused to watch the network after Comcast bastardized it.

Who He Is
Apparently he wasn’t good enough. The show evolved into Attack of the Show! and Rose was released from his contact in 2005. He founded Revision3 along with a few other fellows in April 2005. Things took off from there. He got the idea for Digg.com and it proved so awesome that within a few months the value of Digg had skyrocketed. He does the video podcast Diggnation with former Screen Savers (G4) co-host Alex Albrecht where his internet celebrity status is currently at record heights. He also founded Pownce, what has been called “Twitter on Steroids” with the ability to share pictures and other files through microblogging. While many from TechTV have faded off into the sunset, Kevin has taken it upon himself to go from the guy with a segment nobody cares about to one of the coolest net celebs out there.

He can be found appearing on random podcasts, on the covers of random magazines, or over at his blog.

Becky Worley

Who She Was
Most of us will remember her for filling in on Call For Help as the girl who couldn’t really match up to Leo. She started as a ZDTV producer in 1998 where she would occasionally fill in on other random shows, she also did a 1-hour newscast on random technology. She later did reporting for TechTVon their daily evening news. In total, she produced 3 shows on TechTV

Who She Is
Becky is one of those people who is a lot smarter than she lets on. She is still working in television as an on-air tech contributor for ABC news and hosts a show on the Travel Channel called Best Places to Find Cash and Treasures. Sure. She also writes for yahoo’s tech blog hook me up.

Side note, she has a masters from Stanford and was featured in Sports Illustrated Women as a badass rugby player. Read about it all at Becky Worley dot com.

John C. Dvorak

Who He Was
John Dvorak has always had a reputation as a miserable old man, which is something I’m sure dates back to his days in kindergarden. On TechTV, he hosted Silicon Spin, one of the few tech shows that I found too boring to usually sit through. It was like watching mainstream news with a small panel of people talking about something, but it didn’t matter what they were talking about as their mono toned monotony was just too much to stand.

Who He Is
More or less, the same person. Except instead of Silicon Spin he hosts ZDNet network podcast Cranky Geeks. Which much like Silicon Spin, I can’t really stand. He’s also the VP and Managing Editor for PodShow TECH channel and is occasionally found on MarketwatchTV.You can read his articles on tech everywhere from PC world to Croatia’s Bug Magazine. Despite his apathetic attitude towards life, he’s still a smart guy. He’s just one of those guys that’s easier to tolerate in a newspaper than on TV. He lives all over mainstream media and over at his blog.

Martin Sargent

Who He Was
Martin was a former fill-in co-host on Call for Help, but he was more widely known for his stuff on The Screen Savers. Leo and Patrick started calling him “The Twisted Lister” for compiling weird top 5 lists (even weirder than Letterman’s top 10) and had a “Site of the Night”, which was some other weird random website. In 2003 he opted out of that to start his own show, Unscrewed. It was a bizarre, late night talk show with a tech theme.

Who He Is
After the merger, Martin stayed the course, only to have his show Unscrewed unplugged by Comcast. He was fired as was pretty much the entire staff. He laid low for a while before popping up with Revision3 in a comedy podcast called Infected. He currently does Web Drifter on Revision3, which they picked up after comedy central (I’m sure unanimously) passed on deciding to pick it up. He also does Internet Superstar for Revision 3, which is substantially more worthwhile. He also does Why Today Sucked for GoTV.

Martin plays on Myspace.

Chris Pirillo AKA “The Gnome”

Who He Was
This guy used to bug the living piss out of me when he was on TV, as one of the nerdiest looking and acting people ever to grace the airwaves. He did some Call for Help hosting for a while.

Who He Is
Somehow, the networks have stayed away from picking him up all these years. Chris can be found today all over the internet, mostly blogging and video chatting. He has gone into the realm of Internet Celeb, with a pretty good general tech support forum, chatting, and his twitter postings (which are pretty entertaining). I’m assuming he’s just writing for a living, as he’s written a few books and shows up in columns every now and then. Much like John Dvorak, Chris is much easier to stand when he’s on the other side of your computer screen instead of your TV, and his stuff nowadays is actually pretty worthwhile.

