I just got a free Sanyo WH1 to review (YES!) and this, incidentally, happened…

Letz Do Scienz – Sanyo Underwater Camera Edition from Adam Dachis on Vimeo.

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1) A Perfect Pocket 1080p HD Camcorder We’re not far from this. In fact, we weren’t far from this a few years ago and yet an HD 1080p camcorder that accomplishes all the things it should for about $600 does not exist. If you look at the Sanyo HD1000/1010/2000, Sony HDR-TG1/TG5 and the Canon HF100/200/300/etc. you get successes in some areas but not all. I want everything, so do you (even if you don’t know it), and it’s possible with current technology yet still unaccomplished.

The Sanyo pretty much wins out on amazing picture quality, yet has a bit rate of 12Mbps for 1080p/30. In the HD2000 model, rather than correcting this they simply added a 24Mbps rate but for 1080p/60. Most people couldn’t give a crap about 60fps, and since the number of frames has doubled the 24Mbps just doubles with it. Twice the data, twice the data rate, still the same number of artifacts. Give me 30fps, or, better yet, a 24fps option, and 24Mbps. Or at least something higher than 12Mbps (18 seems to do fine in many cases).

The worst part about the Sanyo, however, is where the Canon really shines. Canon’s OIS (Optical Image Stabilization) and iAF (Instant Auto Focus) both work phenomenally well. The autofocus on the Sanyo (and the Sony) is slow. The Canon and the Sony both have excellent optical stabilization, which easily bests Sanyo’s digital offering.

Sony has the Sanyo beat on size, though. The size of the Sanyo definitely gives it a nicer picture than the Sony with a smaller sensor, if it were possible it would be nice to get the Sanyo a little more compact. The Sony’s style and higher-quality physical controls (let’s not even talk about the touch screen menu system, which I don’t mind but can clearly understand hating) are very appealing. Physically, there’s a lot to like about Sony’s design but that’s far more trivial than a camera that’s tiny and gets the job done.

In short, take the Sanyo line and give it a better bit rate at 30/24fps, add Canon’s OIS and iAF, maybe make it a bit more compact and then you’ve got a near-perfect consumer pocket 1080p camcorder. It can be done. Will someone do it already?

2) A media center box that integrates with all the big online services, not just different collections of them. And, since we’re dreaming, one that has the ability to play back nearly any media format from a hard drive or over a network.

Netflix and Hulu boxes are cropping up all over the place. So are network media streamers and media file players. Other boxes have support for YouTube and Amazon Unbox, as well as other crap most people don’t bother with. Nothing does it all, or even enough. You can’t get a box with Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Unbox. What’s up with that?

The Roku box is pretty great, weighing in at only $99. It does Netflix, of course, and now Amazon Unbox. But where’s the Hulu support? There are other boxes that have similar combinations, dumping Netflix and keeping Amazon and Hulu. You can generally find a box that has two of three, and then sometimes YouTube as a bonus. Plex Media Center is an interesting offering. Though it doesn’t offer Amazon Unbox, it does offer iTunes support alongside Hulu, Netflix, YouTube and other online and offline media sources. That’s fantastic, since you could essentially get it to do just about everything you want…if you have a Mac. That’s going to run you $599 if you go for the cheapest Mac mini you can buy, and perhaps you don’t want to aggregate your content on a computer attached to your television. Nonetheless, you could set things up so it works pretty much as perfectly as you’d ever want but should you really have to drop $599 on a media center when there are a bunch of options for $100-200 that get you most of the way there and could do better?

The Western Digital HD TV Media Center box is my favorite for playing pretty much anything you can get off the Internet (aside from DRM-protected content). It even has support for Matroska (MKV) files, which is pretty amazing. You can play up to 1080p. The problem is you don’t have any network or Internet connectivity, so it only does one thing well: play downloaded files off a hard drive. Take this box and add gigabit ethernet, the Plex interface and functionality and Amazon Unbox support (in place of iTunes, since that wouldn’t exactly be possible) and you’ve got an excellent media center for what shouldn’t cost more than $200.

It can be done right now. Where is it?

3) A portable media player with excellent codec support and the elegance of an iPod touch.

There’s not much to say about this because it’s probably never going to happen. You’re not going to find a PMP with an app store like the touch has, but that also has the format support of the Western Digital box mentioned earlier. It would just be nice to think that you could have a media center and PMP that could sync with each other and be blind to the media format. Instead, most PMPs you’d actually buy (unlike the seemingly wonderful Cowon offerings that always seem to fall short) stick with a few formats they like rather than finding a way to integrate ffmpeg to decode the crap out of anything you throw at it. It’s just depressing.

