TwoThirtyAM

(Keep in mind I have only been using Android since Nov 6)

Handcent SMS – A frontend for SMS/MMS. Adds a great deal of functionality to Android for messaging.

Home++ – A full home replacement that looks great and is coming along very nicely.

Movies – Find movies, theaters, and even manage your Netflix Queue.

Wifi Analyzer – A graphical WiFi analyzer.

Foursquare – Official app for the Foursquare service.

NewsRob – RSS reader with Google Reader sync.

Yelp – Official app for the Yelp service.

Seesmic – Relatively new to Android, but a fantastic Twitter client. I use Tweetdeck day to day on my laptop, but seesmic is very similar.

Advanced Task Killer – A must have app to manage running applications and even schedule app killing.

Barcode Scanner – All around barcode scanner for prodcucts or QR codes.

Evernote – Official Evernote app. Have your notes everywhere. Always synced.

DroidLive – Shoutcast internet radio player. Beautiful UI.

Remember The Milk – Official app for the best to-do list service there is, Remember The Milk.

Qik – Live stream DVD quality video from your phone.

LOLcats – Gotta get your daily fix of cheesburgerz!

Google Maps w/ Navigation – Hands down, THE BEST turn by turn navigation software I have ever used.

Weather Widget – Absolutely beautiful widget for the weather, with cool animations.

Amazon.com – Official Amazon shopping app.

Autorotate Widget – A quick one tap widget that will enable/disable the accelerometer for screen rotation.

AppsInstaller – Installer to install .apk files.

ASTRO File Manager – The best file manager I have found to date for browsing files in the Android filesystem.

Feel free to add more apps in the comments below or let me know what apps I should have picked. I will most likely have late additions since the year isn’t actually over yet. :)

I know it is kind of weird for me to talk about a toothbrush here, but I love this thing! I have used a good number of different electric toothbrushes in the past, then went back to “manual” toothbrushes after being disappointed with them all. During my last cleaning at the dentist I was given the pitch for this little gem. I was a little skeptical, but with the external LCD screen (i’m a geek) and the deal on it from my dentist, I thought, what the hell.

You get the toothbrush body, a couple brush heads, the external LCD display, and a dock type charger / brush head holder for the counter. You can use this toothbrush for multiple people since you can remove the brush head. The External LCD display not only tells you how long to brush on each section of your mouth, but also tells you when you are brushing too hard and when it is time to replace your brush head. Sounds gimmicky, but it is a really nice addition. Not to mention, it’s a nice clock for the bathroom.

My mouth has never felt as clean as it does after using this toothbrush! Once you use it, you won’t go back to a normal toothbrush. A little pricey, but totally worth it I think. I mean after all, I wrote a friggin review about it on my blog. :)

That’s it, short and sweet. Buy it at Amazon.

I will admit right off the bat that I have a photo and laptop bag obsession. There, now that’s out of the way. :) I have been eying this particular bag for a while due to it’s large amount of storage and it holds a 15″ laptop on top of all the photo gear. This bag is generally around $150 – $200. Price was really the only reason I was holding off on the purchase. Fortunately I was on eBay and found a seller with a Buy It Now auction that was accepting offers. I offered $90 not thinking they would take it, and they did! So now onto the bag itself.

You can easily hold 2 SLR bodies and around 6-8 lenses in this bag. You can customize the whole inside with the velcro padding. There are also several zippered pouches inside for storage. On the outside there are even more zippered storage areas. There is also a tripod holding system that can fold down and secure a tripod to the back.

The bag is very comfortable to wear. It has 2 very padded shoulder straps along with a chest strap and waist strap to secure it to your body. The zippers on this bag are big and easy to zip. I wore this pack for a photo hike that was about 5 hours and it was great. Everything was safe and secure with no issues. One thing I would like to see however is a memory card pouch on the shoulder strap that is easy to get to. Other than that, it is an all around awesome bag for your photo gear.