Uncover all of his madness at pirillo dot com.

Erica Hill

Who She Was
Having an entire news show devoted to tech news was enough by itself to get me to watch it. But to have it hosted by one of the most gorgeous women ever to be on TV was just the kind of treat that’s usually too good to be true. Erica made TechLive worth watching even if it was on mute. In addition, she’s also incredibly smart (summa cum laude from Boston University) and speaks french.

Who She Is
Moving on. After leaving TechLive, Erica went on to work for CNN, doing stuff for Headline News where she eventually got her own show, Prime News With Erica Hill. She recently moved up to be a sub-anchor on CNN for Anderson Cooper’s 360 and in 2006 she got her due, being named people magazine’s #35 most beautiful person. I’m sure she’ll be around for years to come, I always felt that she deserved better than TechLive.

You can find her contributing to the AC360 blogs.

Jim Louderback

Who He Was
Jim was a big behind the scenes guy at TechTV, being the VP and Editorial Director, he had full control over the networ’s content. What stayed and what went was ultimately his decision. He developed TechLive, granting happiness to geeks everywhere and when he wasn’t doing that, he woud randomly appear on shows for commentary and news segments and had his own show, Fresh Gear. Jim was Mr. TechTV

Who He Is
Jim went on to keep working for Ziff Davis Media, including being Editor-In-Chief for PC Magazine. He’s also managed DL.TV and Extreme Tech. Currently he’s been pimping himself as the CEO of Kevin Rose’s company Revision3and runs the most bland looking website ever here.

Morgan Webb

Who She Was
She is remembered as the pretty nerdy video game girl on TechTV’s XPlay, where her and Adam Sessler reviewed video games and gave their weird and quirky commentary. She was also doing stuff on The Screen Savers and Call for Help.

Who She Is
Well, the same. X-Play is the only show to survive the merger, with the hosts intact! If you get G4 you can still see here and Adam on there. She has been featured in FHM, Maxim, and various other places. She was offered a playboy spread, but refused on personal reasons. Dammit.You can find her on Webb Alert.

What about Everyone else?

Lets not kid ourselves. Most of the familiar faces are covered here. But what about everyone else?

Kate Botello, former Extended Play and Screensavers co-host tried her hand at Broadway before moving to Traverse City, Michigan to start her own web design company.

Roger Chang made all sorts of appearances on TechTV, being an associate producer for Call For Help and The Screen Savers. Roger left after the merger and did some work with the site ScopeTech, succeeded Patrick Norton on DL.tv, and recently became a senoir producer at Revision3.

News personality Jessica Corbin anchored for TechLive, hosted Fresh Gear, and made random appearances on other shows. She has done work with Headline News and hosted Love’s a Trip on the Style network. She currently will drop in from time to time on TWIT and works at Revision3 doing the Digg Reel podcast.

Former Fresh Gear co-host Sumi Das is freelancing at  local Fox news in San Francisco, KTVU.

Megan Merrone left TechTV to start a family. She is still in California and writing for a Microsoft website in addition to her own website and podcast (which she does with Leo Laporte) on parenting. (Thank you farkers for reminding me of her)

Yoshi, the McGuyver of computing is a CAD Engineer for Gentle Giant studios, where he has worked on Pirates3, Spider-Man3, and the new Indiana Jones movie.

Geeky lab rat Robert Heron emerged from The Screen Savers to be a HDTV analyst for PC Magazine and appears on DL.TV and random TWIT podcasts.

Screen Savers contributor and Internet Tonight host Scott Herriott is apparently now a Bigfoot enthusiast. His myspace lists TechTV has his last recent job, although he’s doing tips on comedy writing now.