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Now there are a bunch of other products that could be on this list, and there is another list entirely for professional media devices, but these three are the most obvious oversights I just can’t wrap my head around. Well, maybe except for #3. It just makes me sad that we have and have had the technology to accomplish these things and yet nobody has stepped up to the plate. We’re stagnating rather than moving forward, and it’s not an issue of technical barriers. It can be done, but it’s not being done and it’s really a shame.

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The Internet, nowadays, is littered with “Web 2.0” services that’ll promise to change your life. I’ve discovered a few that have actually changed mine. They haven’t made me a better person or a smarter person, but they help me accomplish goals and that’s worth the minimal to non-existent fee they all impose. How they make money and how they’ll survive in the long run is beyond me, but for now they’re wonderful.

• Vimeo – There is no better service for posting videos than Vimeo. Sure, there are other HD options these days. Sure, there are places with additional features. What you get with Vimeo is still the best. As a standard user you get 500MB of upload space a week (2GB for plus users, which costs about $60 a year). You can upload in HD. You get a wonderfully and simply designed web site with amazing, creative and artistic videos. You get one of the only communities on the web that’s actually friendly and nice. You get to share and create with smart people. And, if you’re a camera geek like myself, Vimeo is the first video site to get the latest barrage of test footage…


• SugarSync – I’ve posted about SugarSync before and I shove it down throats with more regularity than my bowel movements. I hate just about every backup solution I’ve tried. Being a Mac user, Time Machine is pretty and all and works great if you’re on a desktop but what about a laptop? Plugging in a hard drive to back up your machine can be an enormous deterrent. It requires memory. SugarSync doesn’t. It does require patience, but it conducts its business in the background and your files are right back where you left them should anything crash. I lost a hard drive recently and I restored from an old time machine backup to start. It took about 20 minutes, but I as I don’t backup to a drive much I was missing files. SugarSync replaced them so fast they were there before I could remember to check for them. About 30 minutes after the crash, my computer was identical. I would’ve lost important documents had SugarSync not been so proactive with backing up my most vital files. It is a freakin’ lifesaver, and I’m only promoting one of the amazing features. You can sync between machines, you can stream your iTunes library to your iPhone, you get photo albums and more. You can be a member for $25 a year. It is the only backup and/or sync software I’ve ever used that I love. Or even like, for that matter.


• Evernote – It took me awhile before I actually started using Evernote, but once I did I realized it was something I’d been seeking for ages. I still haven’t quite found the best note organizer for work-related things, but as far as life goes Evernote does it all. Text notes are very simple, just like any application. Where Evernote shines is in the other formats. Pictures submitted to Evernote are parsed for text. You can actually search for text that shows up in a photograph! Evernote also allows you to include audio notes. Because I come up with song ideas and generally sing into the computer to remember them for later, I have a lot of these. I can never keep track of them and often times they get stuck on my iPhone in a recording app that can’t sync to the computer. Evernote actually comes with a recording feature in their iPhone application and their desktop application, so whenever I need to save a song idea I can do it and know I can access it anywhere. Additionally, Evernote employs the popular web clipping feature you see with many web services. Instapaper is one example, and what I used before Evernote. Instapaper is a wonderful “deal with it later” sort of idea, and it’s simplicity is unparalleled in its genre of web services, but if you like to procrastinate then you’ll quickly assemble a list of Instapaper items that’ll take years to get through. You also can’t save things for later. Evernote has a powerful (and quick!) search functionality that’ll let you keep track of everything. Organization is also an option. There’s a lot to be said about Evernote, because it is a very powerful tool. In fact, that’s the reason I strayed from it for so long—the number of options you have is a little overwhelming at first and the learning curve, though not high, is steeper than your average Web 2.0 app. Nonetheless, there’s a lot to explore and Evernote is certainly worth the time. Best of all, it’s free! And, if you need some serious note-syncing services you can pay $45 a year (or $5 a month) to get them.


• Flickr – Sure, Flickr’s been around for awhile but they’re nonetheless the best photo sharing site around. And they integrate with Moo, which we’ll talk about next, but there’s plenty more to love on top of that. Flickr is a very simple and appealing photo site, but what makes them the best, in my opinion, is the ease of uploading your photos. Flickr provides desktop software for upload and there are a few iPhoto/Aperture upload plug-ins for the Mac. Getting your photos into Flickr is easy. Getting them out is easy, too. Thanks to the Flickr API, developers have been able to create a ton of applications and widgets that make using your photos simple. It also lets third party services access your photos so you can print them, put them on t-shirts or make them into holiday cards. Furthermore, Flickr has one of the nicer communities and there are plenty of generous photographers who will let you use their work if you ask nicely (or so I’ve heard). Organization is also very simple. Flickr has an excellent interface for creating sets (albums) and collections (of sets). Flickr was also one of the first sites to implement tagging as an organizational paradigm, so it tends to be more functional and useful than implementations in other Web 2.0 services. Best of all, Flickr is free or super cheap for a premium account (at only $25 a year).