Well the HTC Hero has finally made it stateside..kinda. Instead of the
next gen looking Hero, we got the crappy knockoff version at Sprint
that looks like every other phone. It came out today, so we stopped by
the local sprint store to check it out. I didn’t really care too much
about the handset, nothing too special there. More important is the
Android Sense UI. The UI is beautiful, however feels very clunky sadly
:( I think it is a problem of a phone UI finally outpacing the hardware
it was designed for. Is this phone a winner? Probably, if you are with
Sprint. Am I switching from my iPhone? No. I am thrilled however that
this type of innovation will fuel competition in the mobile sector.

I recently went on a photo shoot with a friend of mine to the abandoned town of Drawbridge, CA. I needed to rent a lens because I recently sold the majority of my lenses with my old Nikon D40 camera body. This only left me with my Nikon 35mm f/1.8. A fantastic lens for sure, but not quite the right tool for the job. Since a lens like the 24-70mm f/2.8 is upwards of $1600, renting was the way to go for sure. This particular lens is talked about like a god, so I had to see what all the hype was about! I rented it for 3 days for about $50. Not a bad deal at all. The very first thing I noticed about this lens was the weight; it is hefty! It weighs about 2 pounds, compared to my Nikon D90 body that weighs about 1.3 pounds! Having a solid f/2.8 from 24-70mm is fantastic; I found this lens to be very versatile for my shooting. This lens actually stayed on my body the whole day. The autofocus on this particular rented unit felt like it might have been slightly out of whack, but when in manual focus it was pretty damn sharp. I realize this lens is probably better suited for an FX body, but even on my DX D90 it was a wonderful experience. I can see why everyone talks about this lens so much! If you have the almost $2000 to shell out, this lens should be in your bag!

On a side note, if you have a Nikon D90, you know it came with the LCD protective cover. LEAVE IT ON! During this last shoot, my plastic cover got scratched to all hell, not even sure how it happened, but if the cover wasn’t there, my LCD would be wrecked! So if you have it on, keep it on. If you don’t, put it on now! If your particular camera model doesn’t have a protective cover, research to find one that will suit you. You won’t regret it. A new $10 cover is always better than a permanently scratched LCD.

The Nikon D40 was my very first dSLR camera. A fantastic leap from the point-and-shoot side of the fence! I had the camera for about 4 years, but really only started getting serious about photography a little over a year ago. After shooting with the D40 body and mastering it (the camera, not photography) over the course of a year, I was starting to hit imitations of the camera hardware and it was starting to look like it was time for an upgrade. I really prefer and like the Nikon camera bodies, so I knew I would be upgrading to a new Nikon. I studied all the bodies and reviews for months to find out what would be the best upgrade for me. It came down to the D90 and the D300.

The two seemed to have pretty similar specs minus the video on the D90, although the D300 was touted as more of a “professional” camera. One of the biggest features I wanted was the command and sub-command dials for aperture and shutter speed adjustments.

The video on the D90 leaves a little to be desired. Especially compared to the new D300s that came out a couple months after purchasing the D90. Video is not all that important to me, so it is just a bonus to be able to shoot little video clips with the same camera I already have with me.

I find the build quality of the D90 to be much higher than some of the newer bodies coming out like the D3000. The body feels great in the hand and is a good weight. I like a larger camera body and this is just that. I found the D40 a little annoying to hold due to its small size. I had a battery grip on the D40 simply to make it more comfortable to hold with a longer lens.

The image quality on the D90 is great. A very nice improvement from the D40, although the raw files were a lot harder to work with on my old laptop. The D40 raw files were no problem, but the D90 at twice the size made the computer chug. I have since upgraded to a new MacBook Pro, so it is no longer an issue.

As far as lenses go with this new body, I bought the Nikon 35mm f/1.8. This lens is AMAZING! Super sharp and fast. And for only $200, you have to have this lens in your bag. I also rented the Nikon 18-200mm from Lensrentals.com and I WILL be buying that lens at some point. It was so versatile and handled a full day shoot walking around town without having to stop and swap lenses.

Overall, If you are in the market for a Nikon body upgrade from one of the lower tier bodies I would say this is definitely a camera to look at. If video is more important to you, you may want to look into the D300s instead. For me, stills are where I want to be, and this camera body does not disappoint!