James Kim was a product reviewer before coming on to be the senior editor of all digital audio for CNET. James passed away in December of 2006of hypothermia after braving the freezing winter cold to save his family, stranded roadside after being snowed in.

Sarah Lane was a familiar face on The Screen Savers  and stayed as a segment producer on Attack of the Show!, but she quit that in 2006. She now works (can you guess?) as a production director at Revision3.

After Unscrewed got axed, Laura Swisher moved on to co-host podcasts and now works for CNET doing programs for them. She lives on blogspot.

I’m sure there’s a few I’ve missed, but mostly, these guys are either doing their own thing, working for CNET, or Working for Revision3.

So after watching something on the History Channel about a month ago about Area 51 (this is what you do when you’re sick of movies and have to sit there for 6 hours a day), I started to really wonder why this whole thing is completely secretive. What the real motivations are behind it all.

A few popped to mind. First would be the panic that would be caused by the entire ordeal. People would immediately freak out over the thought of aliens among us, and the conspiracy theorists would run rampant with “Who is an alien” commentary. But that could ultimately be supressed by the government assuring the people that it is no big deal, we have nothing to fear, etc. That in itself could be taken care of.

Then there was the threat of World War from other countries, say China for example, looking to get their hands on alien technology, but ultimately, this isn’t much to fear either. These are some of the most top secret facilities in the world, and it’s hard to imagine a world superpower going after this technology not knowing what it is, what the capabilities are, or what you can do with it. It’s hard to start WWIII on just a hunch, even if it is about this. So that is something that I doubt we would really have to worry about.

The biggest problem would be resulting in a massive world panic. I’m talking BILLIONS of people immediately thrown into hysteria. And it won’t be the fear of the aliens that does is. It’s the fear that they could be wrong about everything that they have believed in their entire lives.

Have you ever known someone who years after being a religious person who all of a sudden wakes up one day and says “What if there really is no God”? It’s not usually a pretty sight to watch someone come to terms with the fact that everything they’ve supported their entire lives may be complete hogwash.

Many will attest that religion and morality go hand in hand. The thought, simple enough, that “if you live a horrid life, you will go to hell” just might be eradicated if there is no eternal punishment for those who commit evil deeds. As such, the typical orthodox perspective on it is that without religion, we would be a bunch of sinning sods who will do as we please without care for the consequences. Now, I personally feel that as a society we have evolved to the point where we can act on our own moral convictions without 10 commandments and a list of sins to guide us into what is right and what is wrong. I think we can figure it out.The government, however, I’m sure has some reservations. The US government was founded on many Christian ethical practices.

As a people, we have been slow to adapt to new things. In the 1530s, we still believed that the Sun revolved around the Earth until Copernicus said otherwise. Yet today, 20% of Americans still believe that.  Yet still, as a society we are on the fence about Evolution, regardless of the age bracket, gender, or race of those we ask about it.

Now, the existance of Aliens would mean that any and everything could be thrown into the hat as far as religion goes. Did they create us? How many more of them are there? Are there infinate worlds and universes? What does this mean for the story of Genesis? The questions go on and on, but the bottom line is this: The existance of a being from another planet opens the door to question our very existance and destroy the fabric of many of the world’s religions. Once you question the very core of someone’e belief system, the whole system starts to crumble. How would the Pope, the Dhali LLama, and other religious leaders react to the presence of these beings? The whole thing would unravel as there would be too many questions and nowhere near enough answers, leading to panic worldwide.

Panic means that people do stupid things spur of the moment. Religious panic, menas there will be really stupid things supr of the moment. Don’t think so? Think of the last time you saw someone on the news doing something immensely stupid for a religious cause.

A worldwide panic of people coming to terms with the fact that their religion might have been nothing all along.

Or wose yet, you bet on the complete wrong horse and the Raelians were right!

