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Some things...
Nov. 14th, 2012 10:45 amI bought a Roku and have been playing with Netflix. My conclusion: Roku is nice, Netflix streaming is not very useful unless you just want to watch TV shows more than a year old - and I am not able to judge that because I don't know much about TV shows, other than there seem to be a lot of them on Netflix. I did watch an episode of the Munsters last night, and some Phineas and Ferb. However, I'm really not inclined to actually pay for Netflix at this time. It's a bummer because I really was looking forward to just deleting a lot of my hard drive content and using them.
The Panasonic camera (DMC-ZS20) is an overall win. My only real gripe with it is that focusing is almost hopeless in low light at long zoom ranges, but that's likely to be the case with any camera with this spec (20x zoom point and shoot). The 20x zoom is wonderful - I can take relatively close shots of stuff on a stage from the back of the room. The video performance is surprisingly good - I shot over an hour of video over the weekend at a sitting and the battery held up well - I don't know exactly how much video I shot but I'm guessing about 80 minutes before I had to switch batteries. The 30 minute per shot limit is a bit irritating. I don't know for sure if that limit applies if I'm shooting in a lower res mode, even though I shot at 720p and then VGA (640x480) mode, I didn't let it hit 30 minutes to see what would happen. It would be nice if the startup was a little faster but I can't complain that much (I can always complain a little).
Having a smart phone is worth it just to run a call blocking app. The app blocks more calls than it lets through, and yes, I'm sure they're all spam. If our landline was as much under attack at all times as it was during the month before the election, I'd look in to ways to apply this tech to the landline as well.
I got some Sennheiser HD202 headphones for about $25 for work. They're probably about perfect for work. They sound pretty good, a little mushy and a little distant but really not bad (way better than any earbuds), comfortable enough to wear for hours at a time, and cheap enough to leave sitting around, though the latter is probably not a concern given that a nearby coworker has left his $500 Sennheisers out for years now. The Koss PortaPros sound great too but do not noise isolate and they hurt my ears after an hour or so.
The Panasonic camera (DMC-ZS20) is an overall win. My only real gripe with it is that focusing is almost hopeless in low light at long zoom ranges, but that's likely to be the case with any camera with this spec (20x zoom point and shoot). The 20x zoom is wonderful - I can take relatively close shots of stuff on a stage from the back of the room. The video performance is surprisingly good - I shot over an hour of video over the weekend at a sitting and the battery held up well - I don't know exactly how much video I shot but I'm guessing about 80 minutes before I had to switch batteries. The 30 minute per shot limit is a bit irritating. I don't know for sure if that limit applies if I'm shooting in a lower res mode, even though I shot at 720p and then VGA (640x480) mode, I didn't let it hit 30 minutes to see what would happen. It would be nice if the startup was a little faster but I can't complain that much (I can always complain a little).
Having a smart phone is worth it just to run a call blocking app. The app blocks more calls than it lets through, and yes, I'm sure they're all spam. If our landline was as much under attack at all times as it was during the month before the election, I'd look in to ways to apply this tech to the landline as well.
I got some Sennheiser HD202 headphones for about $25 for work. They're probably about perfect for work. They sound pretty good, a little mushy and a little distant but really not bad (way better than any earbuds), comfortable enough to wear for hours at a time, and cheap enough to leave sitting around, though the latter is probably not a concern given that a nearby coworker has left his $500 Sennheisers out for years now. The Koss PortaPros sound great too but do not noise isolate and they hurt my ears after an hour or so.