• Moo – If you love printing crap you’ll love Moo. And Moo can help you print more than just crap, too. They have two kinds of cards you can print, both of which function as calling or business cards quite well. You order in small quantities so if you’re not quite famous yet you don’t need to commit to an order of 500 business cards when you only need 50. Even better, Moo lets you print different designs in a single order. Every card can be different if you’d like it that way. You’re not restricted to business or photo cards either. You have the option of printing post cards, note cards, greeting cards and sticker books (my favorite). Moo also prints holiday cards as well, but those aren’t much different than the greeting cards. If you’re outside of the UK, the biggest disadvantage of Moo is in the delay of delivery. Printing times usually take around a week and mailing times are about the same (if you’re in the US). Nonetheless, if you have a little patience you get a fun product you made. Also, they sell printed cards from someecards.com, which puts them over the top.

These services, combined, come to about $200 a year (assuming you buy a couple of things on Moo). That’s about the cost of two months of Starbucks coffee, and these things are actually beneficial. So, check ‘em out and see if they work for you. I think they’re wonderful and hopefully you will too.

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The Accident is a story about a young man whose head has an unexpected run in with a toaster hurtling through the air. Rather than helping him, the woman responsible chooses to dispose of his supposedly dead body. The day goes downhill from there.

The Accident from honest by design on Vimeo.

I came up with this idea before heading out to New York for one of my many mini-vacations last year. I thought it would be a quick, easy and fun shoot that Becca and I could do in a weekend. Becca thought it would be too complicated and we were both being kind of lazy so it never happened. I found the outline I wrote, which was as much of a script as a script could’ve been, and decided to shoot it this summer with some friends and friends of friends.

When Megan saw the fight she sort of took over with a lot of things. About an hour into prep I said “do you want to just direct it?” She responded as if I’d said it sarcastically, but I said “no, really, you should just direct it. I think you’d do a better job.” So Megan did, and choreographed the fight at the end and so on. I was more of a story consultant and director of photography at that point. We had a lot of fun and I think it came out really well.

Editing was a neat process because while I knew what shots I wanted and pretty much only shot those, the first cut ended up being very different from the final. It’s kind of amazing what editing can do even without a bunch of angles to choose from. One of the hardest things to do was make the choice to dump my absolute favorite shot. At one point Dawn is pushing Christian into the dumpster. It’s well-framed and looks great. It’s also really funny. What it does, however, is take us out of Christian’s perspective. It also feels kind of weird sitting between the point where he blacks out and the point where he wakes up. Watching it I wondered, why are we seeing this? He’s not. I realized we were seeing it because I loved the picture and not because it made sense (which it didn’t, at all). So it had to go.

Another thing I dumped at the end was, well, the ending. In outline/script, it reads that as Christian and Dawn are parting ways karma takes over and Dawn is hit by a car. Not only did this just not look very good when cutting from the previous shot, but it didn’t really add anything. When I rearranged the timeline a bit in the second cut and had a little more room to work with at the end. The kiss initially cut to black and then to a wide shot of Dawn and Christian getting their clothes back on. I changed it to hold on the kiss longer and move to a close shot of Christian buckling his belt, then to Dawn with blood smeared on her mouth, and then to Christian licking his lips. What kind of sex is implied here is really up to you, but I think it comes across as a hell of a lot weirder with such a direct jump. It’s an unsettling note to end on, and I liked that a lot.

The very last, major thing I dumped was the music. I actually wrote a song for this short and it just turned out to be wrong. One night the Crew Cut’s Sh-boom popped into my head and I said, oh, this is so very much that song. First of all, it’s a polar opposite of the content of the movie. That said, I shot this with a very happy atmosphere. When I first thought of the idea it was going to be weird and rainy and strange. I don’t think that would’ve been bad but a lot different. I kind of want to make it that way, too, and see how it comes across. I really like the way this works, though, because it has a happy front and a disturbed underside. I feel like Sh-boom has that wonderfully pleasant 50s feel but with a highly sexual subtext. It fit perfectly. I’m probably not the first person to feel this way and act on it, but if something’s right it’s right…right?

All in all, I think it came across really well. It was sort of amazing how easily we were able to put this together despite the number of costumes, props and makeup we needed. With a full crew it would be a cinch, but with three and a half people crewing and only having about six or seven hours (split over two days) to shoot I think it’s pretty amazing how fun, relaxed and easy it was to make. I think our attitude really comes across in the quality of the final product. We all had a great time and it shows.

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(Thanks to Sean for the title.)