Can you even fathom this? The world war following it all would be inevitable. Fundamentalist governments would  be put in an interesting place, from Northern Ireland, to Tehran, to Washington DC and Mexico DF, anyone that has ever run for office touting their religious background or running on a faith based platform would have an interesting time coming up with a way to figure things out. Assuming we don’t decend into anarchy in the meantime. Because the first thing I mentioned of aliens freaking out among us will come only after the religion argument fades into play.

The sequence of events looks like this

1. Public knows about aliens
2. Disbelief
3. Governments prove aliens
4. More disbelief
5. Real life examples of aliens
6. People start questioning things
7. Start to accept it as a possibility
8. Start to question faith
9. Start to panic
10. Conflict begins, confusion ensues
11. People do some really stupid things, like war, random violent acts, etc.
12. Civilization as we know it crumbles

There we go: the 12 steps to destroying society, in all of it’s glory. Balance the people’s right to know with the fact that there are billions of people who can’t handle the truth and tell me what we should do about it.

I’m not making an speculation on the existance of ETs, flying saucers, etc. But if there is, I can understand why we will never know about it until the invasion. Which I highly doubt we will be able to adequately prepare for anyways, so I’m not too worried about it.

During last July’s move into the new house, somehow part of the tray for my HP 4050n LaserJet printer was broken. I figured I would have to replace the whole tray, and since I’m in the mood to fix everything that’s broken, I figured it was time to take care of this. But while on eBay looking for a new tray, I discovered that it’s just the stupid little triangular bit that sits in the tray that determines the paper size and sends it to the printer (that was the problem, after it broke it thought that it was legal sized paper 100% of the time. Not true). My sadness that this stupid little piece of shit has been the cause of my trouble this entire time is illustrated in the following picture.

Now, while on eBay I discovered feedroller.com , a place that sold the stupid little triangular piece. And best of all? Through the magic of the internet, where you can get anything from anywhere, I find that this place is literally six miles down the road. So I just head on over there with my tray, they pop on the new piece for me AND give me new rollers for $15. I was estatic.

To make things better? They do toner refills for $35 if you have your toner cartridge. To compare: The HP certified new cartridge is $120. And the crappy ink cartridges for my Brother MFC-3240c cost at least $20 each. And the damn thing refuses to work unless all CMYK cartridges have ink in them, even if you aren’t using color. Lesson learned. More money up front means less money later.

To compare:

Kicks ass.

While this:

Not so much. The crappy little cartridges on this sucker don’t last very long either, I’ve gotten substantially better mileage out of most ink pens. I did, however, find that you can get a bunch of ink for it at a very low price on amazon while searching for the picture. So I might just do that next time. But either way, HP FTW. And as you’ll notice below, the HP is almost 8 years old and still runs flawless. It’s a champ!

Now that everything is peachy keen, it should be all good right? Just set up, install, and away we go? Well apparently not. After I checked all of my TCP/IP settings on the printer I was baffled and pissed off when nothing worked. I decided to let it go for the time being, go give my saxophone lesson, and look at it after class later on. After a lot of wondering why the computers (my Ubuntu or Windows boxes) wouldn’t connect, I noticed something odd on the configuration page.

Yes, dispite the fact that it showed the IP address under the protocol information, the damn JetDirectIO card appeared to be screwing up. Checking my switch, sure enough the little light was blinking instead of being solid green, meaning the connection, somwhere, was screwed.

While the first thing that popped into my head was “Shit, how much is a new JetDirect card gunna run me?” it hit me. Why not change out the ethernet cable from the crappy one you know is at least 8 years old to the new one that you literally just opened out of it’s packaging?

The results, ladies and gentlemen, were magical. After hours of meddling, changing settings over and over again, going through every HP manual I could find and getting nowhere, and a lot of mindless frustration it turned out to be a bad cable.

Lesson learned. Always, always check your connection settings first.

