Mike Cohen

Coolpix L5

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I bought a Nikon Coolpix L5 yesterday at Circuit City when I saw that it was cheaper there than anyplace online. It’s much smaller & lighter than the Canon A75 and the picture quality is excellent.

Nikon & Canon

Nikon & Canon

links for 2007-01-21

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Considering a new camera

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I’ve been looking for a new camera to replace my Canon A75. Until now I’ve always owned Canon cameras and I was thinking of an A630, but after looking at several other brands, I’m now planning to buy a Nikon. I’ve narrowed my choice down to two models: the Coolpix S7C and Coolpix L5, although I’m leaning towards the L5. Both are 7 megapixel and have very similar features. I really like the S7C’s slim and lightweight design and the 3″ display. I don’t really think I’d be using the Wi-Fi feature too much, so I don’t really care too much about it. The L5 has 5X optical zoom vs. the S7C’s 3X and it uses standard AA batteries, which is what I really liked about the Canon A75. However the L5 is almost as big as the A75 although it’s lighter and less bulky.

links for 2007-01-20

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A way to make a difference

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Thanks to The Landing Pad, I’ve discovered Kiva.org, a site which lets you lend small amounts to individual entrepreneurs in developing countries. I just lent $25 each to two business owners in Ghana. This is the easiest way to get involved in microfinancing and actually do something that can make a difference.

Universal and Sony prohibit Zune sharing for certain artists

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Via Engadget:

It’s official: record companies don’t like you. After all that griping about signing up for the Zune music store — and keep in mind that these record companies receive monies for selling songs here — that resulted in Universal Music Group getting some sort of fat royalty check from Microsoft for Zune sales, not to mention whatever negotiations went on behind closed doors to come up with that ridiculously minimal “three days or three plays” sharing scheme, a couple of labels have once again gone out of their way to make life hard on you. It appears Sony Music and Universal Music Group are marking certain artists of theirs as “prohibited” for sharing, meaning that just because you’ve paid for a song, and even managed to find another Zune user on the planet Earth, doesn’t mean you’ll necessarily get to beam that JoJo track to another Zune via WiFi magics. In a non-scientific sampling of popular artists by Zunerama and Zune Thoughts, it looks like it’s roughly 40-50 percent of artist that fall under this prohibited banner, and the worst news is that there’s no warning that a song might be unsharable until you actually try to send it and fail. Oh well, maybe you can just hum a few bars or something — just make sure the labels don’t hear you!

[Originally from ClicZune]

The Dark Side of HDCP

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The Dark Side of HDCP – Why is My PS3 Blinking?:

FloatsomNJetsom writes ‘High Definition Content Protection is supposed to make sure you’re not playing pirated content, but sometimes your devices screw up the HDCP ‘handshake’ (over an HDMI cable) and nothing works. This happens with some regularity with the PS3, and Popular Mechanics investigated and found a quick and dirty workaround. From the article: ‘We then checked with Leslie Chard, president of HDMI Licensing, which owns the rights to the standard, who told us that HDCP is one component of HDMI that has been plagued with interoperability issues. HDCP (high-bandwidth digital content protection) is designed to prevent the interception of data — specifically copyrighted Hollywood movies — between an output component and a display. As Steve Balough, the president of Digital Content Protection, the licensing company for HDCP explains, the two pieces of hardware must exchange a key, a sort of certificate of authenticity unique to each individual device, to verify a secure connection.’ The problem isn’t limited to the PS3 — many HDTV cable boxes and have the same problem. The fix there? Unplugging the power cable.’ (Via Slashdot.)

links for 2007-01-18

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