If you’ve been reading between the lines, you know I’ve had a few bad experiences with Virgin America. While there is now some finality to the latest situation, which I can’t/won’t speak about publicly (yet), I think things have been resolved satisfactorily. My experience wasn’t even particularly bad in comparison to some of the flights people have. (I am, of course, referring to the flights where the passengers either die or almost die.) It was, however, a wake up call. We now live in an era where the TSA, a government organization, can steal from the citizens it was established to protect. When we fly, we essentially have no rights and this, along with insufficient pay, has established an abusive mentality with a large selection of flight crew. Nonetheless, the government is giving handouts to help the airlines function and continually redefine what it means to scrape the bare minimum. This is wrong.

Enter Kate Hanni, president of Flyer’s Rights. She is currently working to have a flyer’s bill of rights passed so airline passengers are not treated like rotting sides of beef. After speaking with Kate and getting involved with the cause, I thought I ought to post what anyone can do if they’re slightly less angry than I am regarding the state of the airports and airlines today and only want to devote a little time and/or effort. Here are some options:

• Donate!
• Look up your congressmen and/or women and let them know you want the flyer’s bill of rights to be passed.
• Call your Ways and Means committee members and let them know you want the flyer’s bill of rights to be passed.

A list of contact information for your Ways and Means committee members is included after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry

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No, they go on your wall.

At Stuft Acquaintances, you can enjoy all the fun of a dead animal on your wall without the mess and creepiness of actually having a dead animal on your wall. If you have a child who won’t give up their favorite toy or you just enjoyed the evil parts of Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, you’re probably the target market for these odd wall hangings.

Via Modern Materialist.

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Sure-fire, get it? Ha ha ha…

Suck UK has recently released this Teddy Bear Lamp, featuring a bear body and a lightbulb head. One year for Halloween I went as a tube of toothpaste. On the top of my head was a lampshade. Everyone thought I was a lamp. I know how this bear must feel.

Buy it?

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If you need an ultra-fast, ultra-potent dosage of creativity you’re sort of screwed. I’ve got nothing for you. But if you’re the kind of person that gets inspired by the work of others, which is most people, you might want to check out Creativescrape. It’s a utility by the same people who made some other neat stuff.

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I love flash drives. I have hardly any use for them, but the idea of storing data in a tiny little anything is very appealing to me. Here are my five favorite ways to overpay for flashy flash memory and one way to get an appealing drive for the right price.

1. ZipZip 2GB Memory Bricks cost about 13 times what you’d pay for a generic 2GB flash drive. What a generic drive can’t do, however, is give you an excuse to bring legos to work.

2. If 13 times isn’t enough, try (almost) 26. The Natural USB Stick (2GB) will let you join in on the trend of wooden computers for only $128! If you enjoy a tree sticking out of your laptop (assuming you can get this drive to comfortably plug in to your laptop) then this one’s for you.

3. The USB Mixtape by SuckUK (they make awesome, mostly useless things) seems fairly cheap at $20, but then you realize you’re only getting 64MB of space. Yes, that says sixty four megabytes. This is due to the product acting as a digital mixtape, offering only the necessary space so it sticks to its purpose, but it’s still the most expensive drive (per MB) you can buy.

4. You won’t overpay terribly for this USB Thumb Drive, but you’ll be taking the terminology a bit too literally. This drive is an actual replica of a human thumb. Funny, but also kind of creepy.

5. Mimoco’s Mimobots are, by far, the best way to overpay. It bridges the fun of designer toys and the functionality of data storage to give your data that “cuteness” it has been lacking. Great new Mimobots are released throughout the year, with storage capacities of up to 8GB, but they don’t last forever. Some of the best Mimobots are from the original series and can only be had via eBay.

Now, if you want a fast (200x) flash drive that’s not just stylish but tiny and cheap then you should look no further than Super Talent’s Pico line. The drive first pictured on that page is my preference, because it’s easy to get in and out of your computer (the smaller ones can be tough to grip) and has built-in protection, but feel free to try them all. You can generally find the Pico drives at NewEgg and SuperMediaStore, though they’re not always easy to come by.

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If you are a developing fetus, don't eat tuna. If you don't want Alzheimer's, don't get old. If cancer isn't your thing, don't have too much soy (or orange juice or shelled nuts or genetic disposition). But since you're going to die anyway, do something nice so "God" doesn't smite you or whatever.

Meet May Wah Healthy Vegetarian Foods. They make the same fake meats used at the Wong Family Restaurants (Red Bamboo and Vegetarian Paradise, for example) in New York City. Order online and pave the road to heaven a little bit faster.

Special thanks to Ehaab for the link.

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honest by design is a pseudo media blog with things to see, hear and purchase. You’ll find entertainment as well as both free and expensive stuff.

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