Well, this sure isn’t a grand feeling. My T-Mobile sidekick is synced with Danger, Inc. for all of my contacts, notes, etc. Now, this is cool because if I lose my phone, get a new one, etc all my stuff is still there. No Facebook groups for “I lost my phone I need numbers!” for me. But today, I’m paying the price for that. The constant sync with Danger means that if www.sidekick.dngr.com fails to work, as it is today, I can’t get at any of my data. Including phone book entries. After messing around with my phone to no avail, I tried using my online desktop interface through my.tmobile.com and it won’t load either, so Danger has crashed and taken down who knows how many sidekicks with it. But this is highly upsetting. Things like txt and picture messages started to come back, as well as did the clock, but this is just plain a pain in the ass.

Danger, get your stuff together. I know that M$FT aquired you earlier in the year, but this is no excuse. With Google’s Android right around the corner and MS doing who knows what with the sidekicks, I might be going a different route next time I get a new phone anyways. But things like this definately do not help.

EDIT: Literally, as soon as I hit submit, my phone went nuts and I got my emails back. Maybe things are getting fixed!

In other news, I applied for a position at Twitter. It’s working from home doing support staff, basically answering emails for customers quickly and efficiently. Nothing that’s beyond my capabilities, but let’s see how stiff the competition is for something like this. I would love to work for twitter, it’s something I’m quite familiar with and besides, who wouldn’t want that on their resume?

Ooh, and after screwing up my new camera, I’ve sent it to an authorized Samsung repair center in New York. So much for the good price I got for it

So after years of always borrowing somebody’s camera when I wanted to go on trips, etc I finally bought my own. Going into it all, I created a list of criteria that I was looking for that is has to have:

• Be small enough to carry around with me (compact or subcompact). No more missing Kodak moments all the time.
• Use SD cards, not XD, compact Flash, or Sony Memory Stick. I already have a 2 gig SD card, don’t want to buy another.
• Li-Ion Battery if replacements are cheap enough, otherwise I’ll deal with getting some rechargeable ones.
• Good image quality, final product more important than pixels.
• Priced around $200ish.

After spending hours of looking at product reviews online. I had to find cameras that I could find reviews on, matched my specs, and were available in store. I have to be able to at least hold the camera in my hand to make sure it will feel good (not awkward, I have big hands). If I order online, I have a rather great risk of ending up with a camera that will be virtually unusable to me. Circuit City had the best prices and selection online of cameras in store, so that’s where I decided to go. I had 3 cameras in mind leaving the house. Thanks to NewEgg, Circuit City, and MyProductAdvisor.com for being big helps in deciding what direction I should go in.

The Fujifilm FinePix f50fd was my top choice, but I couldn’t find anyone anywhere that carried it. Its 12mpxl , has a nice lens on it, a wide ISO range and got solid reviews. I like FujiFilm cameras, my 35mm is a FujiFilm and the pictures it takes are amazing (yes I still have my 35mm. And yes I even know where it is).

Next was the Canon PowerShot A720 IS. I’ve been hearing great stiff about Canon’s products lately, and this sucker has a  6x optical zoom, nice shutter speed, and all the features I’d want.

Of course Circuit City didn’t have the Canon on display because it’s being discontinued, just 1 for sale in a box that I couldn’t open. Which probably means the price will be dropping soon. The Samsung however, they do have. I was almost tempted to get the open box / display NV10 because it was only $50 without cables or anything, but I decided against it. You never know what you’re getting, especially with a camera I didn’t want in the first place. So that was tempting, but ultimately out of the question. After picking up the NV15 I loved the look and feel of it all. I couldn’t play with it as the battery was dead but after playing with the other sub compacts at the store and hating them all I decided to go for it.

Here’s the front view of the camera

3.8 inches wide, 2.4 inches high, and .7 inches deep. Super tiny, almost the size of my sidekick LX, although the camera is a bit heavier. But it fits in my pocket nicely.

Something that I had to take a gamble on was the Samsung Smart-Touch interface. Which is either a big selling point if you like it, or a major turn off if you hate it.

