I'm a fuss-minimalist when it comes to gadgets. I hate carrying round stuff in my pockets so until man-bags are cool I'm forced to reduce to a bare minimum and ensure that each of those is as small as possible.

This is part of the reason I have never had a video camera. Video editing seems to have been about as straightforward as pitching a family sized tent and anything less than £800 expenditure meant that whilst no-one noticed the bulge in your trousers it was only because your pocket-sized camera had made them fall down.

Nonetheless I've always had a bit of a hankering but had planned to hold off until Vodafone gave me a decent one for free (read £80/month). However times change and for one reason or another, the hour has come.


It had to be tiny and it had to be easy so I got this little Sanyo from Amazon. It fits snugly in the palm of the hand and records MP4 (DVD format) onto SD RAM(the little memory-bit that you stick into your digital camera). The camera cost £230 (with a 128Mb card - ~7 minutes at full quality) and a 1Gb card (~60 minutes at full whack) cost me another £70.

I now have a camera that will record up to 1hr of top quality video that I can easily get onto my computer. Perfect. Probably worth mentioning that it also has a 3.2megapixel camera - you honestly can't go wrong with this puppy.

I've hardly used the camera so far but from what I have done I can say that the menu system is great - as easy as my old IXUS and incredibly intuitive.

Being a less trendy brand (Sanyo), the box was a joy to open. Buy something from Sony and you feel honoured if it comes with a lens cover. It might only be a shifting round of the letters but change Sony to Sanyo and you get a lense cover, strap, a case, a base-stand, cables to connect to a TV and even a remote control!

So far, I'm very pleased. If you want one, you can get get it at Amazon.

http://earth.google.com/

If you've got a broadband connection, then get this, it truly is incredible. The privilege of being able to fly to anywhere in the world and zoom in close enough (in some places) to make out cars is something else.

Fancy trekking in the Himalayas? See what the terrain's like first:





Here's a shot of the street that I live in now:


And here's the one that I used to live in - it costs about 4 times less btw - I reallly do wonder sometimes why I moved!




Interestingly if you look at the Antartic, it's totally distorted. I guess that this means most of the shots came from equator orbiting satellites (which can't see the bottom of the world very well).



When the web first became mainstream back in the 90's I remember people saying 'You can tell who's got an internet connection by the bags under their eyes'. I never really got that, I found it really hard to find things of interest on the web and to be honest, that hasn't really changed a vast amount since. Web2.0 is something different though - now I fear a real internet addiction.

This tool is incredible. Kudos to Google for showing us our world!

Very cool - type your username (or someone elses) into this website and it will create a flash photo album out of your flickr photos. Album includes turning pages -oooh!

If you don't have a flickr account then here's an album I made earlier:
http://flickralbum.com/index.php?fUserName=petenixey&tag=&maxPages=30

http://flickralbum.com/

RSS is the new buzzword of Silicon Valley. 99% of the world, however, still have no idea that it even exists never mind what it's used for. If your're in the one-percentile this probably isn't for you but to the rest of the world, read on and hopefully I can help you understand both how the technology works and, more importantly, what its significance is. First off, let's take a quick glance at the terminology.

RSS / XML / ATOM / My Yahoo – erm… pardon?

If you've ever asked this question then be reassured, you're not alone. The answer is that they’re all essentially the same thing – a type of feed. Just like, cds, DVD’s and minidiscs are all ways to store data, these are different ways to package up a news feed.

There’s no particularly good reason for having so many types. It’s just that a bit like the early days of the motor car when there were steam, horse and petrol versions, no-one’s yet decided which format’s best. Usual story but nonetheless a little confusing.

Okay. And a feed is what exactly?

A feed is a set of xml data packets whose structure can easily be parsed and understood by a computer.

Sorry?

Feeds are a way for you to read all your favourite websites in one place without having to bother checking them all individually each day

Dandy. Just for the hell of it though, explain it once more a completely different way.

Ok. Imagine a pretty green field in the Swiss alps. The field is full of cows with bells on and lush green grass. In one corner though is a big ugly iron trough - a feed.

Most of the time a cow like nothing more than to wander round and eat the sweet, Swiss grass but that takes time and effort and sometimes the cow can’t be bothered. When that happens it’s much happier to just sit down by the trough and wait for the farmer to trek up the hill and dump a sackload of food in front of its big wet nose.

Eating from a big steel feed trough certainly isn’t as idyllic as wandering round a cute Swiss field all day but it sure is quick. If say a cow wants to taste the grass from several different pastures the possibility of having it delivered straight to the feed becomes sweeter still. Yeah, I know that it’s usually ground up bits of other cow that are dumped in the feed but just humour me for a minute here and pretend that it’s sweet, green grass.

If our cow-friend wants to eat food from 1300 different fields (creaking of analogy) then it had better have some fricking fast legs or accept that it’s trough-time.

Please don’t tell me I have to explain how this relates?

Ok, nice idea but I’ve never seen a feed. Show me

Well, actually you probably have. There’s one on this page for a start but for the sake of familiarity, let’s take a look at the BBC news website instead. Dotted all around its pages you’ll see little orange buttons which (at the time of writing) are labelled RSS. Those buttons are actually just links to a separate, stripped -down version of the page you’re looking at (the BBC page that is, not this one).

What’s the point?

Without wanting to repeat myself though the point is that:

You can read all your favourite websites (or at least the ones who publish feeds) in one place without having to bother checking them all individually each day

(I said I didn’t want to, not that I wouldn’t).

Enter the feed reader

(Japanese accent)- Don’t browse, feed. It’s like a finger, pointing to the news

Now, some of you may be wondering what’s the point in having a separate version of exactly the same thing – “I've got a webpage, why do I need a feed as well?”.

Fair question. The answer is that the feed is easier for a program to understand. Yes, I know Google is a program and that Google understands everything and knows that the answer is 42 but some programs are smarter than others.

Hotmail but for news

The next question is, why would a program want to understand a webpage in the first place? Well remember I said that feeds let you check all of your websites in one convenient place? Well this place (program) is usually a bit like Hotmail, Outlook or Outlook Express except instead of sucking in your email, it sucks in your news. You can sort your news by date or title and even search it. Splendid.

Programs that do this are called feed-readers, news-readers or news aggregators or (blank space for when Microsoft releases their differently titled version of the same thing which four months ago was actually just called a news reader by the whole of the rest of the world except for the two MIT grads who owned it and called it bogopogo.com).

Show the feed reader a normal webpage and it’ll look at you like a confused puppy. Give it a nicely structured feed and it’ll roll over, beg and even fetch your slippers. Computers are simple souls and sometimes it helps to talk to them slowly in short words and a strong voice.

A quick summary

• A feed is an easy way to get all your news and information in the same place without having to check a load of websites individually

• RSS/XML/ATOM are all basically the same thing. Different versions of the same culture separated by a common language and several passionate programmers. Simple eh?

• A feed reader is a bit like Hotmail, Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express except that instead of fetching email, it fetches your news.

• These are still the early days of feeds and everything may well change.

All clear? I hope so. Next time we’ll look at how feed reading does more than just speed your news up and actually changes the news you read.