I listen to a ton of podcasts, watch a lot of video podcasts, and have moved all of my TV watching to online services like Hulu. Overall the experience over mainstream television and radio is so good it can’t be measured! Better quality content, and the choice to watch only shows that I want instead of having to weed through the massive amount of garbage that is on mainstream media. With the lack of intelligence and an over abundance of worthless advertisements, mainstream media is dead to me. Podcasts and Hulu have ads, so what’s the difference? There are a couple of differences: podcasts and the like generally have fewer ads that are more targeted toward the show you are watching, making for a more effective ad. These ads are also generally slipped into context of the shows. Hulu has more traditional ads but fewer per show and generally will have ads that are genuine in their intent.

Everything sounds pretty good, so what’s the problem? The problem is what I am calling “The SquareSpace Effect”. It’s unfortunate that they were the ones that had to take the blame for this, but they were the first ones that made me realize the problem. The problem is frankly over advertising. To the point of turning would be customers into anti-product maniacs. Over the 15-20 audio and video podcasts that I subscribe, a company like SquareSpace is on 90% of them with the same exact ad every week. I understand you need to get your companies name out there, but when you are targeting something that is an RSS feed where you are pretty sure you have a majority of repeat customers, you maybe can cut back some. Also a lot of the podcasts I listen to are on the same network, and it’s pretty likely that listeners subscribe to many podcasts on the same network due to similar content. This could be a problem that only effects the technology genre of this new media, but that is my focus.

The second case of this comes from Hulu. They have a similar problem. They seem to have a very small library of commercials to splice into the shows. This means that during an hour of viewing Hulu TV shows, I am pretty much guaranteed to see the same commercials every time. There have been more instances than I can count where the same exact commercial has played 4-5 times in a row during my viewing. A specific example I can remember was the ad for the movie 500 Days of Summer. After seeing the commercial the first time I thought it looked like a movie I would wan to go see. After seeing the same commercial for the 6th consecutive viewing I hated the movie and wanted nothing to do with it.

There needs to be a compromise here! I find the advertising to be VERY successful on this “new media” but I feel like they might be beating and kicking the poor dead horse. I have purchased several products due to ads on these new media networks, but they have to be careful of over advertising and killing the brand.

Lamborghini Reventón and Bugatti Veyron. Two cars I never thought I would see in person. Well, scratch that, I saw them both…at the same time! Insanity! I was out on a photowalk with a friend and we happened upon a high end car dealer. We were drawn to the dealer at first because we saw a MINI GP out front. After shooting a few photos of the GP I was standing there talking to my friend and suddenly a strange feeling came over me and I just happen to turn to my left. Upon turning, I saw the ass end of the Lamborghini Reventón. After a quick double take, the freaking out began. One of the guys that worked there (and owner of the GP) came out and we chatted with him for a bit and then he invited us in to check out the rest of the cars. They had a ton of sweet cars; Lamborghinis, Ferraris, Porches, etc. You name it, they had it. However compared to the Veyron and Reventón, the rest all but disappeared! After taking tons of shots of the Veyron from every angle, I moved outside to the Reventón, where I took probably double the number of photos. Right as I was about done shooting, one of the employees came out to move the Reventón inside, so I switched over to video mode and shot a little video of them moving the Reventón inside. Everything about the Reventón is absolutely perfect. Every line, every detail, flawless. Needless to say it was a fantastic day!

Lamborghini Reventón Photo Gallery
Lamborghini Reventón Video
Bugatti Veyron Photo Gallery

This weeks photopost comes to you thanks to a new software package that I have fallen in love with! The software comes from Nik Software. They make these plugins for both Aperture and LightRoom. I personally use Aperture and love it! The particular plugin I used for this image was SilverEfexPro. A fantastic little plugin, and at the $199 price point you would hope so! The good news is that Nik offers a “Complete Collection” for $299 that includes five of their plugins that separately would come to a grand total of $750! So needless to say, go for the $299 Complete Collection. I can’t wait to work with all the plugins more!

This photo was taken during the Worldwide Photo Walk on July 18, 2009 in San Jose, CA.