Here’s the back of the camera:

The buttons along the bottom and side are what make up the smart touch interface. Instead of using a touch screen that will smudge, the buttons take on new roles depending on what screen you’re looking at. And you don’t have to keep hitting all these buttons, you slide your finger across them to change menus and stuff. It’s really cool, and a very elegant solution to the problem.

In addition, it hits every other point on my list. It uses a Li-Ion battery with cheap replacements. Uses SD and the High Def SD. And it was marked at $200 but the website had it for $152, so I got that price instead. Looks like a winner, but what about picture quality?

Since it was dark out, I figured it would be good to try and snap some night shots, see what the camera really can do. The biggest things I’ve had problems with as far as digial cameras go are the night shots and the shots coming out unclear because of my hand shaking. So off to Detroit I want.

These pics of Detroit and Mount Clemens were all taken from within my car, sometimes stopped, sometimes not so much.

Here’s a shot of downtown. It’s nicely lighted so I didn’t have it in night mode (it has night mode, day mode, kids playing mode, mountains off in the distance mode, and lots of other things).

All things considered, they come out pretty good, but the 1 thing I noticed is that it’s really hit or miss with this camera. A lot of pictures turned out amazing, a lot of others really sucked. You take off the feature that stops the shaking and all of a sudden pictures don’t turn out very clear.

But I highly doubt that’s the camera’s fault. It has auto settings, programmed settings, and a manual setting where you can change everything to your liking. So once I play with it a bit more I’m sure I’ll be able to tweak it to the way I want it.  This is something I’ve noticed that I really like about it, it can be as simple or as complex as you would like it to be. So for people that just want to point and shoot, it works. For people that want to fine tune their pictures, it works.

Pictures with subjects off in the distance I found harder to focus on, so they didn’t come out as well.

But when it knew what the focus was, the pictures came out great. I had a few shots where it was fighting between buildings and traffic to get the correct subject and the best focus, and in turn neither one became the focus and the picture was a wash. But sometimes, it worked perfectly.

Once I learn to tune it the way I want and really learn to use it, I’m sure I can get all my night pictures to rock.

But how to the night pictures turn out during the day time? I went to Mount Clemens to do a comparison.

For the most part, they don’t look too bad. I’m still very leery about  how motion shots will come out if the camera has a problem finding the subject to focus on.  But for small dogs winking at you, it seems to work great.

I also put the NV15 on my tripod and took some shots out my window at the neighborhood. With the tripod holding it down the camera didn’t need the anti-shake stuff at all and the pictures in daytime came out very clear, despite the fact that there was a dirty window between me and the subjects

Not too bad altogether.

The camera has a lot of features that are geared at novices that I’m sure will be good selling points for them, but it’s something I’ll never use. The color correction is nice, and being able to add sepia, change to warm and cool colors is nice, but it’s all stuff I’d rather do in Photoshop (the red eye flash however, does not fall under this category. Nice addition there). And the weird picture framing things it does I will never use, it’s a feature that takes the picture and puts it in some weird frame or a turned page or some other stuff. I’m sure the teen girls will eat it up, but I don’t much care for it.

I’m not going to get into the techy stuff like the ISO specifications, detailed lens info, etc. You can read about that elsewhere. The bottom line is that this is a very good camera at the price. If you’re looking for a small something to carry around with you that will give you pretty good image quality at a good price, this will do the trick nicely.

Good:

• Size is perfect, design is awesome.
• Lots of cool features
• Lots of ways to tweak your images, settings, etc.
• 10.1mpx is nothing to sneeze at
• Smart-Touch interface
• Price ($151.99 at Circuit City)

Bad:

• Picture quality could be better in most cases
• Some features are disappointing
• Battery life sucks. But you can get 2 replacements and a charger on eBay for $20, so I’m doing that.
• Not for seasoned pros who want professional quality. Definitely geared towards consumers.

It nicely fit all of my checklist points, so check it out if you’re in the market.

Check out more of the pics from driving around last night and this morning in the pictures section.

I also found an Attack of the Show! interview where they talk about the camera, check it out: