Sunday, July 29, 2007

BigLap and the Canon Powershot A630

I'm giving up on Bluetooth. I don't seem to be able to do anything but scan local Bluetooth providers.
Next up? The camera. I recently purchased my first digital camera not built into a phone at B&H. At Consumer Reports' suggestion, it was an A630. So, I'd like to do 2 things:
(1) Store photos and videos on Kijamaa
(2) Set up a script whereby when I do put a photo on Kijamaa, it autodegrades it into a reasonably small file. It's an 8-megapixel camera, so the file sizes are huge. My vision is to have a photos folder* and a degraded_photos folder, and in the degraded_photos folder have smaller copies of all the photos in the photos folder. We'll stick with goal (1) for now.
9:47 PM To make it look like I listen, I'm going to try moving photos with the SD card first. The A630 comes with a 16 MB card, which holds about ten photos, but the B&H kit adds two 2-GB cards on to that.
9:49 PM I gave the camera to a tween girl at a barbeque recently, and I just saw all of the photos she took. I'd forgotten all about them. It's good that we're doing this.
9:52 PM In Johnson O'Connor Research Foundation tests, I was found to be in the bottom dodecile for finger dexterity. I've just now gotten the card out.
9:54 PM Stick the SD card in Kijamaa after removing the dummy plastic plaque. a friendly popup box tells me it was detected, and asks if I like to add them to my album. I select for it to always perform this action.
9:56 PM It's essentially immediate. Since I never believed in memory cards for phones, I'm going to try again with the cable.
9:58 PM I plug in the USB cable and get another friendly popup. It's almost identical to the last one, but says 'A camera has been detected' instead of 'A photo card has been detected.'
10:00 PM OK, you want to know why it was so fast to put the photos on my card into my album? Because it didn't involve moving the files. I'll have to watch for that.
10:03 PM All right! This time there's a little application that copies my photos down and deletes them from the SD Card (which is now in the camera.)
10:04 PM OK, that's finished. My photos are now on my laptop, and off my camera.
10:05 PM I play one of the 'Ask George' videos, which has come across as an avi file. It plays with sound! Yay! Now I need to get DVDs to do that. I have 'Singing in the Rain' from Netflix, and I'd really like to watch it.
10:06 PM OK! Unmitigated success! I'm off to Caffe Vivaldi.




* - In Windows 95, Microsoft started calling directories 'folders.' I don't know if this spread back into the Linux culture at all, but I like it, so I'm going to keep on doing it until I find out its wrong.

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